Shot on location throughout Alberta, Canada, this promotional video shows off beautiful Alberta. Didn’t know much about Alberta before watching this video, but now thinking it’s worth a trip. Apparently this is one of many promotional commercials. Time to wade through the rest.
Category: Snow
-
Levi LaVallee’s World Record Snowmobile Jump
Levi LaVallee jumps 361 feet on his snowmobile (60 feet longer than the current world record) at a Red Bull event in San Diego. Red Bull is there to capture the whole thing and make sure Levi’s f
eat looks as incredible on film as it did in person.
-
Bobby Brown Triple Cork 1440 Slow Motion
Bobby Brown knows a little about sick aerial freestyle skiing. At just 20 years old, Bobby is an X-Games regular and is the only person ever to have landed a Switch Double Misty 1440, o
r a Triple Flatspin. He was one of the first skiers ever to have landed a Triple Cork 1440. Luckily, Red Bull managed to grab it all on HD film and get Bobby to take us through his thought process during this insane trick in slow-mo. Enjoy.
zp8497586rq -
GoPro HD Hero 2010 Compilation
In this video are some of GoPro’s best shots in 2010. Shot on a GoPro HD HERO, this footage features skiing, snowboarding, surfing, swimming, skateboarding, car racing, human flight — you name it.
-
Red Bull Moments | Bobby Brown Triple Cork 1440
Brought to you from Red Bull Moments, a series of high-definition, slow-motion extreme moments that are shot at 1000 frames per second, this clip features Bobby Brown, two-time X-Games gold medalist, performing an insanely beautiful triple cork 1440. Shot in Alaska.
-
Swedish Andreas Fransson’s Ski Descent of Denali
In the summer of 2013, I plan to climb Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. And when I stand on the summit, I plan on representing Nerve Rush in the triumphant, glorious manner it deserves.
As it stands, this expedition is about 1.5 years away. In the meantime, as I pad my bank account for the necessary gear and logistics, I also begin to think about a training schedule that will optimize my chances at reaching the summit. Standing tall at 20,320 feet, Denali is no easy climb.
Currently in armchair-mountaineering mode, I occasionally find myself browsing the Internet for Denali-related resources. Training programs, trip reports, maps, you name it. Just recently, I stumbled upon something remarkable and definitely Nerve Rush worthy.
Andreas Fransson, Swedish Alpinist Extraordinaire
Andreas Fransson, a 28-year old Swedish alpinist and extreme skier, has the rare kind of prowess we at Nerve Rush HQ tend to swoon over. Not only is he capable of scaling mountains with world-renowned alpinist, but he’s one of the best extreme skiers in the world, buddying up with the likes of French snowboarder Xavier de Le Rue.
In 2010, Fransson shattered the upper half of his body in the French Alps when a wet-slab avalanche ripped him from his rappel. A year later, in May 2011, he broke new ground with a solo first descent of Denali’s south face, a route called the “baddest unskied line in North America.”
After a month of alpine-style climbing on the mountain, ascending and descending to acclimate and familiarize himself with the route, Fransson took 12.5 hours to descend the 8,000-foot south face of the mountain. Much of this trip was done at night..without a headlamp!
Riding with 177-centimeter Nordica Enforcers, Fransson descended on a precarious and seemingly never-ending surface that featured sections of 70-degree ice.
After returning safely to base camp, Fransson, in true extreme form, decided that the adventure wasn’t done. He took a rest day then climbed Denali’s Cassin Ridge, one of the most famous alpine climbs in the world, in a mere 33-hour round trip push. To lend some perspective, the Cassin Ridge has been climbed in under 36 hours fewer than 10 times. And, following this second successful venture, Fransson skied the Messner Couloir, a 5,000-foot, 45-degree descent. All told, he slept 3 hours in 3 days.
Fransson currently lives in Chamonix, France, a skier’s and alpinist’s mecca in the French Alps. He trains 10 hours a day.
From Fransson:
“Society has an absurd general belief that life is about hanging on as long as possible. So people [are] often hanging on for the sake of hanging on and not for really living … I can go on for days about this, but the important things in life are unsayable, so let’s just live it out and see what we find behind the curtains in front of the big game we are all playing.”
Here is a clip of Fransson skiing the Col de L´Aiguille Verte in Chamonix:
[vimeo id=”19292027″ width=”600″ height=”350″]
-
THIS IS MY WINTER, Featuring Xavier de Le Rue
TimeLine Films presents THIS IS MY WINTER, a serious snowboarding film that features Xavier de Le Rue, Mathieu Crepel, Andreas Fransson and Samuel Anthamatten. The full film will be screened at various mountain films festivals on November 2nd (including Banff), and the movie will be available online in mid-November, 2011.
-
RIP Antoine Montant, French Extreme Sports Star
The extreme sports community lost one of its own this week.
Antoine Montant, a French extreme sports star, was killed in a tragic accident in the French Alps, where he was BASE jumping. Local police found his body on Sunday and are investigating additional details.
Antoine Montant grew up just outside the French Alps and is one of those guys who learned to ski as soon as he could walk. At age nine, Montant learned how to paraglide from his older brother Valéry, an experienced hanggliding and paragliding pilot that helped pioneer the sport of speed flying — paragliding with skis down steep, snowy slopes. Valéry was killed in an accident in 2006.
Montant was a certified instructor in skiing and paragliding and certainly one of the world’s top athletes in both sports. He was an avid extreme skiier, BASE jumper and speed flyer.
To give you an example of what Antoine Montant could do, below is a clip of the first-ever speed flight along the cables of Chamonix’s old cable car:
[youtube id=”_yKU03F1f2A” width=”600″ height=”350″]
Nerve Rush HQ’s thoughts are with Antoine Montant’s friends and family.
-
Skating on Thin Ice (Literally)
Don’t really know how to describe this video clip. Just a guy, doing a bit of thin ice skating, some cold water swimming, but a very well-composed clip. Looks fun. Would love to have a drink with this guy. Filmed in January 2011.
-
Reporting Live: 2011 Reel Rock Film Tour
A few weeks ago, Nerve Rush HQ received an email:
I bought two tickets to the Reel Rock Film Tour…The six movies being shown look incredible.
I hopped on over to the website and found this trailer:
Boom goes the dynamite–I was in. Waiting in line, I realized I should have gotten there earlier. The theater was packed.
History of the Reel Rock Film Tour
The first Reel Rock film tour premiered in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado, featuring two new climbing movies. Founded by Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer, both who have been producing and directing adventure films for more than a decade, the Reel Rock film tour is organized annually and promotes films about rock and ice climbing, mountaineering, BASE jumping and other adventurous mountain sports. The tours often include gear raffles, athlete appearances and signings and fundraising for non-profit organizations. The tour is put on by Sender Films and Big Up Productions, who team up with North Face and Windstopper as primary sponsors.
Reel Rock Film Tour 2011
This year, the 6th annual film tour kicked off with two winners from a filmmaking competition. The judges picked one winner, and online votes (or “the people”) chose the other winner.
The judges choice, “Crash Pad Test Facility,” featured a comical sequence of tough situations, all of which were handled miraculously by the bouldering crash pad. The people’s choice, “The Climber Kid,” was a climbing parody of The Karate Kid.
There were six other films:
Ice Evolution
A beautiful film shot at British Columbia’s Helmcken Falls, maniac ice climber Will Gadd, a 30+ year veteran to the sport, shows us his dream climb–a heinously difficult but perfectly aesthetic overhanging climb behind a waterfall. Gadd and Tim Emmett dodge 30 foot icicly bombs and climb undoubtedly the hardest pure ice climb in the world. My favorite part of the film? When Gadd and Emmett used a metal detector to hunt down ice-covered bolts from the previous season. It was hilarious.Cold
“What the fuck am I doing here? We have to get down.” Over the past 26 years, 16 expeditions have tried and failed to climb Gasherbrum II, one of Pakistan’s highest peaks (over 8,000 meters), in the winter. In February 2011, Simone Moro, Denis Urubko, and Corey Richards became the first to achieve this goal, surviving -50 degree temperatures and a massive avalanche. In this first-person look at modern super-alpinism, Richards captured both the glory and pain of the trip.Project Dawn Wall
Tommy Caldwell, one of the world’s best rock climbers, has devoted the last decade of his life to opening free climbing routes on Yosemite’s El Capitan. Three seasons into his ultimate project–the seemingly impossible Dawn Wall–Tommy documents his first big ground-up push, showing us pitch after pitch of 5.14 first ascents. Eventually, an epic storm shuts the team down for the season, but boy did they come back with some nutty footage–imagine what it looks like to sleep on a completely vertical face. Ever heard of a portaledge?Origins: Obe & Ashima
One of the more inspiring adventure films I’ve seen, Obe & Ashima profiles nine-year old Ashima Shiraishi, a New York City bouldering prodigy under the tutelage of her passionate coach, Obe Carrion, a former professional. In part of the film, they head to Hueco Tanks, TX, seeking out the highest concentration of boulder problems in the U.S., where Ashima tears it apart. After climbing the notoriously difficult V12 Martini Right, Obe says to Ashima, “This is how psyched feels.”Race for the Nose
It’s the wildest competition known to man, the speed record on the Nose route of Yosemite’s El Capitan. For 50+ years, the world’s best climbers have been one-upping each other, racing up 3,000 feet of vertical granite rock in under 3 hours, risking life and limb to shave mere seconds from the climb. In this film, we follow Dean Potter and Sean Leary, who duke it out with other teams for rock climbing’s ultimate prize.Sketchy Andy / Slacklife
Andy Lewis is a nutty guy who, among other hobbies, enjoys BASE jumping, naked slacklining and aerial “trick-lining.” This film showcases someone who is pushing the limits–some might think too far–with some pretty gnarly feats. Below are some highlights, not from the film tour, of Andy’s best.