The French-speaking Valais region of southwestern Switzerland houses some of the country`s most magnificent skiing & snowboarding destinations.

Verbier is one of the Swiss Alps` — and the world`s — premier snowsports locales. Snow totals & snow quality are consistently some of Europe`s best, while the terrain interconnected with other resorts in the famous Four Valleys ski arena offer a lifetime of steep, snow-sure descents.

Piste sliders will never be bored in the 4-Valley`s, but off-pisters will find it especially enticing. Not sure? The out-of-bounds terrain is so epic at Verbier that the most coveted extreme skiing & snowboarding event of the Freeride World Tour is staged every year from atop the imposing Bec des Rosses (3223m/10,527ft).

ShredStory

Snow wasn`t great at home in Chamonix, so we drove the mountain pass via Martigny into Verbier for an early-season pow day. The off-piste terrain still needed more coverage too and on-piste…well..the pistes are usually only used for accessing out-of-bounds areas, so we decided that instead of ruining our equipment on rocky off-piste runs or boring ourselves on-piste, we`d do the next best thing: jib a centuries-old snow-covered alpine farm house.

My hangover “helped” me to forget the 2-way radios which would`ve made synching our efforts a lot easier, but we nailed it on the first-and-only-try. To me, the image turned out like magic. Here`s Tim Bowden mid-way through a stylie front-side 180° roof-drop while gondola passengers descending in the background get a look at the best thing that happened at Verbier that day.

Later that week I contacted Verbier tourism to see if they`d like to buy rights to the image because this shot seemed like a winner to me. They told me, “We really like the photo but do not think it is a good idea to market our resort by jumping off roofs.” 

I replied, “Oops, ok, sorry.” I wasn`t sorry one bit.

Check out Alpine Objectives Instagram for more shredhsots that piss-off tourism bureaus, @powpusherman