Steep

The word "extreme" has gotten such a qualifying workout in the past decade-plus that it's become a parody of itself, to the extent that even The Simpsons based an episode around Bart's "extreme" personality and skateboard prowess. So Obenhaus' documentary on extreme, "big mountain" skiing feels, despite its jaw-dropping camerawork and patently fearless subjects, like a relic from 1998. Who knew that extreme skiing, birthed on the 60-degree-angled hell-slopes of Chamonix, France, was even extant in the powdery wake of prefab punk rock snowboarding? Isn't skiing, like, for your dad, or something? Dude. I am so out of touch. I still ride a Powell Peralta (on asphalt, no less). Still, Steep is engrossing in its no-crevasse-left-unexplored recounting of the birth of the American pole of the sport, by accidental daredevil Bill Briggs, who skied Jackson Hole, Wyoming's insanely vertical Grand Tetons in the 1960s. From there on out, Obenhaus tags along with a variety of type A personalities, ranging from the French Alps to the far-back country of the Alaskan wilderness. In between sequences of both rapturous beauty and deadly peril, Steep tries to answer the obvious question (i.e., "Dude, what were you thinking?!") via interviews with extreme skiers past and present, several of whom are now dead, having gone out exactly the way they presumably wished. The parallels between the surfing community's Endless Summer and Steep's endless winter (or the "Lords of Snowtown") are there for all to see, and many of the goggled maniacs on display here are revealed to be, in the end, pretty sane people. Certainly they're no more mad than Lewis and Clark or more foolhardy than the Donner Party, all of whom sought to blaze trails into previously unexplored, almost certainly treacherous territories with mixed results and little more than snowshoes. It's this same lust for the final frontier – any final frontier – that drives the engines of the extreme, legs pistoning over impossible odds in the pursuit of doing what has never been done before.