Most everyone who’s snapped on a pair of skis has, at one point or another, found themselves staring down some steep, snow-laden hill, wondering how the hell they’re going to get down it. Now, imagine being at the top of that same hill, only you don’t have a pair of skis, you only have one. For Vasu Sojitra, that’s just the start of a great day in the mountains.
At 9 months old, Sojitra was diagnosed with septicemia, a blood disease that resulted in the amputation of his right leg — a setback that, if anything, has propelled him forward.
Twenty-three years later, “Out on a Limb,” the production starring Sojitra by T-Bar Films, has premiered at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and is making its way around the country (and world) as a selection in the Winter Wildlands Alliance’s Backcountry Film Festival. The festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, focuses on raising funds in local communities to promote avalanche safety and awareness, and human-powered recreation and conservation. With the inclusion of Sojitra’s film, they’ve essentially added an awareness on the emerging advances in adaptive sports in this year’s lineup.
For Sojitra, being an adaptive athlete is more art than science.
“First time I went [skiing], it pretty much sucked, just ’cause I was in a ski school, a class, and they didn’t really know how to teach me,” Sojitra says. “I’m a visual, auditory, kind of aesthetic learner … so having that kind of mindset really helped out with learning how to basically ski on my own. I would just see other people’s body movements and try and see how I could adapt that to my own body, just because it’s a little different.”
Sojitra credits his brother with pushing him to stick with skiing.
“My brother was really in to snowboarding and I just wanted to hang out with my brother, just ’cause we are good friends…[and] ’cause he wouldn’t look down on me at all,” he says. “So it was great to have him there to just push me through, because he would go down black diamonds I was probably not good enough to go down, and I’d follow him down and be like, ‘Oh, this is a terrible idea, horrible idea.’ Still made it down in one piece, hating life, of course.”
In the beginning, adapting his body to the mountain and skis was very much a process of trial and error, a process not without its hits and near misses.
“I made a couple other friends that were into — well, started to get into — backcountry skiing, so I started to figure out how I could get involved in that,” he says. “I just tried to research a couple things, found one idea using Plexiglas kind of material to make snowshoes — that didn’t work so well on the first try.”
Early attempts broke, left him on so little surface area that he sank into the snow, got so wet they stopped sticking to his outriggers. He continued to search for gear modifications that would keep him moving in the backcountry until a solution presented itself.
“We found these little snowshoe extenders from MSR, and we were like, ‘Oh, we could totally tinker a bit and make it fit on the bottom of the outrigger,’” he says. “So with that I could ski in deeper powder without postholing all the way through to my shoulder, basically.”
The idea to shoot a film first came to Sojitra when a roommate brought up the Columbia Sportswear Ski Bum Scholarship during the 2013- 14 ski season. The winner would be awarded with a three-month, all expenses covered ski vacation to Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia.
“We got second place and got a decent amount of publicity from that, so we decided, ‘Well, we might as well make another one then,’” he says. “By then, Columbia had already talked to us, talked to me at least, and I pitched them the idea of making this film and they helped us out with gear, and money, and funding it in general and backing us up. It just blew up from there. It was kind of a small, snowball affect of awesome, for me at least.”
Filming in the Chic-Choc Mountains in Canada, the short, 90-second entry turned into the nearly seven-minute film now being showcased in the Backcountry Film Festival.
“They reached out before we even made the film, which was really cool,” Sojitra says. “So I didn’t really expect any of this to happen beforehand. Even being a part of Winter Wildlands, that’s pretty sweet. … I definitely feel accomplished.”
The film not only got Sojitra’s foot in the door of the ski industry, but a crutch in the door of adaptive sports advocacy. In addition to now being an ambassador for DPS Skis, Darn Tough Socks and Health Warrior, in September 2014, Sojitra became the first adaptive athlete on crutches to ascend and descend the Grand Teton in Wyoming.
Indecision had plagued him after graduating college, Sojitra says, and “Out on a Limb” gave him new direction when he realized the impact the film had on another adaptive athletes.
“I’ve noticed it from all of the adaptive organizations that have contacted me, saying, ‘Hey, we’d love to show this film to our volunteers and participants, and to be a great motivator to get them out there,’” Sojitra says. “People are like, ‘Hey, I want to get in the backcountry. I ski on one leg just like you, and I want to see how you made your rig.’ And I share that idea out there with everyone. So [the film] definitely helped build a little stronger community based around adaptive sports.”
The 10th annual Backcountry Film Festival, which will take place at Neptune Mountaineering on Feb. 5, will not only showcase Sojitra’s story, but also eight other films that possess the same spirit that makes “Out on a Limb” such an empowering visual narrative.
“[The films] are 100 percent human-powered, take place in the wintertime, hopefully tell a story about the entertaining and educational,” says Shelley Pursell, the events and outreach coordinator for the Winter Wildlands Alliance.
Colorado has seven network groups associated with the WWA, including the Colorado Mountain Club and the Crested Butte Nordic Council. This year, the Colorado Mountain Club will host the Boulder screening.
The festival, produced by Boisebased nonprofit Winter Wildlands Alliance and hosted by local grassroots organizations, was created to raise funds in local communities to “support likeminded, human-powered recreation and conservation efforts,” according to the Winter Wildlands Alliance website. Annually, the festival raises more than $110,000 for hosting organizations and attracts more than 20,000 festival-goers.
“After 10 years, we’re in 100 different cities worldwide,” Pursell says. “The most important thing that it does for us is it allows us to give our grassroots members an opportunity to fundraise within their communities. For Winter Wildlands, and I think all of our groups, this is our number one awareness for backcountry travel and who we are and what we do.”
Since its formation in 2000, the Winter Wildlands Alliance has been working to “ensure public land management recognizes the needs and desires of backcountry skiers, snowboarders, snowshoers, Nordic skiers and other winter enthusiasts.”
Purcell says the festival’s come a long way since its humble beginnings in Idaho. In 2013, the Alliance secured a historic Federal Court Ruling that required the U.S. Forest Service to manage snowmobiles in the same manner that all other off-road vehicles on national forest lands are regulated.
“[The festival] raises awareness of the ability of us to raise money and channel it toward organizations that are lobbying politically for people-powered sports in the backcountry and making sure that there are voices heard, as well as the other people who are trying to make use of National Forest lands for motorized sports, particularly snowmobiling,” says Rick Casey, a Colorado Mountain Club council member and director of basic rock climbing for the Boulder branch of the club.
The nine films featured this year come from both professional and grassroots creators.
Sojitra now works in Bozeman, Mont., as the assistant director for the Bridger Bowl Ski Program for Eagle Mount, a non-profit that provides recreational opportunities for people with disabilities and young people living with cancer. He continues to challenge not only himself, but also other adaptive athletes confronted with the same obstacles.
“I know I’m not disabled, I can do everything on my own,” he says. “There are other athletes just like myself that would not consider themselves disabled, probably just a little different of a challenge. My family, my friends, they don’t think I’m disabled at all. I do it all myself. I know that everyone has challenges, no matter what. Mine is physical, someone might have emotional, someone might have both or cognitive [challenges]…I know there’s a ton of people out there who have overcome their challenges, so that’s what I take out of it at least.”
The 2015 Backcountry Film festival takes place at Neptune Mountaineering, 633 S. Broadway, Boulder, on Feb. 5. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the screening starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for members and $12 for nonmembers and are available at www.cmc.org.
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