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Best GoPro Skiing Videos

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There are few extreme sports as adrenaline-packed as downhill skiing. Regardless of the vehicle, gravity is the ultimate influence and the athlete is completely under its power. The trick is to negotiate with it. The sport of skiing in particular adds a few other layers; the rider has to deal with snow, cold, trees and the  trickiness of staying upright on skis. And when their downhill excursions are captured in GoPro, we as viewers can witness their true craft and go for the ride right along with them.

Here are five incredible GoPro skiing videos.

Avalanche Jump

The skiing in this video is technically downhill, but a more accurate descriptor would probably be  ”down-mountain,” because in no way could you describe the slope this skier is navigating as a “hill.” Moving slowly at first and stirring up a ton of snow, the skier eventually picks up speed and sets off on a vertiginous journey down the mountain, which looks pretty untouched other than the damage he’s doing. Then, all of a sudden, he goes hurtling off the edge of a cliff and the bottom completely drops out so the skier is hanging dangerously in midair. Fortunately, he’s got a parachute, and as an avalanche follows him down the mountain, what was a skiing video becomes something else.

Powder Skiing

Here, we start with the lift-ride up the mountain. Those anticipatory moments of waiting to get to the top before you hurtle back down are pretty essential to the feeling of a great ski run. After hitting the top, the skier sets off down the hill and ends up leaving the main course for a route through the trees on the side of the mountain, picking up a chilling amount of momentum. Whenever the velocity seems to be getting dangerously high, the skier leans left or right to slow himself down. This video proves skiing is a sport that requires an immense amount of skill and control.

Alpine Ski Racing

There are plenty of different ways to ski: for pure recreation, for extreme thrill or for speed. The video shows the latter — a skier practicing slalom skiing, where you need to navigate between different colored flags as fast as possible. As he whips down the mountain, you can see him trying to turn around the flags as close as he can so as to keep the route he’s taking as fast as it can be, and what we get here is one of the fastest iterations of downhill skiing that you’ll ever see. And in case you think that it lacks the obstacles — like trees and cliffs — of some of the other videos, well: how do you think it would feel to hit one of those flags?

Pillow Drop

Some skiing runs are only reachable by helicopter or a long, long hike to the top of a mountain because they don’t have any chairlift access built to them. That’s because the only reasons they are runs is that someone decided they wanted to ski them and then found his own way to get to the top in order to do just that. These runs often don’t begin in any sort of orderly, organized fashion, as you would see on a more trafficked mountain. Instead, like the skier above, you may have to plummet through deep piles of snow from high heights in order to land on ski-able footing. That’s part of the fun.

Cliff Jump

What’s better for depicting a downhill run than one first-person camera? Try a bunch, mounted all over the skier: on the skis, on the pole, on the head. Then send him down the side of a mountain, with a jump waiting at the end, and what you get is a high-intensity journey through space and a ton of snow, with the landing after the jump looking like the mix of an asteroid hitting the ground and a mountain lion jumping from a cliff. There’s some control there, but there’s also a sense of complete abandon, which is part of the whole appeal.

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