Warren Miller's Power of Snow Collection (Storm/Cold Fusion/Ride/Fifty)

The best of the lot, Cold Fusion, involves serious globe-hopping through four continents: Join a long, long hike through Kenya to ski what remains of a disappearing glacier, and later watch the surreal ballet of multiple "aerialists" launched high on the slopes at Colorado's Winter Park Big Air Expedition. Scale up--and snowboard down--an impossibly steep peak in Waddington, U.K., and then, believe it or not, ski Iran, a place "between dreams and awakening, of hot tea and cherry tobacco."

Ride provides its own thrills, traipsing after Whistler's avalanche hunters as they launch explosives clearing landslides before landslides clear skiers. Stick around for stops in New Zealand and France, plus helicopter skiing in the North Cascades, snowboarding the bouncy trail of the Breckenridge Bumps, and cross a war zone in Russia to reach (via creaky cable cars and choppers) the top of Europe.

Storm continues the fun in British Columbia's Blue River, Aspen's Roaring Fork Valley, Lake Tahoe, and Antarctica's South Georgia Island, the haunting first site of Ernest Shackleton's legendary, ill-fated voyage. Rounding out this DVD collection is the retrospective Fifty, an album of highlights (e.g., snowboarding in the Chugach Range, near the site of the Valdez crash) that takes a fun, then-and-now approach. --Tom Keogh