After 10 days of filming on wind-crusted snow and ice in Alaska, Reggie Crist, his brother Zach, fellow U.S. Ski Team alum Daron Rahlves, and Jamie Pierre vowed to return for redemption. In April they found epic powder on top of the same treacherous layer they'd left a month earlier. It made for extremely high avalanche danger, unlike Reggie Crist has seen in nine seasons in the Chugach. He recalls the harriest day of filming:

"We were feeling really confident, so we moved to a remote zone. Zach went first and aired off a cornice, landing hard. The whole thing ripped out under him, and he had a thousand-foot tumble. Then Daron took two turns, and the whole thing ripped out under him. He was on top of the slab, trying to traverse off. He managed to work his way off and avoid a bunch of rocks below.

"I was next. Somehow I didn't pull myself off the line; I totally expected it to rip out, but I had an escape route where there were two spines; I was going to work one until it ripped out and then jump over to the other. I dropped in on the first turn and got a huge face shot. I jumped to the second spine, and that caused it to rip out. I took a pretty major fall and narrowly avoided a big crack in the ice.

"It's easy when you're caught up in the moment and the cameras are rolling and you're staring down at 50 degrees of perfect powder. You see where you want to go and somehow you find a way to justify it." Clearly, when redemption's on the line, it'll take more than three "small slab avalanches" to keep these guys from it.