Channel: MAGMA
Who: Alex Hall, Hunter Hess, and filmer Owen Dahlberg
Subscribers: 25.7K
Based: On the road, every winter
Alex Hall won Olympic gold in slopestyle at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. He has 11 X Games medals. Luxury brand Moncler sponsors him. He's modelled for Vogue. He's also the guy whose YouTube channel description reads: "Please help us get to 30K and SUBSCRIBE :)". That gap between elite athlete and scrappy YouTube creator is exactly what makes MAGMA worth knowing about.
What is MAGMA?
MAGMA started in 2019 as a no-budget ski movie (no sponsors, no funding) filmed in a single month on Oregon's Mt. Hood by Hall, his best friend and fellow US Freeski Team member Hunter Hess (back-to-back Winter X Games SuperPipe bronze medalist 2024-5), and their friend Owen Dahlberg behind the camera. The original film was made for the love of skiing, full stop. When it showed the ski community went wild for it. Since then, the crew has released a trilogy of films — MAGMA, MAGMA II, SOULSTAR, MAGMA 3 — and a companion series of biweekly YouTube vlogs called MAGMA Mondays. The vlogs show what Hall and Hess are actually up to between competitions: scouting handrails in random American cities via Google Earth, driving through blizzards, sleeping on friends' floors, jumping cheese wedges in North Dakota. It's the unglamorous, deeply fun reality of being a street skier that the polished competition broadcast never shows.
Why the subscriber count doesn't tell the whole story
At around 26K subscribers, MAGMA is tiny by YouTube standards. But the audience it has is unusually tuned in; they are people who genuinely love skiing, know who Hall and Hess are, and follow the channel because it gives them something that no mainstream ski media does: unfiltered access to two of the sport's best.
The channel was recently picked up by Powder Magazine as one of the best ski YouTube channels to follow. Brands including Volkl, Monster Energy, Faction, and Dalbello now support the films — a significant step up from the original no-budget shoot. The scrappy ethos remains, though. Dahlberg still films everything himself. Hall still Google Earths spots obsessively. Hess still has a day job when the skiing stops.
The line that tells you everything
In a
Powder Magazine interview, Hess talked about the community of unpaid street skiers they encounter on the road each season:
"A lot of these guys, they don't get paid. They work summer jobs, and they're doing it because they love it. And when you're in that realm, you find people that are so appreciative of what they have and just the sport itself." That's the spirit MAGMA runs on. And it's why, at 25.7K subscribers, it already has more cultural weight in skiing than channels ten times its size.
Why we're watching them
MAGMA is what happens when creators with genuine talent and credibility decide to do things their own way. The growth will come — it always does when the content is this good and the people behind it are this well-regarded in their sport. In the meantime, it's one of the most authentic things happening in snow sports content right now.
