At last the long-awaited book from the world's best-known adventure ski writer. White Planet marries inimitably edgy style with subjective passion and objective commentary to create a truly literary treatment of an ever-changing sport.

Writer, adventurer, and ski hound Leslie Anthony has spent his life on two planks, racing down hills, searching for the next perfect ride. His real baptism, however, began in the early nineties when Alaska emerged as the ski world’s Next Big Thing. Steep faces and vast tracks of deep powder snow were captured on film and beamed around the world, just as resort-based skiing was following snowboarding into terrain parks and halfpipes. The result was a freeskiing revolution.

In White Planet, Anthony traces an arc through much of skiing’s global diaspora over the past thirty years, observing its metamorphoses, its ever-new destinations, and the forces that continue to push the sport in more extreme directions. He’s skied volcanoes in Mexico and vertical faces in Alaska, he’s raced historic telemark courses in Italy, and he’s swum through powder in Japan and avalanches in India, always chasing a new experience, a fresh line, and a bluebird day of skiing with someone who shares the passion.

Says Anthony about White Planet: "This is about the real world of skiing—not the rarefied strata of World Cup racing and competition that is mostly represented to the public. Whether resort-based or backcountry, real skiing takes place on the high mountains, in steep couloirs, on massive faces, and deep in forests. It is lodged in the heart and mind and soul of those who do it. It is typically out of sight for the non-skiing public; but White Planet looks deep inside that world."

Both for the hardcore skiers examined and those who want to live vicariously through them, White Planet offers a wild ride. Along the way, Anthony introduces many of the daredevils who have succeeded—and sometimes failed—at spectacular feats, the visionaries who have changed the whole concept of boots and boards and what can be done on them, and the forces that are bringing the sport to nontraditional markets such as China, Bulgaria, and India.

From the sadistic to the sublime, White Planet is an insightful, humorous, rock ’n’ roll adventure that paints a picture of modern global ski culture.