Precipice of fear: the freerider who took skiing to its limits

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In its early days, steep skiing’s drama had come from the fact that these slopes could be skied at all. Now Heitz sought to bring speed – up to 75mph (120km/h) – and style to a sport that once impressed through sheer audacity. The result was something remarkable – and even riskier than before. “That style of skiing is incredibly dangerous,” says Dave Searle, a British mountain guide based in Chamonix. “You can keep pushing the limits of it until you either stop pushing the limits, or you die. That’s the two things really.”

Heitz slid sideways down the first few metres, made a turn, and then cut down on to the highest grey smear of ice. Skiing on ice is not generally recommended: all skiers control their speed by making turns. That’s how they tame gravity. But on ice, the edges of the ski can’t bite, which means you can’t turn, which means you can’t slow down. Instead, you become a vector, pure speed with no directional control.

Heitz believed he could handle the ice, and he thought it would make good footage. He was wrong about at least one of those things. On the ice he lost control and started sliding. One ski came off and he began to tumble. “No, no, no,” he shouted.

Freeriders talk about the “no-fall zone” – territory so steep that it can prove lethal if you lose your balance. The no-fall zone is generally Heitz’s natural habitat, but on the Combin it seemed for a moment that it might get the better of him. Heitz himself thought he was going to fall to the bottom, 600 metres below.

He was lucky. The Combin, unlike some of his other proving grounds, is concave, with the steepest section at the top. There was no cliff below him, and he was able to manage some semblance of control with the ski he didn’t lose. He halted himself after falling perhaps 150 metres (he says the exact distance is hard to judge). The loose ski slid further below him before it, too, came to a stop.