Riding the Avalanche (Full Episode) | Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin | National Geographic

(helicopter rotors). CREW (over radio): Is anyone not ready? TRAVIS: Yeah. This is going to be (bleep) sick. Travis dropping. TRAVIS: Come on! In 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. (crack and rumble). MAN: Holy (bleep). (muffled screams). JIMMY: When you are on a quest to redefine what's humanly possible, the line between triumph and tragedy is razor-thin. I'm Jimmy Chin. From Mount Everest to Antarctica, I've had the privilege of sharing adventures alongside the world's most daring athletes. In the pivotal moments, when life hangs in the balance, what drives the greatest to keep pushing, to stare down fear, to risk everything? These are the stories from the Edge of the Unknown. (wind) TRAVIS: Hey guys, I'm moving into position. Snowboarding is something that I've trained and worked and ridden for so many years. There are so many little mini breakthroughs. I, to this day, continue to chase that feeling that gives me a sense for living. JIMMY: Travis Rice is one of the greatest snowboarders of all time. He's elevated the sport to the world stage through his films and his absolutely outrageous level of riding. It's incredibly beautiful to watch, but it's hard to understand kind of the scope and the scale of what he is actually doing. Travis has been facing both physical and creative risks his entire career. But there was one moment that made him question how much he was willing to risk: when he got caught in a massive avalanche in Alaska. (overlapping chatter) TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah. We are here in Valdez. It is 7:35, 5 minutes behind. Um, bluebird morning, we got some snow yesterday, gonna ride some lines, do some flips, it's gonna be a good day. I was up in Alaska with my crew, working on this film The Fourth Phase. TRAVIS: You need a canvas to put your work on and the type of art that I like to make demands a very large canvas and that is Alaska. You find snow features in Alaska that you don't find anywhere else in the world. On my first couple trips, I was really scared, and scared, not just on a "I might get hurt," but like there was a death component. You have cornices on the ridges, you have crevasses, there's a lot of big cliffs. You get out of a helicopter on top of a ridge and you look a couple of thousand feet down and there's an absolute moment of leap of faith. And then you drop in and surrender to the unknown. Everything in your body is like, speed check, speed check, you're going too fast, slow down. And you can't. You have to just try to override the body's natural ability to protect itself. Avalanches, of course, are a constant thing that you're thinking and talking about. JIMMY: I've been skiing in the big mountains for over 25 years, and I've seen a lot of bad things go down. If you get caught in an avalanche, on a big Alaskan face, you're not stopping until the bottom. TRAVIS: You have control in an avalanche if you have more speed than the snow. 'Cause once you're going the same speed as the snow you're essentially in the avalanche. Until then you're riding on top of it. TRAVIS: And so we try to pick terrain that have really big fanned-out runouts. So that if you were you're not going to be deep, and a rescue is still possible. TRAVIS: Okay. With all these dangers. Why put yourself out there? For me, riding in Alaska, it's the art that I have worked towards for so many years and all of the little subtleties and the nuances and the details, like that's where it matters. BECKY: Hi honey. Some packages for you. TRAVIS: Look at all the good stuff. BECKY: Travis' brain works slightly different in how he sees the world and how connected he is with the natural world around him. TRAVIS: Oh my gosh come on, this is the shot! Are you kidding me? Becky Rice was a award winning downhill skier. BECKY: Please. Growing up, Trav has always been creative, and he's always been a real perfectionist. He could walk into a room and see the angle of a wall that was slightly off balance, and it really bothered him. But he just had difficulty in school. TRAVIS: You know, I was told that I had ADHD in middle school, and you know I probably came close to even being kicked out of school. I ended up getting prescribed Ritalin. But what I found over time was I lost a bit of creativeness. You know I was very robotic. And so, I stopped taking it. BECKY: But that's when he discovered snowboarding. And I would say that that is basically what saved him because he had that focus. TRAVIS: I just fell in love with snowboarding. It was all I could think about. There is a physical, emotional, and even spiritual release. For me it's art. JIMMY: Travis can be a little scattered, because he just has so much energy, but when he's snowboarding, it's like he takes that energy and can hyper-focus it and perform the sublime. TRAVIS: Tempting, voluptuous, beautiful snow. JIMMY: Watching Travis snowboard is a beautiful thing to witness. But when you're going in the big mountains, it can all go wrong at any moment. (helicopter rotors and wind) TRAVIS: We might do a little wide circle to go look at that chute. There's 2 or 3 lines that are pretty bad-boy. And also, right over this thing um there's a crevasse gap that actually looks pretty good. Pretty good. To ride any type of big mountain terrain is really hard. But the filmmaking piece ups the complexity quite a bit. I'd spent three and a half years working on this film. We are isolated to these opportunistic windows of weather to try to get a couple good days. And we had been skunked, we're talking storm for three weeks. JIMMY: By the time you get a weather window, you've got a full camera crew, probably four different angles, and an aerial team on standby. So when Travis is actually standing on top of 3,000-foot spine line, he has to compartmentalize all of that pressure from the production and then perform as a world-class snowboarder. The amount of pressure is extraordinary. BOTH: Ohh! VICTOR: Scary feature. TRAVIS: Scary feature? Dude, how's this then? When we finally got the window to go, there was a component “this is my chance” and everything has to go perfectly. Ya know, when accidents happen in the mountains so rarely is it like one bad decision that led to that. VICTOR: Oh my God, so much snow here. That's what I feel the most sketchy about. I was up there with Victor De La Rue. We were trying to make a best guess assessment of how much new snow we thought there was. I mean, it seems like the cornice right here is pretty supported. But it has that same look, you know, where like, the cornice has been breaking, making the avalanches close to the rocks. We got there and the light looked so good and the face itself was so stunningly sexy. And oftentimes I'll strap in and kinda jump on the top and try to get a little bit of snow to run down the mountain to do a quick assessment of the slope. VICTOR: I mean worst case you can go check it out. TRAVIS: No, I feel pretty good about it. VICTOR: Cool. TRAVIS: And this time because I was so entranced by how pretty the face looked for the filming, I didn't want to scuff it up. You know, had I done a quick assessment I would have not gone. (bleep) yeah, dude. Just commit to the 7, just commit to the 7. TRAVIS: Just Commit to the 7. I wanted to do a backside 720 into the middle of the face, which is inverted two spins with a flip, and then I was going to do two turns and then I was gonna exit over like a small cliff, rider's left. (heartbeat and heavy breathing) (muffled clap) (inaudible prayer) MAN (over radio): Travis dropping in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. CREW: Holy (bleep). (heavy breathing). (rumble) (muffled groans) (muffled screams) CREW: He (bleep) went off that cliff? Holy (bleep). Where is he? (bleep). Does anyone have eyes on him? ♪ ♪ TRAVIS: I started to feel the light collapse right as I was taking off. And in my head my exit was rider's left. But I just see big rocks and so I can't go any more in that direction. The next thing I tried to do was self-rest into the bed surface but there was too much snow above me and it kinda just swept me off my feet. Next there was a cliff below me I didn't want to hit the rock with any part of my soft body and so I really just tried to get in like a backstroke position, keep the nose up and make sure it's the board that hits the rock going over the cliff. The minute I went into open air it was a time dilation experience. It's just a really excruciatingly long time that you're waiting to hit. (thud and muffled screaming). I didn't think it was gonna pop that big. I definitely took quite a bit of a kinda side impact. TRAVIS: I mean (bleep) dude, I should have known better. It was absolutely a near-death experience. JIMMY: When I asked Travis about, ya know, what was the first emotion. He said he was angry. He was angry at himself. JIMMY: And, I mean, I get that. I mean, I've been caught in an avalanche before. It's embarrassing, because it means you made a bad decision, and you're supposed to be a professional athlete. And Travis is really the ultimate mountain professional. TRAVIS: But in this avalanche, I made a couple bad decisions. I let myself down. I let my team down. You know, Nothing good. BECKY: I was unaware of the avalanche until I saw the film. And when I asked him about it, after seeing that, his comment was, “It wasn't as bad as it looked.” I think he kept from me whatever feelings he had. TRAVIS: The reality that you're doing something where there is, you know, risk of death. I think to do it properly, you really have to have that conversation with yourself. CREW: Spleen? No. Down here? TRAVIS: I mean it's taken me years to have that internal conversation, right? Yeah dude. CREW: Glad you're okay. TRAVIS: Me too man. (bleep) stupid. I learned at the end of the day, nailing the sweetest line of my life against possible death, no, I don't think it's worth it. You get a little cavalier with the decisions you make and for me that day it was underestimating how much new snow had fallen, wanting to get the footage, and deciding not to do a quick assessment of the slope, you know, led to me getting, getting into that avalanche, getting swept over the cliff. My recovery took a lot of work. And then I actually went back up to Alaska. FRIEND: How you gonna take out speed? TRAVIS: Respectfully. I make decisions differently, but I will never retire. FRIEND: Alright, best of luck. JIMMY: Travis took in what happened, and then he moved on and then the next couple years, you know, he's still out there charging. BECKY: I just have the most respect for Travis, forcing himself to take a deep breath and learn from this experience. JIMMY: At the cutting edge of adventure sports, the risks are always there. But each athlete has to make a very personal decision, and sometimes that shifts. It's about what they're willing to risk in that moment to achieve their dream. Captioned by Cotter Media Group.