DIG: An Alaskan Snowboard Film is a 28-minute portrait of Alaskan snowboarder Ryland Bell pushing himself far beyond the lines he usually rides around his home in Haines.
The film follows Bell as he drops into a dizzying 975-metre spine after a gruelling, remote approach that demands several hours of bootpacking and climbing to reach the summit. A lifelong Alaskan and multigenerational commercial fisherman, Ryland has always lived between two extremes: the intensity of salmon season and the equally demanding pursuit of riding some of the world’s steepest mountains.
In DIG, that balance is tested. “For those sorts of faces, you often have to chisel out a spot to drop from,” Ryland Bell writes on the Patagonia blog. “…the snow was so rotten we couldn’t make it to the ridge proper. On top of that, we’d watched this layer of clouds and fog build up to the south of us all morning, and as we’re strapping in, we saw it cover camp—thick enough that the plane might not be able to land and take us home. I thought, ‘Damn, what a harsh mistress this is.’”
What begins as a chance to explore untouched lines quickly becomes a survival story when a massive storm buries the crew’s camp under 25 feet of snow. For nearly two weeks, they ration calories, dig for hours each day to keep their tents from vanishing, and wait for any sign of a break in the weather. When it finally arrives, the film captures not only the descent they came for, but the resilience and grit it took to earn it.
“It’s one of the closest things there is to surfing because it’s so steep,” Bell adds. “When you get into that 60-degree range, the pull of gravity is very similar. It’s much more in the surfing mindset, of reacting to the wave as you ride down it, and very much a flow state, where I’m taking it as it comes and leaning into it, really enjoying it.”
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