New film shows why skiing in Scotland is (still) Worth It Every Time
The number of good snow days seems to be in decline each year, but Scotland’s diehard skiers and snowboarders aren’t about to give up any time soon, writes Roger Cox
It’s a sleepy Sunday evening under the giant glass canopy of the Potterrow Dome – Edinburgh University’s main student hub on Bristo Square. There’s a scattering of students sitting alone with laptops out and headphones on, either studying or doing a passable impression of studying, and a couple of guys are playing a leisurely game of pool near the bar. The lighting is low, the mood subdued-verging-on-soporific.
Upstairs at the Hangar Five venue, however, it’s a completely different story. Here it’s hot, rowdy and standing room only for the Backcountry Bash – the annual pre-winter gathering of Scotland’s backcountry ski and snowboard community, formerly known as the Winter Opener, and this year organised and compered by Gordon and Blair Fraser of Anatom footwear and Teko clothing. Homegrown ski films and slideshows draw whoops and hollers at regular intervals, the conclusion of each segment of the evening’s entertainment is met with a roar of approval, and when the lights go up after the final film it’s almost impossible to make yourself heard as a couple of hundred people all start discussing what they’ve just seen at once, greet old friends on the opposite side of the room, and begin making plans for the coming winter.
The question of what kind of winter we’re in for seems to be at the top of most people’s agenda. Since the pandemic – which, ironically, saw some fantastic snow conditions in Scotland’s mountains, at a time when hardly anyone was in a position to get out and enjoy them – the news for the snow-sliding community has gone from bad to worse. In terms of the number of skier visits clocked up by Scotland’s five ski centres, the 2024/25 ski season was the worst since records began, and the two seasons before that weren’t much better. The general consensus seems to be that – climate change or no – Scotland is long overdue a decent snow year.
That said, making the best of less-than-optimal conditions has long been a theme of skiing in Scotland, and it cropped up in several of the films and events at the Backcountry Bash. Indeed, the whole point of ski touring troubadour Jimbob McCluskey’s musical slideshow, Back to Braeriach, was that sometimes conditions are so unfavourable that the only sensible thing to do is to give up, go home and try again another day. The reason his presentation was called Back to Braeriach, Jimbob informed us, was because the first time he’d tried to ski the titular mountain he had found surface conditions to be “ice”. The video clips and still pictures he was narrating (and providing a live soundtrack to) were from his second, successful and gloriously sun-drenched attempt.
If there was one film that really summed up the grit and determination necessary to make the best out of skiing or snowboarding in Scotland, though, it was Worth It Every Time, the project of professional freeskier Harris Booth and videographer Ben Girdwood. “Scotland can be tough,” Booth says in voiceover at one point, “but that extra effort that has to be made is totally worth it.”
In his on-stage introduction, Booth told us that he first decided he wanted to make a film about skiing in Scotland after enjoying the stellar snow conditions that arrived during lockdown. Clearly the last couple of winters then provided him with less white stuff than he would have liked, but the film he and Girdwood ended up making is perhaps stronger as a result. Rather than endless clips of skiers and snowboarders floating through bottomless powder (which can be found pretty much anywhere in the snow-sliding universe these days) Worth It Every Time is a distinctive, no-frills hymn to the sheer bloody-mindedness necessary to grind out a ski season in Scotland when Mother Nature refuses to play ball.
There’s rain, there’s mud, there’s fog and there’s one truly gruesome grass-skiing wipe-out. Beyond that, though, there are state-of-the-art tricks launched off homemade kickers, drone shots of steep gully lines that make you catch your breath, and there’s also a brilliant segment dedicated to the Glencoe Gathering, which saw skiers and boarders from all over the UK descend on the resort to tackle a huge array of features created on a “tiny strip of snow” by the guys at Snowpark Scotland. Booth perhaps sums up the argument of the film best when he says that, no matter how atrocious any given winter might be, ”there are always going to be a few days that are just epic.”
In 2019, long-suffering readers of this column may remember, I interviewed data scientist Michael Spencer after he was commissioned by the Cairngorms National Park Authority and ClimateXChange to look into the future of snow cover in the Cairngorms. “Trends appear to remain consistent until around 2030,” he said, “after which we estimate a steeper decline in snow cover duration.” In other words: modelling suggests that in another five years or so there could be a sharp drop-off in the number of skiable days in a typical Scottish winter. On the evidence of this year’s Backcountry Bash, however, Scotland’s ski and snowboard community has no intention of going gentle into that good night, but will rage, rage against the dying of the white.
Follow the Backcountry Bash on Instagram at @backcountry.bash
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