Riding the Avalanche | Edge of the Unknown on Disney+

[INAUDIBLE]. [BEEPING] We're here, yeah. We're in Valdez. It is 7:35. We're five minutes behind. Um, bluebird morning—we got some snow yesterday. Gonna ride some lines and do some flips. It's going to be a good day. [HELICOPTER ENGINE REVVING]

I was up in Alaska with my crew working on this film, "The Fourth Phase." I think let's do this wizard thing real quick. It looks extremely good. [MUSIC PLAYING]

MAN (VOICEOVER): You need a canvas to put your work on. And the type of art that I like to make demands a very large canvas. And that is Alaska. You find snow features in Alaska that you don't find anywhere else in the world.

On my first couple trips, I was really scared. And scared not just on a, I might get hurt, but like there was a death component. You have cornices on the ridges. You have crevasses. There's a lot of big cliffs. You get out of a helicopter on top of a ridge. And you look a couple thousand feet down, and there's an absolute moment of leap of faith, and then drop in and surrender to the unknown.

Everything in your body is like, speed check, speed check. You're going too fast. Slow down. And you can't. You have to just try to override the body's natural ability to protect itself. [CHUCKLING] [MUSIC PLAYING]

Avalanches, of course, are a constant thing that you're thinking and talking about.

MAN: I've been skiing in the big mountains for over 25 years. And I've seen a lot of bad things go down. If you get caught in an avalanche on a big Alaskan face, you're not stopping until the bottom.

MAN: All right, just do a little snow check here. OK. With all these dangers, why put yourself out there? For me, riding in Alaska, it's the art that I have worked towards for so many years. And all of the little subtleties and the nuances and the details, like, that's where it matters. [MUSIC PLAYING]