Ben, leading the pack. Photo: Fleeting Time
Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone — and then it comes back again. For me, I’d forgotten the importance of the annual ritual that unites the snowboard community to collectively percolate the anticipation of winter to a fervent boiling point.
I’m talking about the movie premiere, of course. Every fall, before the impending snowfall scatters us onto the slopes, the snowboard community unites to marvel at people doing something we love so intimately, and at a scale so much larger than what most of us can achieve. And the energy that springs from these events is cleansing. There’s some catharsis in collectively cheering for something you know that you’ll never do but are happy to know that someone did.
Ben Ferguson has been doing that for years, now. The shredder from Bend, Oregon first lit up the national stage in 2018 alongside Shaun White on the U.S. halfpipe team, but that was merely one box to tick before moving into his true passion, riding pow in the backcountry.
Nowadays his work schedule involves filming full time with the exception of narrowly missing the Natural Selection finals after losing to none other than Travis Rice. But just being the onscreen talent wasn’t enough for young Ben – for his latest project he teamed up with camera wizard Aaron Blatt to direct RedBull Media House’s and Homestead Creative’s two-year opus, Fleeting Time.
The film documents Ben and friends as they sojourn around North America in a time when travel was not only frowned upon, but even outlawed. The first year was filmed entirely in the U.S. due to travel restrictions. The next year, the border opened up, and the crew got to capture some of the spectacle that is the Whistler backcountry – arguably the world’s best zone to film, with more than thirty years of shred flicks to back up that claim.
Now Ferguson and friends have a film to show for it – backed by the Red Bull hype machine on a coast-to-coast tour that started in Ben’s hometown of Bend and will finish at the hometown of Burton Snowboards, Burlington, Vermont.
I recently asked Ben if it was better just filming without people judging his run on a full-time comp schedule. But his response was insightful, “There’s still judging,” he says, “but the judges are your peers. They come to the premiers, and we have all these pro snowboarders coming down to see it for the first time. I can’t be showing these guys a weak product.” Not to mention the film hopefully making its mark, and “living up to all those shred films that inspired me to even make this movie. So there’s a lot of stuff that makes you want to push yourself and do the best you can.” Which is why he’s one of the greats already.
But Ben is just one player in a cast that is a veritable dream team of snowboarding’s top stars. Red Gerard, Travis Rice, Mark McMorris, and many more. So the film doesn’t feature just one rider. Each segment introduces the crew that pairs for each particular backcountry zone, emphasizing further that riding wild snow is a team sport.
“When you’re doing contests it’s one burst of energy for two minutes long on one run, and it’s all about you,” Gerard told me. “When you’re in the backcountry, you need to be looking out for your friends just as much as they ‘re looking out for you. You want to go out with people who care about you and know what’s going on. There’s a lot more education that goes into it.”
Education is a cornerstone, and a big shift for these next-gen films. At the start of the movie was a disclaimer that all the riders and film crew have at least some degree of avalanche safety knowledge, which should be a fundamental part of every backcountry rider’s base understanding. It’s great to see them encouraging the next generation to be mindful of that right out of the gate.
The movie does its job to fire up the stoke for winter. And doing so in a packed house makes it all the more special. It’s what mainstream cinema is missing out on these days. Thankfully our community is still keeping that collective in-theater energy alive. It’s a sign that the COVID drama might finally be behind us, and if we can learn anything from the last two years, it’s that these collective experiences will always amplify the stoke and unite the snowboarding community.
The remaining tour dates are below:
