The Dutch duo taking adaptive snowboarding to the next level at the Fort William Mountain Festival

A big old plank made of wood, fibreglass, plastic and metal may make you feel like some sort of minor deity when you’re sliding downhill on it, floating effortlessly above the snow and able to change direction with a twitch of your hips. Once you’ve stopped moving though, once that board has stopped planing across the surface of the snow and has sunk beneath its featherlight surface – well, in that instant you have transformed from the snow-sliding equivalent of an eagle into the snow-sliding equivalent of a chicken. Ever wondered what a skimming stone feels like when it stops skimming and falls to the bottom of the lake? Now you know.

Thinking of unclipping your bindings, and stepping off your board and into the snow? Oops... yeah, see, now you’re in up to your thighs. The board was at least spreading your weight across its length when you were standing on it, but now you’ve left it behind every step you take is going to be like that last one, and will burn about as many calories as a 100m sprint.

Given all of the above, it’s hardly surprising that snowboarders were quick to come up with a way of making uphill backcountry travel a little less effortful, and so the split snowboard was born: just like a regular snowboard, only once you’ve finished flying downhill on it you can split it in half to create a pair of (admittedly weird-looking) skis. Do a bit of fiddling about with your bindings and attach some sticky skins to the bottom of each plank, and it’s possible to travel uphill, if not as efficiently as a skier then at least slightly more efficiently than a chicken.

Travelling through deep snow on a splitboard is certainly easier than attempting it on foot, but it can still be hard yakka. One minute your climbing skins might be gripping beautifully, the next they might lose purchase, and you’ll start drifting unnervingly backwards down the hill. Planning to break trail up something steep-ish? Then you’ll need to master the kick turn, rotating one plank through 180 degrees, followed swiftly by the other. Trying that with a heavy pack on your back? Yup: perfect recipe for slapstick.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it’s necessary background for understanding the levels of determination and athleticism on display in Dolore – the recently-released film by Carlos Blanchard which has just won the Best Short Film award at the Fort William Mountain Festival, and will screen as part of the festival’s International Film Awards event on 14 February.

The film follows two Dutch para-snowboarders Lisa Bunschoten and Chris Vos on their first high-alpine splitboard tour, at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Dolomites. Both are competitive athletes of some renown, with multiple Paralympic medals to their names, and both are equipped with prosthetic legs. Vos’s right leg became paralysed following an accident; Bunschoten was born with fibula aplasia in her left leg, and at the age of 16 made the decision to have her left foot amputated.

“I think in snowboarding, adaptive snowboarding is really accepted,” says Bunschoten, “and I think it’s also something that’s really growing these last few years. But if people think about adaptive snowboarding they straight away think about racing, because that’s the biggest part of it right now. So it’s really cool to show that there’s more than racing in adaptive snowboarding, and that it’s also just going out and having fun.”

And Bunschoten and Vos do indeed make their adventure look fun – in fact, that’s perhaps this film’s greatest achievement. Sure, there are moments when they struggle while climbing, but this is by no means a watch-through-your-fingers saga of suffering.

There’s no question that the pair have set themselves a big challenge, but the early spills are met with laughs, not gritted teeth, and the downhill section – well – the varied terrain they find themselves in is the stuff most snowboarders’ dreams are made of, and you can tell by the way they’re riding that they’re loving every minute of it.

Before the duo set off into the hills, Vos sums up his philosophy as follows: “If your family is too protective, and they say ‘yeah, you’re disabled’, and if you think you’re disabled, then you will be disabled.”

Then, towards the end of the film, as Blanchard gives us a lingering shot of his two stars making wide, blissful turns across a deserted Alpine meadow bathed in evening sunlight, Vos gives as perfect an argument as you’ll hear for living in the moment: “I really want to see everything and explore all kinds of things,” he says, “and maybe if I die when I’m 40, I could be happy, almost, because I did everything I wanted to do.”

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The Fort William Mountain Festival runs from 13-16 February, see www.mountainfestival.co.uk

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