Big turns in deep, untouched powder are the first things that come to mind when we think of the glorious side of exploring the backcountry. We earn our runs and relish every turn. There’s also undeniable risk any time we ride out of bounds, and that only compounds whenever an athlete pushes it to an extreme. Elias Elhardt and Xavier De Le Rue are no strangers to the backcountry and in Invisible Ground the two question their own motivations when this experience is pushed to life-threatening extremes. Is it worth the risk? Is it possible to find a reasonable balance? They come across and explore questions like this while sharing their own close calls.
Both have had their fair share of high-profile scares in the backcountry. De Le Rue has openly talked about his own experiences in the past, including getting caught in a 2008 slide near Orcières, France.
“I traveled the full distance and was unconscious at the bottom of the run,” he said in 2019. “My helmet strap was choking me and my mouth was full of snow. Normally the rescue would have started at the top, but from the heli they thought they saw something near the bottom, so Henrik Windstedt, who I was riding with that day, skied all the way down – what they had spotted was a tree – but thankfully I was close by and amazingly on top of the debris, so he was able to get to me in time, clear my airway and get me to a hospital…. Lucky doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“While risk taking is possibly the most obvious and ever present subject in our sport, I felt like we mostly get to see this in the form of the action hero overcoming risks,” Elhardt says about the film. “With Invisible Ground, I am questioning that narrative and finding a different perspective by making (something) which is neither glorifying, nor educational, but one that explores the space in between.”
