Meet Mallory Duncan, One of Skiing's Foremost Creatives

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

The Music Within the Mountain

It takes confidence to begin your ski film in a barbershop. After gaining such wide acclaim from his debut film, The Blackcountry Journal, Mallory Duncan felt he’d earned it. “I came into this with zero formal training,” the 33-year-old athlete and filmmaker said. “I didn’t go to film school. I don’t know almost anything about shooting a camera.” But what Duncan possesses is a singular vision, one that produced the most compelling ski movies in years. Once he saw it cometo life, Duncan knew he had to keep pushing. 

Drawing parallels between jazz music and backcountry skiing in The Blackcountry Journal, Duncan wanted to extend the metaphor. His next film, LINES, connects performance in the mountains to writing and rapping 16 bars. “Rap is an art of performance, as much as it is of writing,” Mallory Duncan says. “It takes an enormous amount of preparation before a rapper gets on stage ready to recite a verse. Backcountry skiing is the same way.”

Duncan’s attitude toward ski filmmaking is distinct. In the hyper-saturated world of 15-second clips and low-effort content that swirls around the internet, Duncan posts beautiful imagery infrequently, instead opting for concise, artistic, thoughtful cinematic releases. In his mind, the ski films that begin with a skier atop a big face ready to drop miss the majority of the story. There is so much expertise that comes with selecting a line, planning a weather window, seeking the right snow, and assessing safety. It’s like writing a verse—you have to iterate over and over until it’s perfect. Only then can you get on stage to perform. 

In LINES,  Duncan combines these elements of backcountry travel and verse writing while incorporating elements of barber-shop culture into an eight-minute film that reflects on different modes of human expression, anticipation, and catharsis. Duncan cuts between shots of him pushing deep into the backcountry—ruminating on his choices on the skin track and beneath his tent—with rapper Chima the Stubborn preparing to take the stage. The tension feels heightened compared to the more pondering Blackcountry Journal, with emotions bubbling to a fantastic climax.

From an outsider’s perspective, Duncan burst onto the scene around the beginning of the pandemic. In reality, he has spent the last nine years in Bend, Oregon, turning the Cascade volcanoes into a playground with his fast and fluid approach to backcountry skiing. In his videos, he tiptoes up vertiginous couloirs and carves soaring, swooping turns down enormous backcountry faces. After building a following by sharing footage online, he released The Blackcountry Journal in 2023. The film channeled his lifelong love of music and poetry into his skiing.

It also reflected such a different take on the ski movie form that Duncan wasn’t even sure if The Blackcountry Journal had an audience. “It didn’t really have banger clips,” he said. “We made it for people who weren’t necessarily even into ski movies.” Unsure of its future, Duncan didn’t intend to submit it to festivals, but after receiving overwhelming praise and support from friends and strangers alike, he submitted it to the Banff Film Festival. “It felt like a waste of time and money; Banff is for people who have been making films forever,” Duncan said. But to his shock, The Blackcountry Journal took home Best Film in the snowsports category.

The child of two skiers, Duncan’s parents drove him from his home in the East Bay city of Hayward to Alpine Meadows every single weekend, the car filled with the notes of Otis Redding and Nina Simone. His intensity shone from a young age—Duncan was certain he’d grow up to be an exceptional ski racer, destined to win Olympic Gold. He joined the Sugar Bowl Academy for high school, on a scholarship from the National Brotherhood of Skiing, and began to take racing seriously. But Duncan was plagued by inconsistency. He’d get a great result one run and DNF the next, pushing himself to the limit. He burnt out on ski racing and decided to step away from the sport in college.

Once he graduated from the University of Vermont, Duncan moved back to the East Bay, seeking balance between his love of the outdoors and his appreciation for the culture of the city. He enjoyed the parties and the music, but kept feeling drawn to the mountains. In 2016, he took a trip down to Chile—he’d raced at Portillo in high school but wanted to explore the country beyond skiing. A buddy told him to go to Pucón, and he ended up hiring a guide to climb the volcano. That winter, Duncan found himself back on snow, stepping in clunky frame bindings on his first ever ski tour on Broken Top near Mount Bachelor. He was hooked on the freedom and scale of the big mountains and pursued a career as a brand rep and an athlete in Bend.

As his appreciation for the backcountry grew deeper, he began to find connections between the liberty of open volcanic terrain and the improvisational qualities of music and poetry. Duncan never knew a life without music and lyricism. He’s written poetry since he was a child and grew up surrounded by old soul and jazz records. Duncan picked up the saxophone in third grade and has been playing ever since. Recently, he’s begun to connect the flow and improvisation in jazz and hip hop with movement in the mountains, finding rhythm and lyricism in drawing lines in fresh snow. This spark of clarity evolved into the concept for his first ski film. 

The second he arrived in Banff to attend the festival, the concept for Duncan’s next film, LINES, crystallized. Although he’s been coy about giving too much away, Duncan knew he wanted to touch next on the lyricism in rap. While filming for LINES, Duncan spent ten days in the Eastern Sierra backcountry seeking big powder-filled faces above 13,000 feet. Booting up complex, exposed lines, Duncan felt the nerves of a performer. When the cameras started rolling, he momentarily froze.

Duncan’s mind filled with expectations—the heights of The Blackcountry Journal, the standards to which he held himself, the ideas his audience had of him. “LINES unintentionally discusses the insecurities we all deal with as writers, athletes, and humans,” Duncan said. In a matter of seconds, he felt all of the pressure of his ski racing career building once again. But when he imagined himself on stage, all of the preparation and work he’d put into this line, this shoot, returned. Mallory Duncan took a deep breath and dropped in.

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

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