Philippe Clairoux

Canada | Active: 2015-2020 documented ski record | Known for: ALIVE, PARTIMEVERYTHING, Gapers Gone Wild projects | Discipline: street skiing, slopestyle and crew filmmaking

Whistler Under Intersection Lights

At Whistler-Blackcomb in British Columbia during spring 2018, Philippe Clairoux appeared in Gapers Gone Wild’s Intersection film, where festival noise, park snow and a dense local crew replaced the isolated logic of a judged run. The project, Backy to the Future, entered the Intersection film contest during the World Ski & Snowboard Festival and placed Clairoux beside Essex Prescott, Jeremy Acland, Garrett Knochenmus, Connor Browne, Jessy Desjardins and a long list of Whistler skiers.

That setting introduces the strongest version of his public ski identity. Clairoux was not building a record around medals or televised finals. His path moved through edits, city features, road trips and crews that treated filming as part of skiing itself. The film format gave room for rails, short run-ins, park laps, crashes, travel and the informal energy that disappears from a conventional results sheet.

Mammoth Starts Before the Film Years

Clairoux’s official competition archive sits in slopestyle. His FIS profile lists him as a Canadian skier born in 1997, with a status now marked not active. His early Nor-Am appearances included a 78th-place slopestyle result at Mammoth Mountain in 2015, followed by 23rd at Buttermilk Mountain in Colorado and 36th at Canada Olympic Park in 2016.

Those results do not form the centre of his biography, but they matter because they show the competitive base beneath the film work. Slopestyle demands more than one clean trick: a skier needs speed across a full course, stable jump takeoffs, controlled grabs, rail precision, switch skiing and reliable landings. Clairoux’s visible career later moved away from formal starts, yet those Nor-Am entries explain why his projects could shift between resort terrain, urban spots and long road missions without being limited to one type of skiing.

ALIVE Took a Year to Finish

ALIVE, released in 2016, is the clearest individual marker in Clairoux’s archive. The short film was presented as his one-year project, produced by Clairoux, edited by Jessy Desjardins and filmed primarily by Guillaume Paquette-Jetten. Rather than functioning as a simple end-of-season highlight reel, the project gave him a named release with a production team and a clear personal frame.

The title also shows how Quebec skiers used independent media at the time. A dedicated part could bring together accumulated clips from different sessions and make the skier’s choices visible through editing, pacing and music. Clairoux’s involvement as producer matters as much as his skiing. It suggests an athlete participating in the construction of the film, not merely delivering footage to an outside company.

Quebec to Oregon in an Electric Vehicle

In 2018, Clairoux and Jessy Desjardins released PARTIMEVERYTHING; The Grand Traverse. The project followed the pair on an electric-vehicle road trip across the United States, searching for places to ski in cities and on mountains. Its premise was deliberately broad: the trip was not confined to a resort, a single snowpark or one conventional contest circuit.

That route put travel at the centre of the skiing. A road mission requires a different rhythm from a season based at one lift. Conditions can decide the daily plan, city terrain can replace a park, and a feature may only work after a crew has found access, built snow and checked speed. The Grand Traverse placed Clairoux in that freer format, where street skiing, mountain laps and the practical work of reaching a spot are part of the same story.

Sea to Sky After the Long Drive

Later in 2018, PARTIMEVERYTHING; Sea to Sky followed Clairoux and Desjardins in British Columbia after the United States trip. The episode combined skiing with a wider coastal journey that included surfing, a useful sign of how the crew treated the season as travel culture rather than a narrowly managed training programme. British Columbia gave them access to deep Coast Mountain snow, city infrastructure and the Whistler network that had already shaped several connected projects.

For Clairoux, the recurring geography matters. Quebec supplied the home-side street context, Oregon represented the road-trip expansion, and Whistler offered a larger crew environment. The films do not support claims of a single signature discipline. They support a more accurate reading: a skier comfortable moving between slopestyle experience, street sessions and travel-based video work.

NOSTALGIE Linked Quebec and Copenhagen

PARTIMEVERYTHING - NOSTALGIE, released in 2020, extended that network beyond Canada. Clairoux appeared with Jessy Desjardins, Phil Gaucher, Jakob Ebskamp, Anthony Patry and Dane Kirk in an urban ski film built around rails and street terrain. Ebskamp’s presence connected the project to the Danish freeski scene, while Gaucher brought another strong Quebec street-ski reference point into the same cast.

The credit list is important because crew films often show relationships that contest databases cannot. A skier’s place in the culture can be measured by who is willing to travel, film, shovel, wait for snow and return to a spot together. NOSTALGIE documented Clairoux in that setting: not isolated from the wider scene, but positioned inside a Canadian-European exchange of street skiing and independent production.

Rails, Runs and Film-First Skiing

The available record points toward a style shaped by varied surfaces rather than one fixed contest discipline. His FIS archive came through slopestyle, while later projects used urban rails, compact landings, road-trip locations and resort laps. Street skiing depends on speed checks, edge control, balance through the first rail contact, controlled exits and patience around snow conditions. Film crews also need a different type of discipline: repeat attempts, careful camera placement and the willingness to stop when a landing is not ready.

Clairoux’s projects therefore read as production-driven freeskiing. The goal was not only to post a score. It was to create a sequence that worked visually, gave the crew a shared identity and made distant locations part of the final edit. That approach sits naturally beside Quebec street culture and the wider Whistler scene of the late 2010s.

A Finished Competition Record and an Active Film Archive

Philippe Clairoux’s confirmed ski record runs from Nor-Am slopestyle starts in 2015 and 2016 to ALIVE, the PARTIMEVERYTHING road films, Gapers Gone Wild’s 2018 Intersection entry and NOSTALGIE in 2020. The FIS profile identifies him as inactive, so this page should not suggest an ongoing international contest career without new official evidence.

The lasting material is the archive of projects: a Quebec skier who used competition experience as a base, then moved toward crews, road trips and film production. His strongest contribution is visible in those documented releases, where cities, mountains and collaborators became as important as any individual result.