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There was a moment after Michael Hibbs came away from skiing like a maniac down several sets of San Francisco’s Lyon Street Steps when an older woman who’d been watching approached him with a question.

“You didn’t go the whole way?” she asked Hibbs.

“I just kind of laughed and was like, ‘Well, I value my life. I’m not trying to get wrecked out here,’” Hibbs said.

This was in April 2018, and Hibbs was in the middle of a five-day film shoot for an offbeat ski flick called “The Kook,” released online in late February. It’s a 15-minute mockumentary that parodies the ski film genre by chronicling the life of a fictitious skier-hermit, played by Hibbs, who lives in the Marin woods. He hoofs it across the Golden Gate Bridge — clunking in ski boots with untamed hair and no shirt, sticks slung over his shoulder — on a mission to gain corporate sponsorship by shredding San Francisco’s famous steeps, snow be damned.

“Snow is soft. This is the future of the sport,” Hibbs’ character, called Bucky Hart, narrates at the start of the film. “Those posers up in Squaw say they’re extreme. Dry-land skiing is extreme.”

The Kook from Sam Blakesberg on Vimeo.

The film arrives during another alarmingly dry winter in California and serves as meta commentary on our trajectory toward an arid, post-snow future. If global warming were to completely neutralize frozen precipitation on the planet, then the ideal ski town might look something like San Francisco, the filmmakers say. Imagine a climate-warped adaptation of skateboarding in which riders ditch the wheels and scrape their way down the city’s steeps, chasing the rush of their ancestral snow-skiers.

“It’s very much an exaggerated horror story about where this leaves the sport of skiing if we keep releasing all this carbon into the atmosphere,” said director Sam Blakesberg, 26, who grew up in San Francisco.

Hibbs’ performance is our vehicle into that bizarro reality. He proceeds to pull off a series of risky, unthinkable, real-life ski stunts at high-profile spots around the city and in Marin. He shoots down a vast grassy slope on Mount Tam through the morning fog. He carves some 40-degree pavement on a flank of Potrero Hill, sparks crackling off the edges of his skis. He reaches out for high fives from tourists while skidding down the cable car tracks on Hyde Street. He hucks off the stone wall atop Twin Peaks and tears through the dirt, east toward Market Street.

“I approach skiing from a stuntman mentality. Like, what can I get away with?” Hibbs said.

Hibbs skied shirtless and helmet-less in a pair of tan overalls and worried at times about blowing out a knee or bonking his head. But he came away from the shoot with only some nasty road rash on his butt and back. If a stunt got hairy, he’d just slide out like a baseball player stealing second, he said. “I’m more comfortable on skis than walking.”

Hibbs, 26, grew up throwing tricks at the terrain park on his home hill near Minneapolis. In college at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, he connected with Jack Ebstein, a fellow film student who grew up in San Francisco. Hibbs, in the middle of the city and hours from snow, had already been tinkering with bizarro ski antics like dropping into L.A. canyons. His Instagram account was full of “Jackass”-style ski clips.

“He already had the character of the Kook in college and we talked about turning it into a narrative film,” said Ebstein, 25, who co-wrote and produced “The Kook.”

“We always wanted our first film to be in San Francisco — to use the landscape of the city in a unique way — and we stumbled onto this idea where San Francisco is treated like an actual ski mountain,” Blakesberg said.

“Dry-land” skiing is not something that serious mountain skiers aspire toward. Sand skiing, in which skiers speed down dunes, is practiced in certain parts of the world, including Namibia and Peru. But performing wild tricks in the urban landscape — straight-lining down an escalator, for example — is more stunt than sport. Skiing pavement and grassy hillsides (even steep ones) is slow, absurd work. “You’re kind of just destroying skis,” Hibbs said. “But it’s aesthetically interesting. It looks cool.”

(Representatives from the San Francisco Police Department and California State Parks contacted for this story hadn’t heard of the activity and said there aren’t laws against riding skis in public places, provided a skier doesn’t cause any damage.)

Though the style doesn’t typically carry status in the world of professional skiing, the mysterious French skier Candide Thovex has built a global reputation showcasing his skills on dry terrain. Thovex is known for his surrealistic video segments in which he skis through bone-dry sheep pastures and dense tropical jungles — in one, he even grinds along the Great Wall of China — as if it’s a totally normal day on the mountain.

Thovex’s work was an influence on the creators of “The Kook.” “We talked about things we liked in his videos and then things we wanted to make unique in ours,” Blakesberg said.

Highlighting San Francisco as a character led the filmmakers to some questionable choices.

When Hibbs’ character isn’t shredding the city’s iconic landscape, he’s performing the role of an apparently crazy San Francisco indigent. At times, the effect can be seen as a clever satire of the conditional indifference evident among many sidewalk San Franciscans. At one point, Hibbs’ character waits for a ski shuttle at a MUNI stop on Market Street, berating passersby about snow conditions while they actively ignore him.

But the commentary can veer cringe-worthy, as in a scene in which Hibbs’ character rants maniacally in Union Square while brandishing a bottle of whisky, kicking over patio furniture and yelling at extras playing pedestrians.

When asked about the Union Square scene, Ebstein and Blakesberg said “The Kook” shouldn’t be taken as a critique of the city’s homelessness crisis. “We’re not trying to make some grand statement on mental illness in San Francisco,” Ebstein said. “That was the character’s low point in the story and he’s taking it out on the world.”

Blakesberg and Ebstein showed “The Kook” at film festivals in 2019 and released the film on Vimeo in late February. Ebstein works as a speechwriter in Los Angeles; Blakesberg is a freelance post-production video editor in New York. They’d like to make another film that expands the universe of “The Kook.”

Hibbs lives in Portland, Ore., and pays the bills through freelance video work. His health insurance just ran out, so he might be done with this brand of dry-land skiing for the foreseeable future.

“I’ve definitely burnt out from skiing on dirt,” he said. “I hope I can find an outlet that I’m as passionate about that’ll be easier on my body.”

Gregory Thomas is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle and outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas