LIVIGNO, Italy — Normally, like most people, the holidays are the busiest time of year for United States free skier Alex Hall. From Thanksgiving to New Years, he’s booked. Sometimes he’s competing.
Most of the time? He’s filming. Whether it’s riding rails in public places or finding the gnarliest, steepest staircase to jump over, Hall’s passion has become making ski videos.
Ski videos, consumed on YouTube or social media by the general public, have become more than passion projects for athletes in their free time. They are a commercial vehicle – branding opportunities for a sport that receives the spotlight for two weeks and then largely disappears for the next 306.
To end 2025, though, Hall, 27, took the year off. Not because he wanted to.
“Honestly, it just didn’t line up with the schedule,” Hall said before competing at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.
Hall had skipped the last five Christmases and had some obligations with his girlfriend’s family this time. The lack of snow in the United States made it easier, but he was still fiending for content creation. And as he started his Olympic training at the slopestyle and big air course in Livigno, Italy, his friends back home were filming.
‘It’s weird having FOMO at the Olympics, but I can’t lie,’ he said, ‘I have a little bit of FOMO.”
Hall knew once he was finished at the Olympics, which included a silver medal in the slopestyle event, he would have plenty of time to film.
Hall prefers urban-style filming. Rather than waste time on TikTok or YouTube, he spends his hours after dinner scouring the next city on his path he can exploit. He researches cities via Google Earth, which he uses to scout handrails and staircases.
‘When I’m on a trip, that’s my guilty pleasure,’ he said.
Hall and Hunter Hess have a YouTube channel called ‘MAGMA’ that chronicles their careers from competition to cityscape. Their friend, Owen Dahlberg, films. Whoever else wants to join can participate in the videos. The channel is home to 70 videos and nearly 25,000 subscribers.
During the season, they drive from event to event and stop along the way for content purposes.
‘When you do the competing and the filming, you have to make sure you balance both,” Hall said, ‘which is really tough to do.”
What’s special for them is that they love the work, whether it’s training for 10 hours per day on the mountain or driving around a municipality looking for rails to jump down.
‘We’re consumed by it,’ he said. ‘We’re super lucky. I always count my blessings of how lucky we are. That being said, as happy and as fortunate as we are, I think a lot of us work incredibly hard.’
In October, manufacturing brand Armada released a full-length film in front of a sold-out crowd at a warehouse in Salt Lake City. During the ‘Ornada” premiere, fans cheered like they were watching a basketball game as skiers found their lines in the powder or nailed tricks in urban spaces, according to Powder Magazine.
Getting to build and find the rails is the best part, said USA free skier Marin Hamill.
‘I think filming street is so fun because it’s so different than a contest,’ she said.
Ski movies – at least ones made by skiers for skiers – have been popular for three decades. Films such as the ‘Blizzard of Aahhh’s” (1988) and ‘Aspen Extreme” (1993) are solidified in their place within the culture.
2022 free ski Olympian and silver-medalist Colby Stevenson saw filming in the backcountry and riding bigger mountains as a natural progression from competing.
‘It’s really gratifying to get out where there’s nobody else and basically turn a whole mountain range into a playground,” Stevenson said. ‘I can’t tell you the freedom you feel out there on a snowmobile when you’re looking at a couple peaks in the distance and you’re just with your buddies like ‘All right!’ and going through the trees. It’s completely out of this world. You feel like you’re on a spaceship flying around. It’s insane.’
There are the obvious pitfalls of social media to consider, Stevenson said, because the image presented is inherently skewed from reality.
‘For people who don’t get to travel as much and experience these things – obviously you want to get out there and experience that stuff – it’s great for that as well,’ Stevenson said, ‘because we’re showing the beauty of the world and how awesome it is we have this planet as a playground.”
It is an ideal way to discover what his friends in the skiing community are up to, and he often finds himself motivated by his friends’ videos.
The way U.S. men’s halfpipe skier Alex Ferreira became involved, he said, was by “getting more serious with our fun, basically.’
And so the character ‘Hotdog Hans’ was born. Anyone familiar with NBA star Kyrie Irving’s ‘Uncle Drew’ bit will instantly understand the similarities. ‘Hotdog Hans’ comes out when Ferreira dresses up like an old man and messes with other slope-goers, pulling pranks on them or making them worry about his age before executing some ridiculous trick.
Hotdog Hans has 322,000 Instagram followers and 238,000 subscribers on YouTube. The sixth official Hotdog Hans video, released a month ago, has already racked up 254,000 YouTube views. Ferreira’s own Instagram checks in at 78,100 followers.
What started as a clickbait mechanism instantly matured into a branding opportunity for Ferreira and his team. Within 15 minutes, Ferreira said, he realized the power of the character. Ferreira never fancied himself an actor, yet there he was, method acting.
‘We were having a lot of fun and we realized after the first one, we were just bringing a lot of joy to people,’ Ferreira told USA TODAY Sports. ‘It wasn’t just the average skier that loved it, it was a young kid, a young adult, a parent, and a grandparent. The four quadrants were all hit and everyone loved it.’
Those who take on backcountry skiing shoots are warriors for the manual labor involved, Ferreira said.
Why free skiers excel in content creation isn’t much of mystery to figure out. They are responsible for formulating tricks and then must be daring enough to execute them.
‘Honestly, I would say if you are creative or if you have some sort of ambition, put your kid in skiing because the options are limitless,’ Ferreira said.
The only difference between his and Hall’s ventures, Ferreira said, is the tone.
‘Their mind keeps wandering and wandering and wandering of things that they could potentially do, and they see it in their head and then they go and want to try it on snow, and I’m the same way, just in a bit more of a humorous aspect,’ Ferreira explained. ‘I hear a joke or I see a scene in my head and I think, ‘All right, well, maybe we could pull this off and get some laughs out of it.”