Words: Matt Coté 2022-01-19 14:47:32
“Vogue, vogue, vogue. Dylan Siggers often lets his skiing do the talking, but there’s more to the man behind the mask—Madonna humor included.” Photo: Mattias Fredriksson “I’m a total control freak,” Dylan Siggers says. It’s not the image most people have of the freeski prodigy from Fernie, BC, but the 28-year-old, renowned for his immersive filmmaking and flowing style on snow, is allowing me a peek behind the curtain. Making his skiing come across as fluid, natural and carefree has been a lifelong composition, he tells me—his magnum opus. Siggers represents a branch of skiing that first went its own way when Oregon native Eric Pollard took a detour from big mountain burl, focusing instead on creative play in open terrain. Back in the mid-aughts, while Pollard was making films with Nimbus Independent, Siggers—an adoring young fan some 700 miles north of Oregon—was taking notes. Today, Siggers has followed suit as one of the most prolific underground talents in skiing, with an output beyond what seems humanly possible, both on skis and behind the lens. For over a decade, he’s been at the forefront of what athletes around the world are now having to do: making and editing their own content. Behind the scenes of the self-made skier’s oeuvre, though, is his exacting control over his aesthetic, and that’s been his way from the very beginning of his ski career. “He’s a reverse mullet: party in the front, business in the back,” says Josh Malczyk, the former global brand director at LINE, who signed Siggers back in 2006. “He seems to have 48 hours in a day, he just does so much stuff. His output was just next level; every week he had a new edit that was totally different than the one he gave us the week before. And his skill progressed at the same rate as his filmmaking.” Though he likes to project an appearance of acting with reckless abandon as part of his youthful, carefree brand, Siggers’ actual life is far more calculated. He got married when he was 25, owns a home, and runs a successful freelance filmmaking business making tourism and music videos. He’s also a pro mountain biker, plays the drums in three bands and is an and is exuberantly talkative—something his parents say comes from being an only child and having to reach out a lot for companionship. As a kid, that meant Siggers was always the one rallying his friends to the ski hill. His father, Robin, remembers that Dylan would get really upset because he always wanted to catch the first lift, but sometimes his friends wanted to start at 10 or 11 a.m. It’s not that different today. Dylan remains the glue of his friend group, according to his wife, Sophie Perrault. With no media gatekeepers in Fernie, Siggers picked up a camera as a preteen and herded his pals in front of it, passing it off to them when it was his turn to ski. He taught himself to edit on a home computer and began releasing a series of erratic edits online under the moniker of Burrrlapz. It was a portmanteau of “Bear laps,” a nod to the Bear Chairlift he and his crew would ride all day, making Fernie Alpine Resort’s natural features into their aerial jungle gym. Those edits, which Siggers continues to create to this day and now include a feature film called Football, have helped skiers like Josh McSkimming, Liam Morgan and Garret Capel carve out a little corner of the internet for themselves, and become a cult influence for a huge sect of the sport. They harness the guerilla ethos of skate films and the visual treatment of street snowboard films, but package it all in dreamy winter scenes where human movement seems like it belongs in nature—as though freewheeling play on skis is an intrinsic part of the landscape. The crux of that, of course, is getting talented people into that landscape. He continues to populate his films with little-known locals who have explosive skills, and in that regard Siggers is Fernie’s resident shepherd. Sometimes, though, he’s more like a border collie. “He’s super vocal about everything; you know exactly what he’s feeling when he’s feeling it,” Perrault says, admitting Dylan’s constant energy can be trying at times. For her part, Perrault has been a focusing force in Siggers’ life, injecting the pragmatism of a medical professional (she works as a licensed practical nurse at the local hospital). But she’s also become his partner in other respects. Since they began dating in 2012, Perrault’s ski and backcountry skills have progressed greatly, and she goes on every trip she can with her husband (even during the summer, when they switch to mountain bikes). She’s also become one of his principal videographers—a potentially contentious proposition if ever there was one. “He’s up there doing the hardest thing he can do, and the shot would be perfect if he took it,” she says. “But, he’s got me doing it, so it can be stressful.” Calling Siggers a stickler for detail is an understatement. For years he’s covered his face with a neck gaiter while skiing because he doesn’t want anyone to see his weird facial expressions and wants to direct attention to his skiing. Last year a photographer snuck a shot of his uncovered face, and it drove him mad. It’s this need for control that makes him feel that he wouldn’t do well in a traditional filming scenario in which someone else is making the video. Despite that, Siggers never touches the camera himself anymore. Early in his career, someone from a film company tried to convince him to give up skiing in front of the camera and just be a filmer. It angered him so much that it motivated him to ski even harder. Since then, he’s carefully directed all shooting via his friends, wife, or even his dad, to make sure he’s always an athlete and not solely a filmmaker. After the shoot, regardless of who was behind the camera, Siggers finds the story—the vibe—in the editing room. Everything is shot at 60 frames per second, giving him the option to slow the footage down and do much of the creative lifting during post-production—where he tweaks and revises until he gets exactly what he wants. While Dylan may be the more noteworthy Siggers these days, he comes from a family steeped in Canadian ski history. Three decades before Dylan rose to prominence, elevating the profile of his town among skiers across the world, his father opened Fernie up for an entire generation of ski bums and is still part of local ski lore. Growing up in Vancouver, BC, Robin migrated to Whistler during the mid-1970s, where he built and lived in a squat in the woods in order to ski every day. But when big money found Whistler, that first generation of hardcore ski bums was flushed out of the woods and sent packing. A friend of Robin’s told him about a tiny, two-T-bar community ski hill in southern British Columbia that had epic amounts of snow (close to 30 feet a year), five expansive bowls and no crowds. The rub was having to post up in a backwater mining town without much going on. Robin took the tradeoff, and in 1977 split a $100-per-month rental house with three friends and found work at the Fernie Snow Valley ski school. There was no avalanche control back then, so the ski hill simply closed for a few days whenever it snowed. When the owner decided to build up Fernie Alpine Resort by putting in chairlifts, the first one was taken out by a big slide from an imposing headwall. That’s when they decided to institute an avalanche control program, creating the patrol team. Robin was one of the first on the job. As Fernie Alpine Resort grew during the next 30 years, eventually being purchased by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, Robin advanced to operations manager, a title he still holds. He and his wife, Helen, raised their son on the ski hill, which acted as Dylan’s de facto day care. The couple intentionally sheltered their child from the pressures and expectations of the outside world, and he grew up believing skiing was life. And a good life, it has been. “The generation gap that I had with my parents in the ’70s was more of a titanic gulf because there was such a cultural difference between my parents and our generation,” Robin recalls. “Things were happening really fast. The generation gap between Dylan and I is a technological gap, but not a cultural one. You know, we even like the same music.” That organic approach to parenting has allowed a lasting friendship to flourish. Robin still skis frequently in the backcountry, and often accompanying Dylan on his film shoots (now mostly in the backcountry). Although Helen doesn’t ski as much, she also remains close with her son, in her role as his main creative influence. She’s a seamstress and, according to everyone who knows the family, she’s where he got most of his precision and style from. “Ever since he was a baby, I was sewing,” Helen says. “Dylan’s crib was set up in my sewing room, and he’d be my sounding board. I always asked him how my work looked.” “What’s with the heavy machinery calendar behind you?” I ask, eyeing the trappings of Siggers’ via from his webcam. Around the calendar are mementos—stickers from the LINE Traveling Circus, $100 in Japanese yen he forgot to spend in Japan (and seemingly doesn’t know he can still deposit in Canada) and other silly sundries. “It’s a reminder,” he answers. “I look at it and think, ‘Make good videos and you don’t have to do this.’” Growing up in a town with mining history, many of his friends continue to earn their living with their labor. Fernie is still somewhat humble. It’s famous and popular among Albertans from nearby Calgary (a three-hour drive northeast), but has never gotten the same amount of hype as Whistler or Revelstoke. Siggers doesn’t take his career for granted. Every video view is hard-earned, and he’s as loyal to his followers as they are to him. He feels an obligation to entertain his audience, and wants to to do it as well as he can. “He constantly thinks he doesn’t do enough,” Perrault says. “He doesn’t realize how much he does and how not that many people can say the same thing. His editing, his filming and even the contracts he writes up—Dylan does everything by himself.” It’s hard to know if he insists on doing things himself in spite of or because of his insecurities. Either way, that DIY attitude is why Fernie works so well for him. Although it’s low key and he would have found more opportunity in a place like Whistler, he’s been able to blaze a path on his own terms at home. Doing so has made him an underdog instead of a superhero, but that’s a conscious decision, and it’s one he’s happy with. “He should be bigger than he is,” Malczyk says. “He’s a creation of what Eric Pollard pioneered, and this is the next generation that’s taking it to a completely different level. It’s so important to show those younger kids you don’t just have to be a park skier.” Indeed, the clips Siggers previews for me are transfixing. It’s not so much how he moves, but how it syncs up. His skiing is so integrated with the setting, it’s like he’s coordinating his tricks with the shadows. He hates generic pow slashes but hasn’t resorted to the same back-seat wheelie turns other non-conformists have developed in rebuke. With Siggers, every movement leads to the next, and though it’s not traditional, his technique is centered, balanced and flawless. He believes each skier should be unique, and that’s what he wants to express. “I want things to feel good,” he says. “It matters how the video feels to watch. I like things that are kind of melancholic and happy. I like things that aren’t traditionally happy, like a nice Modest Mouse song. It’s not happy, but it feels nice.” At the heart of it all, though, is Siggers’ desire to prolong his youth spent in the mountains. It’s the central narrative that runs through his skiing and his work, even as it evolves and becomes more refined. Perrault figures if it weren’t for Siggers’ eccentric-but-undeniable gravity, the collection of misfits he brings together would have broken loose from his orbit and scattered long ago. “It’s a friend production,” Siggers says about his career, acknowledging the ecosystem that supports him. “It’s really collaborative and a lot of my homies are out there just for me.” In the end, watching him and his fellow soul skiers draw timeless shapes at half speed, I get the sense he’s trying to control more than his sets. It feels like he’s trying to slow down that thing that makes most of us grow up and grow apart—the march of time itself.
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