Affect at altitude: embodied practices and digital technology in backcountry skiing and snowboarding

This thesis explores the lifestyle sport subculture of backcountry skiing and snowboarding, or backcountry touring. The sport sees participants use specialised equipment to venture into mountain areas that are unsupported by human infrastructure in pursuit of secluded or challenging slopes to climb and then ride down. Over the course of the last 10 to 15 years backcountry touring has experienced rapid growth in attention and participation. As a result a number of new influences have altered the way that participants engage with their practice and understand their experiences. The use of digital technologies have become significant elements of the embodied experiences of tourers in the backcountry. Similarly, the proliferation of digital media practices has offered new ways of representing and understanding the backcountry and its corporality. With these depictions of touring reaching wider audiences than ever before, commercial interest in the backcountry market has risen with ramifications for the tourers who participate in different aspects of the industry. These additions to the affective atmosphere of the field constitute a raft of challenges to sanctity of established backcountry principles that concern ‘authentic’ and safe practice. Tourers experience and respond to these struggles in nuanced ways: from expressing concerns about how depictions of the backcountry can influence the practice of others, to adopting and adapting technology that augments their observance of the conventional perspectives of touring. This thesis uses a synthesis of affect theory and the concepts of Bourdieu in order to explore and animate these intersections of human bodies, objects and the non-material. This theoretical position has informed the project design and data collection process that included fieldwork, digital ethnography and 22 semi-structured with a broad range of the relatively homogenous touring community.