Rob Kingwill did what many people who find themselves in precarious situations do: He looked to the heavens.
At the time, Kingwill, a professional snowboarder, could have touched a star from his perch atop a peak in the immense snow-covered Chugach Mountains near Girdwood, Alaska.
"It's the Holy Grail of skiing and snowboarding," he said.
Having grown up in Jackson, Wyo., the 26-year-old Olympic halfpipe hopeful knows a little about steep and deep. He wasn't in Jackson anymore. He gazed down a slope of pure powder so steep he could see the bottom but nothing in between. From the new bindings bolted to the new snowboard he had never ridden, this was indeed unfamiliar footing.
"Are you ready?" he was asked.
"Yup," he impulsively replied before sanity returned. "No."
Kingwill, a happy-go-lucky snowboarder whose wide open style lends itself to riding too fast, isn't afraid to admit he was scared.
If only he'd had time for a few practice runs, just a taste to dial himself into the rugged terrain he was facing for the first time in his life. But his tight schedule left no time. He'd ridden the backcountry all over the world but nothing like the Chugach range, where the faces are 2,500 feet long and "it's all you riding top to bottom."
And one more thing. The snow tends to slough off, especially when something foreign like a snowboard is introduced. If riders fail to pick a line and stay with it, they're liable to turn into a freight train of snow barreling down behind them.
Kingwill knows all of this, yet there he is. He can't climb back into the helicopter. There might not be another sunny day on this fickle peak. The show must go on. This is legendary ski and snowboard filmmaker Warren Miller's latest.
"I found God at the top of the mountain. That's basically what happened," Kingwill said. "I tried praying, 'Let me be safe and make it to the bottom.' "
With that petition he was off, carving beautiful sweeping turns with his snowboard on the nearly vertical blanket of white. Twenty-five hundred feet. All "Kinger" going top to bottom ? head over heals, end over end. The slough caught him.
A wrong turn put him into the path of a rumbling funnel of snow formed in a chute over his shoulder.
"It's like being churned in a wave," he said. "I didn't get buried, but it was up, down, up, down, up down for a long way, 500 feet probably."
After coming to rest in a pile of snow, Kingwill heard a voice from above.
"Welcome to the big mountains," boomed the heli-guide.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks for asking," Kingwill wanted to shout. But that's hard to do with a mouth full of snow.
Of course, none of that shows up in Miller's "Cold Fusion," which plays Saturday at Park City High School at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. (For other Utah showings see www.warrenmiller.com.
"They make it look like I don't get taken out but I get worked," Kingwill said. Nevertheless, his week in Alaska was an "awesome experience."
Most of the movie's snowboard scenes, he said, were shot on that first day. The weather changed, leaving Kingwill to think that to get the good days he did, "Warren Miller has a deal with the devil."
E-mail: romboy@desnews.com