Jackson is a sleepy little town tucked within a 55-mile long valley in northwest Wyoming. It also lies within the shadow of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, the crown jewel of Grand Teton ski country. J-Hole, as the locals call it, is neither for the faint-of-heart nor the big-of-attitude. It boasts over four thousand vertical feet. It’s got steep lines, tight chutes, and mandatory cliffs. Fifty percent of the trails rate expert only. Furthermore, Jackson doesn’t teem with the fur coats of Aspen or the family fun of Park City. With its wooden sidewalks and rustic storefronts, it has managed to retain much of the frontier feel that has attracted hardcore enthusiasts since its official opening in 1966.

Travis Rice grew up in Jackson. Even as a toddler, he bristled with kinetic energy. On skis by age two. Doing gymnasium somersaults at three. At ten, he got his first snowboard. For a young snow junkie, spending a childhood in Jackson was the equivalent of a surfer being raised on Oahu’s North Shore or a mountain biker growing up in Vancouver’s northern suburbs. The young Rice shredded every inch of J-Hole’s 2,500 acres. He conquered the legendary Corbet’s and S&S. Yet his most seminal teenage moment wasn’t killing a specific run or nailing a certain trick. It was receiving an invitation.

“I didn’t know them well at first,” says Rice. “But I’d always looked up to them.” “Them” meaning Jackson’s most hardcore powder cowboys—snowboarders Lance Pitman, Rob Kingwill, and Bryan Iguchi. The three were J-Hole stars. Talented yet grounded. Seasoned and savvy. They’d won X-Games medals. They made boarding videos. They consistently tore up the Teton backcountry. One wintery morning, Iguchi, who was seven years Travis’s senior, asked the high schooler to come along with them. This was major. Rice knew of the legendary Teton backcountry spots like Cody Peak, Four Pines, and Granite Canyon, but he’d never really tackled them. And “Guch,” as he was known, was a pioneer, one of the earliest shredders to push freestyle snowboarding into the backcountry. One of the first guys to throw blindside 720s off natural terrain. An invitation from Iguchi was like an offer from Butch Cassidy to join in a ride with the Hole in the Wall Gang. “Guch doubled me out on his snowmobile,” recalls Rice. They built a jump. Something “super poppy” over a seam of boulders. Rice had been trying some new tricks and thought it’d be a perfect time to test one out. An initiation of sorts. “I stuck a double backflip,” says Rice. “The guys were like, what the fuck?? From then on I could hang with them.”

The three older men became Rice’s friends, his family, his teachers. “Everyone had their own personal character,” says Rice. “And they all brought something different to the table.” Guch possessed the old-school wisdom and patience, Pitman was the fiery go-getter, and Kingwill provided the comic relief. And for the following three years, the J-Hole crew taught Rice lessons that would serve him for the rest of his life. How to safely run with an organized crew. How to depend on one another. How to prepare, how to focus, and how to manage the “business of filming.” And perhaps most critically, the humility required to ride—and survive—the backcountry. It was a skill set Rice would leverage not only to become a better snowboarder, but also a better man.

Evolution. From its genesis, The Art of Flight has had Darwin’s theory in its DNA. After the release of their 2008 mega-hit That’s It, That’s All, Travis Rice and Curt Morgan wanted to raise the bar. Create a more progressive, transformative film. They wanted visuals, travel, and terrain that would break new ground, pushing the limits of both snowboarding and action sports filmmaking. A movie that could achieve the nearly impossible—impressing the most hardcore of audiences while thrilling the mainstream public. They culled their ideas and came up with a name: The Art of Light.

Why? Because partners Rice and Morgan wanted to create a masterpiece—a vision of filmmaking that had been as of yet unseen. So they incorporated the most advanced equipment possible—machines used by both the most lavish Hollywood action films and the U.S. Defense Department. The result? Dazzling clarity. Dizzying angles. A quality and consistency unparalleled to date.

As shooting progressed, however, the working title changed. “Flight,” they called it, which was appropriate, as the cast spends much of the film flying. Dreaming of soaring to unprecedented heights, Rice spent two years scouring Google Earth, studying historical Weather Channel data, and consulting guides and longtime locals around the globe. It paid off. He and his costars, including Scotty Lago, Mark Landvik, John Jackson, and Pat Moore, traveled to the slopes of Wyoming and British Columbia and Chile. In the film, they fly down never-touched terrain in Alaska’s Tordrillo and southern Patagonia’s Darwin ranges. They fly over gullies and massive cliffs, off 100-foot kickers—landing an array of backside 720s, backflips, and even a triple-cork 1440. Soaring atop and above landscapes that look more like Middle Earth than our earth, the cast redefines what snowboarding once considered “big” and “bold.”

They settled—obviously—on The Art of Flight. And it may be the perfect title. When the Red Bull Media House production debuted at New York City’s Beacon Theater in September 2011, the 3,000-plus people in attendance witnessed an ethereal balance of both “art” and “flight”—the evolution of imagination to realization. But if the audience thought that this latest film was simply the product of two years of diligence and dedication, they’d be wrong. In reality, The Art of Flight has been evolving for two decades, since long before anyone ever heard of Travis Rice. “Everything I’ve done has led up to the making of The Art of Flight,” says Rice. “Without my past, there’d be no present.”

In 2006, Travis Rice had a problem. It was no small problem, and to make matters worse, it had been getting worse. Simply put, Travis wasn’t satisfied. Sure, he’d boarded around the globe, stood atop countless podiums, and ascended to action-sports-film superstardom. But he still wanted and needed more adventure. Rice wanted to go—figuratively and literally—where no snowboarder had ever been before. So, naturally, Travis began that very quest.

His first step? Another flick. A cinematic tour de force. Super high-def, IMAX-quality footage. The most remote and most challenging terrain. The Planet Earth of action sports films. The result? That’s It, That’s All. An unheard of half-million dollar extravaganza (or so it was estimated). “This is the first time,” said Travis, “I’ve ever been able to show someone some footage and feel like they’re really getting to see the same thing that we see when we’re out there.” As for audiences, they saw another Travis Rice breakthrough, and, at the time, a film that was generally regarded as the greatest snowboarding flick in history.

Next, in 2008, Travis decided to put on a contest. But nothing like the X-Games or the Dew Tour. The Jackson Hole-based competition he titled “Natural Selection” was like nothing before it. For years Rice had envisioned a competition that encompassed all disciplines. Tested every aspect of a rider. Golfers don’t just putt, do they? Do tennis players only hit with their forehand? No. “Everything in snowboarding’s been evolving,” says Rice. “Kids are getting better, starting younger. I felt a need for something that incorporated reading mountains and carving big lines coupled with freestyle. This is where the sport was pointing next.” So eighteen of the world’s best shredders carved steep mountain lines, tore through ungroomed snorkel-worthy powder, and proved that the “typical” contest didn’t have to be the only type of contest.

Yet those two undertakings simply whet Travis’s appetite for a challenge and adventure. Instead of taking time off, he asked himself, What’s next? The answer? The Art of Flight. “It was definitely more of an unknown adventure,” said Rice. “I’m a bit of an addict when it comes to exploration and finding new and weird stuff to snowboard on.” He and Morgan wanted a bigger, better, and bolder film than That’s It, That’s All. But that came with consequences. The project was going to be dangerous. They’d be “rolling the dice,” as he described some of the team’s riskier excursions.

One roll pointed him to South America, and led the two to scope and explore three hundred miles of the Andes. After dealing with a stint of crappy conditions in Chile, The Art of Flight boys found themselves in the Darwin Range, deep in Patagonia. They rode on four islands. They were a stone’s throw from Cape Horn—as close to Antarctica as humanly possible. They became the first humans to descend the massive mountain faces. Another roll took them north, to the raw and foreboding slopes of the Tordrillo Mountains in south-central Alaska. Then west to the Goat Range in interior British Columbia. “There were elements that were scary,” says Rice. “But we approached it carefully; we’re not out to risk our lives.”

But they did. Because excursions into Patagonia’s Darwin Range and Alaska’s Tordrillo Range meant they were treading where no man had snowboarded before. They were in uncharted waters. There were no lodges, no ski patrols, and no hospitals within hundreds of miles. One misstep, one miscalculation and—as the saying goes—that’s it. That’s all. “If you get stuck out there,” says Morgan. “You’re pretty much done for.”

But that didn’t stop Travis and his crew. Nor did diving through an icy stream to return to their helicopter before it ran out of fuel. Or weeks confined in a tiny cabin in the wilderness. Or injuries to Scotty Lago, Mark Landvik, and Sebastien Toutant. “It was a test for us,” explains Rice. There were countless bumps along the way. They were told things were impossible. That they couldn’t do this or go there. But they didn’t listen. Because for Rice and his crew, impossible isn’t a state of being but a state of mind. “It always seems difficult until you do it,” said Rice in an interview. “There’s an infinite number of ways to do one thing.”