Glen Plake

Mid-November - and everyone is starting to feel the coming winter. My highlight of the week is a street video from Montreal in which Ed Joy shines. We also discover new parallels between baking and skiing and get some life wisdom from legend Glen Plake: it's about living loud enough to feel it, raw enough to remember it, and brave enough to keep doing it - even when the world tells you to back off.

Elan has relaunched its iconic Ripstick freeride series for the 2024/25 season. At its core is a “lightweight big mountain ski” with new carbon deck technology. Carbon tubes and transverse carbon inserts are built into a Tubelite wood core. This setup is designed to deliver strong rebound and high torsional rigidity. The result is intuitive handling and a smooth, confident ride. The new Ripstick line is available in six different widths and lengths. We had the chance to test the widest model—108 mm underfoot in a 189 cm length—as well as a 182 cm version for a short time. Read on to see how they performed throughout the winter!

For the fourth Advent, PowderGuide.com is organising another big raffle - just in time for the big snowfalls over Christmas! And this time, appropriately enough, it's also coming to Slovenia. Because that's where the next lucky winner will be travelling to! Here you can win a weekend ski pass for freeriding in Vogel or a guide to explore the Julian Alps on a ski tour. Naturally including a hotel and not forgetting the matching new Elan Ripstick skis (developed and designed with Glen Plake!) and a tour of the ski factory for your new skis!

CHAMONIX: Mecca, place of longing and birthplace: of alpinism, steep face skiing and many other types of mountain sports. Following on from the article about a new first ascent, today we are looking at films about the ski culture from Chamonix, which is sometimes fraught with high consequences, always enchanted with great panoramic aesthetics and sometimes refined with fun and joy.

The name Kye Peterson is well known to park rats, but also to well-informed freeriders and TGR fans. Trevor Peterson, however, is probably only familiar to Chamonix and steeps enthusiasts. Trevor Peterson died when his son Kye was 3 years old on a well-known steep face route (Glacier Rond, Exit Couloir) in Chamonix. The Edge of Never documents the story of young Kye's self-discovery and, beyond that, of an entire sport.

This movie is not a freeride movie, but a documentary about freeriding and its development. Extreme skiing is like the Olympic Games: There is an old time; "Der weisse Rausch" by Arnold Fank proves this wonderfully.