Adventurer of the week: Extreme skier Ingrid Backstrom appears in new Warren Miller movie ‘Chasing Shadows’

As skiers strap on parachutes and set about pushing the boundary of their sport in the opening moments of “Chasing Shadows,” a familiar voice can be heard.

“Snowriders are the most fortunate people on this planet Earth,” ski film icon Warren Miller says, “sliding on something that never changes but is never the same.”

The same can be said for the Warren Miller movie franchise, of which this is film No. 66. In terms of plot, not much has changed. There isn’t one. Just the world’s most talented skiers and snowboarders doing what’s beyond the dreams and budget of most viewers.

But the movies, narrated these days by Olympic moguls gold medalist Jonny Moseley, also are never quite the same.

“This year, it seems like they threw a little bit of everything in there,” said extreme skiing icon Ingrid Backstrom said. “It’s amazing.”

Backstrom, 37, is a coach at Crystal Mountain, a Seattle native, a Leavenworth resident, and spends much of the year traveling the world to ski.

She and fellow pro skiers Sage Cattabriga-Alosa and Ian McIntosh cap “Chasing Shadows” with an August winter segment filmed in Portillo, Chile.

It’s one of two films Backstrom is starring in and promoting this month. She recently took a break from mountain biking in the rain on the Oregon coast to field a few questions:

Q: Was there more snow in Chile than we had at the resorts here?

A: Yeah, and that was encouraging because they had a drought too. We were supposed to film the segment in July and there was no snow at all. The resorts weren’t even open. So they pushed it back to August. They ended up getting a bunch of snow. It closed the road and the only people who were allowed to ski were the people staying at the hotel. It was such good skiing.

Q; Any other segments you wish you could have tagged along on?

A: Rachael Burks went monoskiing with a bunch of monoskiers and that looked hilarious. There was a segment about the U.S. moguls skiers and that looked so hard to me. And the segment in Nepal looked so gorgeous.

Q: After racing at Whitman College, what inspired you to move over to the type of skiing you do now?

A: After college I moved to Tahoe to take a year off as a ski bum. A friend wanted me to enter a freeskiing contest with her. I’ve always loved just freeskiing around with my friends, so I went and did the contest and I was like, ‘This is sweet. These people are serious about it, but it’s a lot more fun and expressive.’ It’s really hard to describe, because the racing is fun, too. I love it. The fun comes more from the challenge, trying to better yourself. While freeskiing, you might have an amazing run that’s also really, really fun because you did stuff you didn’t think you could do.

Q: Do you get a chance to race anymore?

A: Not too much. Every once in a while I jump on a race course and I’m always super embarrassed skidding around the turns.

Q: Any other movies coming out?

A: Yes, I did a movie with Powder Magazine that comes out soon (“The Great Siberian Traverse” debuted Wednesday). We took the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia and skied along the way. It’s a short film, about 25 minutes, and it was a lot of fun.

This story was originally published November 5, 2015 at 3:52 AM with the headline "Adventurer of the week: Extreme skier Ingrid Backstrom appears in new Warren Miller movie ‘Chasing Shadows’."