Why are freeski stars like Shane McConkey so willing to show us how
to live—and risk paying the ultimate price?

BY STEVEN THRENDYLE from Buyer's Guide 2010 issue

I knew that Shane McConkey’s death had resonated well beyond the realm of our little skiing tribe when The Tyee, a Vancouver-based lefty news website that usually runs stories on homelessness, urban transit and environmental issues, posted “Vancouver Ski Legend, Dead at 39” on its homepage in late March.

Crafting a lede sentence that The Globe and Mail would never print, writer Geoff D’Auria opined that “Shane McConkey was one crazy motherf&%#er." D’Auria—who may, or may not, be a skier—legitimizes McConkey’s life and its many fulfilled dreams to a diverse readership of people who have made pretty conventional career choices—truck drivers, health care workers and schoolteachers who likely never gave the skier’s death a second thought. He concluded, quite eloquently “[McConkey] reminded us all that if we have the audacity to follow our dreams, well, we just might be able to fly.”

photo: Graeme Murray/Red Bull Photofiles

McConkey’s death was indeed unexpected—but was it an occupational hazard? On assignment for Matchstick Productions (MSP) to film its annual ski movie, McConkey was an experienced BASE jumper with more than 700 missions on his flightcap. News of McConkey’s death burned up the Internet, with most of the news disseminated in a chatroom on the Teton Gravity Research (TGR) website. There’s a bit of an irony in that Teton Gravity is a rival filmmaker to MSP. Teton Gravity had filmed Jamie Pierre’s XXXL-sized cliff jump several years earlier.

McConkey’s death also generated an enormous amount of mainstream coverage,
albeit few were as heartfelt as The Tyee story. Though his ties to Whistler and Canada
were relatively loose (he was born in North Vancouver in 1969, however, his fame was
cemented in Alaska and his home in Lake Tahoe), he was referred to as “Whistler’s Shane McConkey” in Canadian newscasts and his death was the subject of no less than three articles in The Globe and Mail. A month after his death, McConkey still had 50-plus film segments on YouTube—one that’s been downloaded more than a half-million times.

Will skiers and daredevils who looked up to Shane give their own careers or participation in these kinds of sports a second look?

Now that the memorial services have concluded and the snowbanks with “R.I.P.
Shane” have melted away, the actionsports film industry and the companies and
athletes that are part of it face some tough questions. Will filmmakers stop scoping out
dramatic scenery to film extreme stunts? Will sponsorship by major companies disappear? And, perhaps most importantly, will skiers and daredevils who looked up to Shane give their own careers or participation in these kinds of sports a second look?

If history is any guide, the answer to the first question is a resounding “no.”

In 1993, California big-air specialist Paul Ruff recruited several still photographers and a
video crew to launch what was going to be the world’s largest cliff jump near Kirkwood Resort at Lake Tahoe. Ruff, an aggressive self-promoter who had stuck a 32-metre cliff jump in a previous Warren Miller movie, believed—in the pre-YouTube days—that he could market still and video footage to mainstream commercial clients like Disney and Mountain Dew for, as a story in the Los Angeles Times Magazine by Alex Markels reported, a half-million dollars. In fact, Ruff even told his fiancé that his Kirkwood catapult would be his very last stunt, and one that he would ride to fame and hopefully Hollywood fortune. Ruff came up short as he approached the monster cliff and fell to his death on a pile of rocks near the bottom. In the ensuing Warren Miller movie Black Diamond Rush, Ruff was highlighted in a somewhat cryptic way—“we’ll see you again, in Heavenly” might have meant that Ruff’s spirit was now poetically soaring in the Tahoe winds—or it might have been the ultimate shameless product plug.

Billy Poole, a Black Diamond-sponsored athlete, died filming a Warren Miller segment
in Children of Winter that was released in 2008. Indeed, Miller movies have introduced such far-out concepts as wing-suit flying and BASE jumping to a more mainstream audience for years.

In the wake, shall we say, of these events, many rationalizations arise. First and foremost is “He died doing what he loved…” spoken not only when skiers perish, but also motorcyclists, surfers, mountain climbers and others who knowingly take risks and put themselves in harm’s way. This convenient excuse ignores the fact that none of us really knows what it’s like to be dead—and how much we’ll miss our lives—because we’re alive. Certainly, the release of dopamine and other serotonin uptake
transmitters in the brain highly enhances—for a short period, at any rate—what it feels like to be truly alive.

While Ruff might have been financially motivated—in the pre-YouTube era, when
daredevil stunts might indeed be commercially valuable to marketing companies and their clients—Shane McConkey didn’t do it for the dollars.

Scott Gaffney is a Tahoe-based filmmaker who was on location to document McConkey’s
earliest ski and later BASE jump exploits. “Shane made a clear decision to make BASE
jumping part of his life. He would come up with the projects and then ask us to film them—the pressure was on Shane, not on us. We might have thought it was crazy—and some of it was crazy—but he went into great detail to ensure that something would not go wrong. We never got the sense that this would be the last time we’d ever be filming Shane.”

Though Gaffney may contend that McConkey would have gone BASE jumping even if he
wasn’t sponsored, Canmore, Alberta-based clinical psychologist Geoff Powter is not so
sure. Powter has a special interest in high-risk sports, bold adventures and exploration. “Our subconscious absorbs a lot of information— whether it’s sponsors knocking, the competitive urge to be ‘the king of the castle’ or simple peer pressure—all of these elements can inform our decision-making process in an unconscious way.” Powter calls this behaviour a “continuator”—leading the participant down a path that he might not otherwise pursue. McConkey’s death temporarily slowed down some of his close BASE jumping friends like JT Holmes, who has taken a sabbatical from wing-suit flying and ski/BASE jumping.

Whether sponsorship dollars are on the line or not, summoning up Kodak Courage
has always been a big part of action sports

Whether sponsorship dollars are on the line or not, summoning up Kodak Courage
has always been a big part of action sports. As Powter says, “These days if an athlete or adventurer says that he did something and there’s no still or video footage of the event, then in his mind it did not happen.” And, of course, there is a danger in redoing “multiple takes” of a particular stunt in order to “get it right.”

As to whether moviemakers will continue to follow these daredevils, one need only look
at the success of MTV’s Nitro Circus, where protagonists BASE jump off cliffs in the Utah
desert, powered by dirt bikes. Produced by the folks who brought you Jackass, one of Nitro Circus’s main stars is fellow BASE jumper and Tahoe resident Erik Roner, who was introduced to BASE jumping by McConkey. Clearly, this is not a sport that is going away any time soon.

Indeed, Powter believes that some of what transpires in the action-sports world is
nothing but biological destiny. “Humans really aren’t much different from other mammals
and even fish or birds,” says Powter. “All through the animal kingdom, there exists
a certain percentage of the breed who are predisposed to discovery and pushing the
limits of the unknown. We know this by analyzing the dopamine receptor chemicals
found in the brain.”

Powter says researchers have identified two different triggers for dopamine production— the short-term “rush” that a skier gets when he jumps a cliff, as well as a longer-term feeling of “flow,” which can last for hours after the event. Tiptoeing across crevassechoked glaciers and through avalanche-prone terrain, a fast and light ski mountaineer like Revelstoke’s Greg Hill will activate the same receptors in the brain as a free-falling ski movie action hero, but for longer periods of time. This “flow” state, as characterized by University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
combines both a heightened sense of arousal and engagement in one’s surroundings as well as intense, almost out-of-body concentration within an activity. The latter group is concerned with absolute mastery of a task or challenge, as opposed to a short, cheap thrill.

“The first time we went through we were
utterly terrified. By our 10th or 15th time, we
became so comfortable that we could
have stopped and had lunch.”

Though it’s common to see risk-takers like McConkey and Hill as being quite different,
there can be a lot of overlap. Skiers and mountaineers can waver between being in full
control one minute and out of control the next. Powter has interviewed many high-achieving athletes close to his Rocky Mountain home, and though his sampling isn’t large enough to be statistically significant, he offers this surprising observation. “Virtually every participant in the sports I studied confided that they were very scared the first or second time they did an activity, but they persevered and pursued the activity anyway.”

Photo: Yorick Carroux/Red Bull Photofiles

Is it in our nature as humans
to reward the risk-takers
and view them as heroes?

And generally—it’s been clinically proven— their fears will, in fact, subside. “It’s actually
quite similar to a person who turns up the volume on his or her i-Pod to filter out
background noise. After a while the brain will get accustomed to the louder volume and
the background noise will again be audible.” Powter, an accomplished mountaineer and
no stranger to danger in his own right, tells of a recent expedition that he participated
in where moving up from base camp required repeated shuttles through a heavily crevassed glacier, where a towering, groaning serac might collapse at any minute. “The first time we went through we were utterly terrified. By our 10th or 15th time, we became so comfortable that we could have stopped and had lunch. Of course, the risk of injury or death was exactly the same—and you might even be more prone to having an accident due to complacency and taking the situation for granted.”

As Canmore-based Will Gadd, a Red Bull-sponsored paraglider pilot and mountaineer
says, “Shane got me to look down the rabbit hole of BASE jumping and I decided it wasn’t for me. To keep it interesting, you have to take on higher levels of risk with narrower margins for error. Skiing, BASE jumping and wing-suit flying are all sports with a high element of risk. And trying to combine all three, as Shane was doing, exacerbates the risks even more.”

In fact, McConkey ran into trouble when his skis failed to release and delayed the opening of his chute. His chute did eventually open, but simply deployed too late for it to do him any good.

Is it in our nature as humans to reward the risk-takers and view them as heroes?
Clearly, Shane McConkey was a hero to a lot of people—voyeurs and imitators alike. At
a time in western society where there aren’t any soldiers leading heroic campaigns or
polar explorers pushing to the ends of the Earth, we’re left with applauding the exploits
of human daredevils—a misguided notion, perhaps, but one that resonates with many
of us. Does Shane McConkey, then, become a martyr for the action-sports cause? Will his death encourage more young men to huck cliffs, fly in wing suits, climb frozen waterfalls or engage in other, enormously risky behaviour? You have to think that it will, and that maybe this is not necessarily a bad thing. The economic and environmental crisis facing all of us has reinforced the fact that we have but one life to live. As Gaffney says, “I think that if a lot of people were told that they only had 24 hours to live, they’d go out and take the chance to do something that Shane McConkey did every day.”