Snowboarders Travis Rice and John Jackson and skiers Chris Davenport and Lynsey Dyer head deep into the Andes of South America in search of the perfect line in Let Me Take You To The Mountain. Released by GoPro in November 2013, the short film was the third episode of the company’s HERO3+ Adventure Series.
Watch: GoPro – Let Me Take You To The Mountain
The film mixes wide shots of sunlit ridges with helmet- and body-mounted footage close to the snow. The wide views set the scale of the range; the point-of-view shots put you right behind the riders as they ride.
The riders: Rice, Jackson, Davenport and Dyer
- Travis Rice (born 1982) grew up at the foot of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming and is one of the most influential big-mountain snowboarders ever. He starred in That’s It, That’s All (2008), The Art of Flight (2011) and The Fourth Phase (2016), and created the Red Bull Supernatural backcountry contest at Baldface Lodge in British Columbia in 2012, winning the first edition.
- John Jackson joins Rice on a snowboard, completing the film’s two-board, two-ski line-up.
- Chris Davenport, from Aspen, Colorado, won the World Extreme Skiing Championship in Alaska in 1996. In 2007 he became the first person to ski all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks in a single year, and in 2011 he skied part of the Lhotse Face on Everest. He wrote Ski the 14ers and 50 Classic Ski Descents of North America.
- Lynsey Dyer learned to ski in Sun Valley, Idaho. A big-mountain and freestyle skier, she co-founded the non-profit SheJumps, which encourages women and girls in outdoor sports, and made Pretty Faces, the first all-female ski film.
The Andes: a mountain range on a giant scale
The Andes run for about 7,000 km down the western edge of South America, through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Their highest summit, Aconcagua in Argentina, reaches 6,961 metres, the tallest mountain outside Asia. In the central Andes of Chile and Argentina, the ski season runs roughly from June to October, which is why so many Northern Hemisphere riders and film crews head south in the summer months.
The Andean high country is dry, sunny and remote. Storms come sporadically and temperatures swing sharply, so the riders’ search for the right line, and the right day, is part of the story.
The GoPro HERO3+ and its Adventure Series
GoPro, founded by Nick Woodman in 2002, launched the HERO3+ in October 2013. The company claimed much better low-light performance and about 30% longer battery life than the HERO3, with a waterproof housing roughly 20% lighter and 15% smaller. Let Me Take You To The Mountain appeared just weeks after that launch, as part of GoPro’s Adventure Series for the new camera.
Planning your own Andes trip? Go with a local mountain guide for any off-piste riding, and carry a transceiver, probe and shovel.
Explore more: skiers sharing a frame with wingsuit flight and another GoPro winter-sports feature.
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