Winter is on the way, and a new breed of skier is ready to take to the sky. "It’s an eternity when you’re hanging upside down," Duncan McPhee began his story. "If it’s going right, you want to stay in the air. And if it’s not going right, you can’t wait to land."

He started over: "You pull up to the top of the park, you’re looking down, and your adrenaline is definitely pumping." On your way into the jump, you make sure your stance is wide, you check your speed, and prepare to send yourself into the air. "And then you spot your landing and, hopefully, don’t bust yourself up."

Throwing oneself 15 metres through the sky at roughly the speed that a bird flies is not everyone’s idea of a good time. But for those like McPhee who have found a home in B.C.’s Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, nothing compares with those few seconds of airborne freedom.

"Time slows down," he said in a telephone interview from Whistler Village. You can be inverted or spinning, but every second of the experience is being taken in with absolute clarity. You can see the mountain below, hear the crowd roar, and feel your muscles twist in preparation for a landing. "That’s what slope-style skiing is about."

After high school, McPhee knew that all he wanted to do was ski. He enrolled at BCIT, obtained a real-estate licence, and moved up to Whistler Village to live the dream. Today he’s part of a renaissance movement in skiing.

Andrew Clough is a coach for the Whistler Blackcomb Freestyle Club. He told the Georgia Straight that during the peak of snowboarding’s popularity, around 2000, membership hit a low of about 20 people. But that was also about the time that the Freestyle Club began to offer slope-style training for kids.

Slope style, Clough explained, is all about jumps and tricks, whether in a terrain park or halfpipe or out in the backcountry, where skiers can build their own jumps. Since 2000, Clough said, membership has experienced steady growth, and it’s back up to 50 members for the 2007-08 season.

Whistler locals like Carlos Strachan agree that skiing is back and bigger than ever. And it’s slope style that has led the movement.

"There has definitely been a resurgence towards skiing," said Strachan, manager for Comor Sports in Whistler Village. "I’ve lived up here for 13 years and I’m seeing people come full circle: people who used to ski, then went to snowboarding, and now are coming back to skiing. It seems to be cool again."

Strachan is also in charge of buying skis for Comor’s B.C. locations. "Probably seven years ago, we were 55-45, skis to snowboards," he said, discussing Comor’s sales. "Then—here in Whistler, especially—we had a blip where snowboards were 60 percent of our sales." Last year, Strachan continued, skis were back up at 50 percent.

Strachan attributed the revival of skiing to slope-style enthusiasts like McPhee. "It’s the resurgence of skiing being cool," he said.

Duncan McPhee enjoys the view from the North Shore's Cypress Mountain.

Jeff Coombs, partner at McCoo’s, a ski and snowboard shop in Whistler Village, explained that at about the turn of the millennium, skis with slightly turned-up back tips began to appear in stores. "Then, about two years later, whole twin tips showed up," he said. "And that’s probably the biggest growth in ski sales now."

Coombs continued with a history lesson: "Guys like Shane McConkey and some of the grandfathers of extreme skiing, they started showing up in halfpipes with these big mountain skis." Soon enough, a younger generation of skiers picked up twin-tip skis and quickly realized that it was now possible to do anything that snowboarders were doing. Slope-style skiing was born.

Coombs described a typical Whistler slope-style skier’s day as one spent in the Nintendo Terrain Park on Blackcomb Mountain, listening to music, doing jumps, and just hanging out with friends.

"That’s the advantage of slope style over just disappearing down a run," Coombs said. "There is this whole cool camaraderie thing."

For countless ski bums in Whistler and throughout the Lower Mainland, there is no better way to spend a day.

"When snowboarding came along," McPhee said, "it was fresh and original and cool to watch." Skiing was forced to take a back seat. "But now skiers can do it too. Skiing has always been there, but now it’s on a level playing field with snowboarding."

Two years ago, McPhee was doing a back flip in the terrain park on Blackcomb. He came up short and hit the ground face first and hard. The crash didn’t even slow him down. Back on top, skiing is showing the same resilience that its fanatics do.

Link: Whistler Blackcomb Freestyle Ski Club