Most British people’s experience of skiing is fairly limited. It tends to involve a week in Verbier or Val Thorens once every few years, a slightly disappointing afternoon at the Hemel Hempstead Snow Centre with the kids, or, for the unluckiest amongst us, watching from a balcony whilst everyone else has all the fun.

The professionals, of course, do it differently. They throw themselves off cornices that look like cliffs, hit eighty miles an hour on a ribbon of ice in Austria and, in some cases, pay an unthinkably high price for pushing it too far. There is a reason it is a sport that lends itself so well to documentary filmmaking.

The films on this list span four decades and quite a few different kinds of risk, from a foundational ski film made on a shoestring in 1988 to the story of the man whose home movies more or less invented the modern American ski industry.

One thing worth flagging up at the start is the fact that not all of the skiers featured in these documentaries make it home, so consider that your ‘trigger warning’ from the outset.

Blizzard of Aahhh’s

Most of the ski films made before 1988 were dry, narrated efforts aimed squarely at people who already owned a chalet in Wengen. Greg Stump’s Blizzard of Aahhh’s was, more or less, the first one that thought a ski film could be about personalities rather than technique and it changed the industry on its own.

Featuring Scot Schmidt, Mike Hattrup and the legendary mohawked Glen Plake, it followed the trio across Alaska, Whistler and Chamonix, set everything to rock music, and effectively invented what skiers now know as ‘extreme’. Stump was eventually inducted into the US Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame for it in 2019.

What stands out about Blizzard of Aahhh’s now, almost forty years on, is how cheerfully unprofessional it all is. There’s a punk sensibility to the editing, a fondness for sending up the wider ski industry and a sense throughout that nobody involved really expected the film to outlast the season.

CNN ran a piece a few years back on the film’s lasting legacy that is worth a read if you’ve never seen it. Plake has remained a sort of patron saint of free-skiing ever since, popping up at festivals and ski-town premieres well into his sixties to remind everyone exactly how it ought to be done and maintaining the punk sensibility we see in the film.

Steep

If Blizzard of Aahhh’s invented the modern ski film as entertainment, Steep is the documentary that goes back to look at where the discipline side of things actually came from. Directed by Mark Obenhaus and released in 2007, the film traces the history of big-mountain skiing from Bill Briggs’s first descent of the Grand Teton in 1971 through the rise of the Chamonix scene in the 1980s and the helicopter-dropped Alaskan era that followed.

It is narrated by the actor Peter Krause and by the ski mountaineer Louis Dawson, and shot across Alaska, France, Canada and Iceland for that proper big-mountain look.

What gives Steep some weight is the toll the discipline has taken on the people the film celebrates. Doug Coombs, generally regarded as the finest extreme skier of his generation, died in 2006 in a fall on a couloir in La Grave, and Steep honours him with some of the last footage shot of him on a mountain.

The film treats that arithmetic seriously without ever quite reaching for a tidy answer about what drives anyone to do this for a living. It is the sort of documentary that turns up regularly in best-of lists in ski magazines, two decades on, which gives you a sense of why it is that it’s made our list and why it’s definitely worth your time.

McConkey

Shane McConkey is the only name on this list to have had multiple films made about him, although the 2013 documentary McConkey is the one to watch.

Produced by Red Bull Media House and Matchstick Productions, it tells the story of the freeskier and BASE jumper from his Squaw Valley childhood through to his pioneering of ski-BASE, the discipline that involves skiing off a cliff edge and opening a parachute on the way down. McConkey was the man who, more than anybody else, made that a recognised thing rather than a thought experiment that nobody had quite been mad enough to try, and for good reason.

On the 26th of March 2009, attempting a ski-BASE jump in the Italian Dolomites, McConkey’s skis failed to release and he could not deploy his parachute in time. The documentary, made by his closest friends with the cooperation of his widow and young daughter, is unflinching about that fact whilst also being a properly funny portrait of the man himself.

The film features tributes from JT Holmes, Tony Hawk and Travis Pastrana, which shows you how widely his influence travelled outside of skiing itself. This isn’t a film for the faint-hearted, but if you’re the sort of person that likes adventure, even if only vicariously, it will be for you.

Streif: One Hell of a Ride

The Streif at Kitzbühel is widely regarded as the most dangerous downhill course on the World Cup ski calendar. The Mausefalle jump alone propels racers into the air at around eighty miles an hour, with skiers landing on a steep, icy slope that has hospitalised a fair number of them over the years.

This 2014 documentary, made in collaboration with Red Bull Media House, follows five international skiers including Aksel Lund Svindal, Hannes Reichelt and Erik Guay through a season leading up to the 75th anniversary race in January 2015, taking viewers behind the scenes of the lives of the participants.

What helps the film become more than just a standard sports documentary is its access. The camera follows the skiers in training, into the start hut and onto the course itself, narrated by two former Streif winners in Daron Rahlves and Didier Cuche.

Watching a downhiller try to articulate, calmly and to camera, exactly why he is about to throw himself down something this lethal is the highlight of the whole thing. Not that the background on the production was an easy one, of course. The Streif still runs every January and for anyone who has only ever caught fragments of it on Eurosport, this is the place to find out what it’s all about.

The Crash Reel

Kevin Pearce was a halfpipe snowboarder who, in late 2009, was widely expected to challenge Shaun White for Olympic gold at the Vancouver Games the following February. On the 31st of December 2009, training in Park City, Utah, he caught the lip of the pipe on a double cork rotation and landed flush on his face, suffering a traumatic brain injury that ended his career and very nearly ended his life.

Lucy Walker’s 2013 documentary, The Crash Reel, follows Pearce from that crash through the long years of recovery that followed it.

What sets the film apart from the usual sporting comeback story is its honesty about what comeback actually means. By the time Pearce is finally cleared to put a board back on, the film is gently steering him towards accepting that he probably shouldn’t. His parents and brothers, including his brother David, who has Down syndrome, become as central to the story as the sport itself.

The Crash Reel opened the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win a string of awards, with Pearce himself spending the years since touring schools to talk about brain injuries. It is an uplifting coda to what could easily have been a depressing tale.

Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story

For roughly fifty years, Warren Miller’s annual ski films were the formal beginning of the winter season in much of the United States of America. He started in the early 1950s with a 16mm camera and a van, filming his own friends in the Sierras and narrating the footage himself on tour.

By the time he stopped making them, he had effectively built the modern American ski industry on his own back. Patrick Creadon’s 2019 documentary, Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story, traces all of that, with Miller’s final filmed interview before his death in 2018 at the centre of it and offering a personal touch to a lovely piece of filmmaking.

The film is more honest than you’d expect about Miller’s personal life, including a fractious relationship with his son and a complicated separation from the company that bore his name. That is what saves it from being a corporate hagiography.

There is plenty of archive footage of impossibly stylish skiing from the 1960s and 1970s for anyone turning up just for the powder, but the more interesting material is the slow business of building a ski-bum lifestyle into a multimillion-dollar brand. It is an apt piece of work for a man whose career was essentially the act of putting himself on screen each November and hoping viewers would go with him.