Winter is officially kicking off as the 27th annual Powerhound Winter Film Festival, featuring “homegrown” movies made by local skiers, snowboarders and other winter-sport athletes returns to Tower Theatre on Thursday, Nov. 19.
Historically, Powderhound brings together Central Oregon’s snow community to kick off the winter season. Last year’s event featured a plethora of skiing and snowboarding films and even films on snowmobiling and ice skating. Central Oregon Avalanche Center is putting on the event.
“It’s a celebration of winter and celebrates our local community,” said Emily Paulson, membership and marketing coordinator for COAC. The nonprofit provides free snow and avalanche information, including daily avalanche forecasting for the Central Cascades from Dec. 1 to April 30, and hosts community avalanche-education events. COAC took over organizing the film fest last year from Dan McGarigle, the former owner of Pine Mountain Sports. He started the film fest nearly three decades ago, and COAC was previously an event beneficiary. The event is now one of the organization’s biggest fundraisers.
A raffle is part of the night’s festivities, with Mt. Bachelor, the event’s title sponsor, donating a season pass. The raffle also includes, among other items, a pair of Salomon skis, a Jones splitboard and a Snoplank snowboard. Not to be missed, before the movies begin and during intermission, is the community photo reel, “Powderhound Yard Sales.” Locals submitted their best wipeouts, typically referred to as “yard sales” because gear often goes every which way during crashes.
Typically, the festival features around a dozen short films, although this year, there will be fewer in order to spotlight “Sierra to Baker,” created by Stratton Matteson, an avid Bend outdoorsman who died Feb. 24 in an avalanche while splitboarding in British Columbia. Matteson, 28, made many a lengthy splitboarding trek, including a 2,000-mile, 100-day bike-to-board adventure where he cycled from the Sierra Nevadas to the northern Cascades, climbing and then descending, many of the peaks along the way. The adventure included several of his friends, including Alex Kollar, who died in Oct. 2021 while kayaking the Deschutes River, shortly after filming the movie. A variety of shorter films will run after Matteson’s.
“We have some local athletes who produce real films, and tour the country with them, and then we also have some from local teenagers who maybe make them and share them with their friends, and then they submit one to us,” Paulson said. “We try to show a wide breadth of our community and highlight a number of different athletes and recreationalists.”
The film fest is a primary fundraiser for COAC, which relies on donations, grants and memberships. Paulson said it’s one of a handful of U.S. avalanche centers that doesn’t receive federal funding but instead is “solely community supported.” COAC has other events coming up, including the Bend Snow & Avalanche Workshop, on Saturday, Nov. 14 at COCC’s Wille Hall; and Beacon and Eggs, which covers beacon drills with local forecasters, at Wanoga Sno Park on Jan. 9, 2027; and two events at Mt. Bachelor, the VertFest, a “skimo” (ski mountaineering) race on Bachelor on Feb. 14, 2027; and Tour de Buttes, another skimo race on March 6-7, 2027.
27th annual COAC Powerhound Homegrown Winter Film Festival
Thursday, Nov. 19, 6:30-9:30pm
Tower Theatre
835 NW Wall St., Bend
https://coavalanche.org/pages/powderhound
$20 (COAC members get $5 off)
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