All photos courtesy of Red Bull

When I got invited to cover Red Bull Infinite Lines, back in January, I had my fingers crossed that we'd have enough snow to do it! 2023 it was held in Avoriaz, but this year it moved to La Rosiere, which many locals were happy to tell me is 'the snowiest town in France'. Turns out there was enough snow, but wind and visibility combined to make sure that the comp never happened. All that time waiting gave me time to get to know some of the eclectic mix of skiers invited to event, people like Karl Fostvedt...

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Hi Karl, what made you want to come to Infinite Lines?

I’ve always been inspired by events like K2 Back 9, Red Bull Cold Rush, Linecatcher and stuff that really just celebrates the world of freeriding and integrating tricks in. This contest is a little more freestyle, but it just seems like such a cool setup. The name says it all, Infinite Lines! One of my favourite things is going in the park and finding new lines and hitting side transitions, so an event called Infinite Lines just sounded so fun.

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You won Kings & Queens of Corbet’s a couple of times?

Yeah, two wins there and one 2nd place. For the last seven years that’s basically been the only event that works for me. Looking at snowboarding, with Natural Selection, that’s where I really hope that ski contests will go. It’s really hard to watch such a sick event, that’s so perfectly tailored to my skillset, but not being able to do it. I’ve got faith that skiing will keep doing more of these events [Infinite Lines] and I think that the more big athletes come out and help promote these events, the more events we’ll see.

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I guess Infinite Lines is a step towards a skiing Natural Selection?

Yeah, exactly. Taking a natural environment and enhancing it. Then bringing a bunch of the world’s best skiers and snowboarders, just letting them loose. What a good formula. The camaraderie that you get at these events is incredible. There’s so much companionship and there are skiers that you’ve never met, but you’re best friends with by the end of the contest. I also wanted to come out here, meet some of the Euro slayers and get to shred around with them. Europe’s just so fun for skiing, you get so much vert and some of the mountains you’re skiing North-facing powder at the top and in March be riding slush at the bottom. So much to explore and you’re on an adventure every time you’re skiing out here.

One of the coolest things about skiing was just being able to explore, get out and ride new mountains, new terrain, new gullys, new cliffs and there’s just so much terrain and so little time in one life to ski it all!

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You’ve kind of had a fairly interesting ski-career, including plenty of street too..

Yeah, came from park, then street and then just went to pow.

Street was nice too, because you still had that adventure aspect of it. You’re just on the hunt for features. Skiing is a goldrush, it’s a treasure hunt! Every day you go out, you’re looking for those insane natural or urban features and when you find them and you make the art of skiing on them, it’s just the best feeling ever.

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You can kind of see that in the contests that you do; like Kings and Queens, Infinite Lines, is that why you do them?

Absolutely. There’s so many genres of skiing and I don’t want to get bottled up in one. Any event that pops up, that feels like it’d play to my style of just tricking, buttering, bouncing and finding new lines, that’s what I want to do.

How could you not want to ride this epic course? It was so fun today, even in the wind.

When the course shut today I went out with Thibault [Magnin], Simba [Simon Bartik] and a couple of locals. We were like; ‘This area’s not good so let’s go find the good snow’. When it’s windy like that, you know that the snow’s blowing somewhere. It’s a bummer that the event got postponed, but when you can go out and ride with new friends and check out new terrain, it was a win for everybody.

We got like seven or eight laps in, it’s so fun! I got to hit a couple of the jumps. I still don’t have an idea for a full run and how to trick each feature, so tonight I’ll go through, map out each feature and try to think of what trick I can do on each one and do the T to B Full Pull we call it!

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You’re known more as a film-skier and you now have your own production company, Native Earth Productions, with the Brap Ski series. How did that come about?

I really wanted to do Brap ski, because the place that I live has so much good terrain, but it’s so far from the highway, so you need a sled to get out and access it. Before I knew it, I’d fallen in love with going out on these adventures, those treasure hunts on the snowmobile. I realised that all we’re doing is just braping to ski and when we were trying to come up with a movie name, we just thought we’d keep it simple and call it Brap.

We’re working on the fourth Brap movie now, it’s been a lot of work getting it off the ground and figuring out how to produce the films, get them funded and corale all of the athletes in. It’s been a serious process and while that’s been going on, I’ve been building a house, so it’s been the craziest, most hectic three years of my life. Trying to start the company and build this house in the woods in the middle of nowhere. You have to drive like two hours to get to the hardware store or lumberyard. All this is for skiing and to be able to go on treasure hunts out of the back yard. It’s all finally come to fruition; we’ve figured out the production company, its niche and what we want to create, also the house, so we’ve got somewhere for the crew to hang out, store their sleds and dry their gear. Then we can just get back at it right out the back yard.

https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/1079452/Brap-Ski-3-

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When were you last in an MSP movie?

I was actually in their project last year, they did a trip out to Idaho, to some of our coolest mountains out there. I still love filming with MSP and I want to keep filming with them a little bit each year.

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You also used to film with Poorboyz?

Yeah! Poorboyz was all I wanted to do as a kid. Happy Days, Propaganda, Ready, Fire Aim just got me so hooked and I just made it my goal to film with Poorboyz.

I was so hungry, they needed athletes I told them I’d just ski anywhere, so they sent me to Detroit in my 2ndyear.

It’s been so cool, the places that skiing’s taken me: Detroit to the Alps to Alaska to the Southern Utah Desert. That’s what I love about skiing, it’s a never-ending adventure and a never-ending treasure hunt to find the perfect style of terrain, where you can just create those feelings of weightlessness, you know! Step-ups, pillow lines there’s just so many places that skis will take you.

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You’ve kind of answered this, but what would you choose between big mountain and street skiing?

Big mountain 100%, but I still have so much love for the streets. Eventually I want to do a two year project; year one I can really focus on backcountry and big mountain, then if I feel like we’re sitting on something really good, then risk it in the streets. Right now I’m so focused on big mountain/backcountry, that I don’t want to risk injury in the street.

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So house and production company are done, this year you got a pro model ski from K2, the Reckoner KF?!

This is year five, riding with K2 and I haven’t had a pro model since ON3P with the Kartel Series, which was one of their all-time best-selling skis. Now, to finally have the opportunity to do it with K2 is so cool. When I was 13 years old, the first pair of brand-new skis I had were some K2s [Extreme] and I put them on the wall and just dreamed of riding for K2 one day.

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How does it ski?

You know it’s funny because the pro model started as a project to make a big mountain charger ski and it ended up being almost the complete opposite of that. We went through dozens of different prototypes, but we ended up actually going from making a super stiff ski, to making a super soft one. We were trying out some old Hellbent flex patterns, then we took the Hellbent core and wrapped it in carbon fibre. Then we thinned the core down a bit, so we’ve got this crazy lightweight ski that’s kind of got a Hellbent flex. It’s 114 underfoot, so it’s a skinny Hellbent, but also with more mellow tips that are designed to hold butters for longer.

Hellbent inspiration for sure, but a totally different ski. Super lightweight and it ended up being the softest, most flexy/butter/bounce ski. The reason I settled on this ski, is because we got a prototype and I started landing switch on it in powder. It gave me like a cheat code to land switch in pow. It just made it so easy. That’s always been my biggest inspiration, like from Idea: Eric Pollard, Pep Fujas, Andy Mahre and those boys. Just wanting to continue that genre of skiing. That’s kind of where my heart’s at, because they’re so good at finding the sickest features, doing switch tricks, unexpected tricks and slow styly tricks!

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Do you think that your skis will help you even more at an event like Infinite Lines?

I think so yeah. For buttering around and landing switch, especially in powder. I’m hoping for maximum powder! Fingers crossed the wind f*cks off!

Hopefully! (it did, but then we couldn't see anything, so Red Bull Infinite Lines 2024 was cancelled)

Ok, so what ambitions do you have left in skiing?

I’d say that right now, what I want to achieve is; making a movie that Eric Pollard, Andy Mahre and Pep Fujas watch and at the end of it, they have a feeling like: ‘Damn, that was the sickest movie I’ve seen in a while!’

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I’ve seen you skiing a lot with the ‘Sit-Ski Boss’, Trevor Kennison. What’s it like skiing with him?

It’s so crazy! Every skier I know is so crazy but calculated in their own way. Trevor is the epitome of that. He’s just figured out his insane way of taking the sit-ski and doing the most unbelievable stunts and doing it with style and grace. Coming in with such a good attitude and so much stoke. He’s one of those buddies that you meet up with and you’re just barking with and yewwwping. He’s such a stoker and it’s so cool that someone like him, that’s had such a gnarly injury, can come back and be one of the most frothing skiers on the planet.

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Just to finish up, I was told by Ethan Stone to ask you about Cleaning and Offering? I don’t even know what that is.

Cleaning and offering is -more or less- the etiquette in filming/shooting and just helping one and other. Being a team sport and an example of cleaning would be; you’re hiking up to hit a booter and you see that it’s a little bit rutted out, maybe you have to go a little bit out of the way to clean it up, but you go off, clean the ruts up for your buddy and clean it up.

Then offering is just f*cking sending her!