The Balance of Powder: Sherpas Cinema’s Catskiing and Heliskiing Film in BC

The Balance of Powder is a short ski and snowboard film shot entirely in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, at Island Lake Catskiing near Fernie and Mica Heliskiing on Kinbasket Lake. It was filmed by the Canadian production company Sherpas Cinema and follows a group of riders through deep, cold powder in search of what the film calls “that elusive life balance”.

How The Balance of Powder was made

The film was a joint project of Mica Heliskiing and Sherpas Cinema. According to Mica Heliskiing, the crew shot deep powder at Mica in December 2010 and returned in April 2011 for the alpine and helicopter sequences, filmed with a gyro-stabilised Cineflex camera. Island Lake Lodge published the film on YouTube on 20 October 2011. The campaign built around it later won Marketing Campaign of the Year from Kootenay Rockies Tourism in 2014.

The riders are a who’s who of Canadian and North American freeskiing and snowboarding: Adam Chuntz, Callum Pettit, Cody Barnhill, Dana Flahr, Eero Niemela, Ian McIntosh, James Heim, JP Auclair, Kye Petersen, Lynsey Dyer, Mark Abma, Matty Richard and Rory Bushfield.

Island Lake Catskiing near Fernie

Island Lake Lodge sits in Cedar Valley, west of Fernie, just outside Mount Fernie Provincial Park in the southern Kootenay Range of the Canadian Rockies. It began in 1986 as a small backcountry ski-touring operation and added cat skiing in 1988, when its founders bought a single Pisten Bully snowcat. Today the lodge works about 7,000 acres (28 km²) of terrain. Weather patterns here bring far more snow than is usual so far inland, which is why the tree runs seen in the film fill up so deeply.

Mica Heliskiing on Kinbasket Lake

Mica Heli Guides was founded in 2003 by Dan McDonald, the same skier who started Island Lake, and the two operations came under common ownership in 2005. The lodge stands on Kinbasket Lake opposite the Mica Dam, about two hours’ drive north of Revelstoke, in the Rocky Mountain Trench between the Columbia Mountains and the Rockies. No road reaches it: guests arrive by helicopter in winter and by barge in summer. Its tenure covers roughly 300,000 acres on the western slopes of the Rockies, which gives the film its big open alpine faces and spines.

Why the film still works

The film pairs two ways of reaching untracked snow. A snowcat gives access to sheltered, deep tree runs close to a lodge, while a helicopter opens up glaciers and high alpine faces across a far bigger area. Shooting the same crew in both settings, in early-winter powder and in spring light, shows the full range of a British Columbia season. The mix of skiers and snowboarders adds variety to the riding. Go with certified guides: on cat and heliskiing trips, they choose the day’s terrain according to avalanche conditions.

For more films from deep-snow country, watch H2O Guides’ Valdez film, see a local crew’s Alta perspective or try This Is Skiing: A Fan-Made Action Montage.

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