New Film Explores Decades-Long Battle, and Terrain, Of Potential Jumbo Mountain

Jumbo Valley is one of those dreamy backcountry paradises you think you'd only see in a ski movie, with peaks stacked with pillows reaching for the sky as far as the eye can see and seemingly endless expanses of wild, foreboding terrain. Developers have been fighting to build a mega-resort in this remote part of British Columbia for literally decades, even installing their own "town" in order to be able to have a voting population that might support their interests as they seek to take advantage of the area's vast terrain and glaciers that are skiable year-round.

Patagonia's new Sweetgrass-produced ski film, Jumbo Wild, explores the heated and long-standing debate about what to do with this pristine wilderness, filled in with what is sure to be incredible footage from shredding the area's terrain. This summer, the developers' environmental certificate ran out–completely stopping the project and forcing the developers to start literally from scratch to pursue the resort project–when they hadn't started significant development of the resort besides hastily pouring a single foundation. To groups like Keep Jumbo Wild, that ideally means a resort will never come, but it's uncertain whether the fight is truly over.

Check out more on Patagonia's site and get ready for the full film release in October.