ANCHORAGE — A professional skier who walked away after falling 1,600 feet down an Alaska mountain says the experience was “gnarly.”
Video of Canadian skier Ian McIntosh cartwheeling down a near vertical mountain has gone viral this week.
The fall happened last April in the Neacola Mountains, about 125 miles southwest of Anchorage. McIntosh was being filmed for the Teton Gravity Research movie “Paradise Waits,” which opens this week.
He says in a video posted on the company’s website that he saw a ridge in the snow and thought he could ski on either side of it.
But as he chose one side, he says his feet just dropped out from under him as he tumbled down the vertical wall. A body camera and footage from a helicopter followed him caroming down the mountain, capturing every bone-jarring grunt as he tumbled after yelling an emphatic, “No!”
Teton Gravity Research owner Todd Jones said in a release that the fall “was the most terrifying crash I’ve ever seen.”
