Coming Down the Mountain

Begins somewhere in the Arctic Circle and ends on an extinct volcano in the Pacific, stopping off at the Camels, a Mousetrap, and the Krankenhaus in between. The resulting journey, paying homage to the frozen water that makes the world fit to ski, becomes a ritual celebration of the Fall.

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For some of its victims, skiing can be terminal. It starts innocently enough when your best friend asks you if you'd like to try it, just once. But your first taste of white powder is the beginning of a dangerous obsession and you're soon locked into a spiralling addiction. By then it's kill or cure. When Andy Martin left for the slippery slopes of Val d'Isere he was only a journalist reporting on the Premiere Neige, the first event of the Ski World Cup. Before long he was running away from reality with the "white circus" of professional skiers, following the men's downhill circuit from France to Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, back to France and on to the United States. It was the ultimate ski bum fantasy: a whole winter playing snakes and ladders up and down enough mountains to reach to the moon, a series of snapshots of intense experience - speed, danger, sex, money. But was it selling out the soul of skiing - nature, knowledge, purification, communion? On the piste and off it, skiers of all kinds, winners and losers, extreme and not-so-extreme, hedonists and dreamers, tell their own stories and the story of skiing, and provide a cool commentary on life down below.
"Coming Down the Mountain" begins somewhere in the Arctic Circle and ends on an extinct volcano in the Pacific, stopping off at the Camels, a Mousetrap, and the Krankenhaus in between. The resulting journey, paying homage to the frozen water that makes the world fit to ski, becomes a ritual celebration of the Fall.