The Snowboarder's Journal • frequency 17.2 • BEN FERGUSON AND A SOLID DAY'S WORK

Although he’s only 24 years old, Ben’s been in the public eye for quite some time now. From Olympic finals to X Games podiums and heavy backcountry sessions from the Chilkat to the Tetons, the kid from Bend, OR has long since established himself as a world-class talent regardless of the venue.

This year, on the heels of a fourth-place finish at the Pyeongchang Olympics, Ben chose a winter of backcountry sessions with his brother Gabe and friends like Sage Kotsenburg, Red Gerard and others—a season of long days on his own schedule that he’d earned from the constant grind of years past. Ben’s been enjoying every moment of living and learning in the backcountry that he can take in. They’ve been working on a project entitled Joy, a short film following these young rippers through a season well beyond contest venues.

As someone who grew up riding it all, Ben’s returned to his roots. He never stopped riding the mountains, even when training as part of Team USA’s regimented program to perform for mainstream audiences.

Ben takes flight and lands a double crippler, a trick never done before in the backcountry, with the calculated and powerful style he’s been known for since showing up on the scene almost a decade ago. He unstraps and begins to hike back up to do it again. It’s all part of a solid day’s work, and Ben’s willing to log the hard miles necessary to set himself up for moments like this. For now, he’s fully committed to the task at hand.

I was born in Idaho. My parents moved us to Bend, OR when it was still small. It gets busy now, but it’s still a little mountain town. The river runs right through it, you can ride bikes, skate, fish—it’s the perfect place.

Brandon Ferguson is pops, Jennifer Ferguson is mama bear. Pops is a dentist and mom works at the office. They’ve had my back my whole life. Pops hustled for his position in this world and he taught me how to work hard. He wants his boys to keep their bite and do the same. Mom taught me how to love [laughs].

Take us through the journey of snowboarding with your younger brothers Gabe and Zach.

I was 8 when Gabe started snowboarding. He was just 4 years old and picked it up quick. He was two feet tall doing stalefishes off natural features at [Mount] Bachelor. There was a powder day when the snow was up to his waist. He tied his own boots, did a toeside turn and flew right out of his setup. He was walking around in deep snow in his socks—”Where’s your board Gabe?” He’s a full-on man now, and he killed it this year.

Big Z’s out in Montana right now digging ditches, making money for school. He rode with us as kids but he didn’t want to compete anymore, started going to school regularly, wasn’t skipping classes to ride like me and Gabe. Now he’s going to college, playing rugby. He shreds hard still—big into straight-lining. He’s the heavyweight champion of snowboarding—the dude is built.

Six. The first couple years it was just me and my dad cruising. The third year I started doing Mt. Bachelor Mighty Mites, then I got into this program called MBSEF [Mount Bachelor Sports Education Fund]. I’d ride with JD Dennis, Ben Watts, Garrett Warnick, and the Warbington brothers [Max and Gus]. I started getting more serious about snowboarding then.

I was 8 years old when I got into my first contest, and I kept doing the USASA. You’d get your two contest runs mad early and then you were ripping the resort. Those were some of the best laps, riding with that massive squad, waiting to see how the contest results came in once the lifts shut down.

We weren’t good at anything. I’d always get stuck. You were always trying to go as fast as you could, keep up and not get left behind. It sucked if you had to take a piss—I would hold it so long. It was so bad, I pissed my boots once. My parents were wondering if a cat snuck into the garage and pissed in them.

I wasn’t about to admit it. But that’s how crazy it was. A lot of those guys went on to make a life in snowboarding and the few that didn’t fully could have. We had a heavy squad. They pushed me toward everything that’s happened now.

There’s a lot of flow at Bachelor—how much did that contribute to your riding?

It’s not the steepest and most aggressive mountain, it’s more playful. You learn how to hold speed and use your edges to get around. We also had a baller park back in the day and everyone was pushing each other. Pat Malendowski would cut the pipe sometimes and it got so good.

Ben Watts was killing it and he would win USASA nationals, so that was always a goal within our crew. I didn’t make nationals my first year, but when I was nine I won slopestyle and got second in the halfpipe for my division. That summer I got signed to the Burton Smalls team and met Chaka [then Burton Team Manager Michael Gardzina], and [photographer] Adam Moran, and the rest of the Smalls kids like Hans and Nils Mindnich and Kyle Mack. Chaka was pretty hard-core. He never seemed hyped; he wouldn’t say anything until you did something really sick. He’d say, “Yeah Ben, cool,” and that was the Chaka nod.

I got into the Rev Tours, and the Launches from there. That’s when I started riding with [coach] James Jackson. He’d take us up to Bachelor and we’d ride pow. We weren’t just in the park learning tricks; we were learning how to ride our snowboards. I started riding for his shop [the late Side Effect Board Shop] around the same time I was getting flowed from Burton.

He’s quiet at first, but once you get to know him, he’s hilarious and he’s a sweetheart. The coach thing began on this trip to Colorado where he ripped everything apart. I didn’t even ride pipe for the first two days. He didn’t like the way I turned my board at the time, so he made my stance narrower and rode behind me and told me what to do on groomers. I was like, “This is bullshit,” but it worked.

By 16 or 17 I really started to figure it out. I was doing it for myself because I loved it. I started to ride the way I wanted to ride. I started to find my own style. That’s when I rose up.

They would do their Gold Camp every spring with kids and coaches. We’d stay up at the Mammoth Mountain Inn. It was rowdy. I did well at the camp and the next year I was on the team. I also qualified for this Youth Olympic contest, won pipe and got second in slope. I was locked into the US Team then, getting invited to the Canadian Open and some other bigger contests.

That Sochi Olympic year [2014] I ended up getting third at the first qualifier at Copper. It came down to the very last contest in Mammoth, and it was between me and Danny [Davis] for the final Olympic spot. I landed one of the best runs of my life and was sitting in second, then Dan came down, did the switch method and laced his run and went to Sochi. It was probably for the best; Dan deserved to go. That last qualifier podium was Shaun [White], Danny and me, and it was unreal. I was so hyped and didn’t care about not moving forward.

No, I was just riding more and more. I started shooting with Pete Alport in Bend and he taught me a lot: how to cut blocks, build jumps, build an inrun, how to operate in the backcountry. He showed me a lot of spots in Oregon. I never missed riding powder because I always just did it.

From then it was always decent contest success. I would usually make finals and I’d either be on the podium or not land a run. It was very focused on halfpipe with the US Team. I would sign up for slopestyle, but since I was riding so much pipe that’s where my results were better. It was a bummer, but it would have been really hard to continue to do both—no one really does that these days.

Peetu [Piiroinen] was the last that I saw doing both. You’d have to be a freak and work so hard to compete at a high level in both these days. Peetu was still trying to compete in both in Pyeongchang [South Korea Olympics, 2018] but the scheduling wouldn’t allow it. There were overlapping practices. You can tell there are producers at some of these events trying to get this done as fast and cheap as possible to make a TV show.

I did the contests and started to put out full parts at the same time. I went to Cooke City [MT] for the first time with Dan [Davis], and [filmer] Timmy [Manning] and that was the first year I went to Alaska as well. The crew was Timmy, Mikey Rencz and Blotto [Burton photographer Dean “Blotto” Gray]. We shared a bird with Absinthe on one day and I rode with [Brandon] Cocard and [Austen] Sweetin. I fully took it for granted—we had a solid run of blue days and I was just a kid getting shots in Alaska. I didn’t know why anyone was bringing me up there. I was so afraid of getting taken out by my sluff that I would just go as fast as I could. I would get lucky, air over some spines, go fast—it was the fastest I’d ever gone in my life, some of the best snow I’d ever ridden, and the most scared I’d ever been on a snowboard, but it was epic. Somehow, I felt like I was ready.

I flew from Haines to Anchorage and we rode lines in the Chugach. It was crazy to go and ride both those places. Again, I was just a kid, wide-eyed.

Tell us about that switch back 180 method from Pat Moore’s Blueprint—that was a standout moment.

It was the first time I had met Pat and my first time riding with John Jackson. We were up top and Pat looked at me and said, “You’re the guinea pig, that’s why we brought you out here.” He was asking what I wanted to do and I said, “Switch back 180.” And he said, “You sure you want to hit it switch? Not one of those nice methods you do?” I made the trick the first time and then put one more up after.

To Pat’s point, the method was a huge standout in your video parts and contest runs.

That was a James Jackson thing. James told me to think about doing the method like doing a back three—set up turns the same way, then pop off the lip like you’re doing a back three. He was also always against grabbing in front of the binding, and I would always grab between the legs. But after watching Terje [Haakonsen] and [Nicolas] Müller footage I started to grab in front of the binding and find more tweak. James gave me shit, but everyone else was hyped. I’ve never seen him grab in front of the binding [laughs].

I got a call from [Ryan] Runke saying Travis wanted me to film in Jackson for The Fourth Phase. I was immediately so nervous. And Rice called me the following week to check in, make sure I was down, asking if I had a sled. I told him I did because I had theoretically won one as Peace Park Standout.

I showed up, had to rent a sled, and ended up wrecking it toward the end of filming. That was just after the X Games where it was snowing so hard that no one could take a second or third run. I ended up sticking my first run and got a podium, first X Games medal—partied kind of hard and stayed in Aspen too long the next day.

We got the latest start driving to Jackson in a snowstorm, got there around a quarter to three in the morning and slept at the Motel 6 in the center of town. We woke up at 4:30 and went to the trailhead. That was the first time I had met Travis, and there was gear and sleds everywhere, probably 20 people. The ice trenches on the trail out were so deep. You did not want to be someone who was holding up the crew, so it was pretty heavy in the morning. We ended up riding a couple lines off the bat with [Mark] Landvik and Cam Fitzpatrick, then we built two different jumps until 7 p.m. The sun was going down, words were being exchanged, people were getting heated as we worked so late. I was so tired I had the shivers and passed out immediately when we got home. Thankfully, the next day was a down day.

Eventually I just turned into part of the crew and learned a lot from all those guys: keep hustling, dig until you can’t dig and then keep digging. Put another block on. I had always known how to work hard—if you care about it, work hard, my pops showed me that. But going out with those guys was a different level.

I was just trying to hang. My mindset was that I wasn’t going to front double 10 this jump, but I can do a switch back one method, big switch back rodeo, or seven off my toes, and these were tricks that weren’t at the forefront of people’s minds when they’re hitting bigger jumps. I was trying to take a different approach and people were psyched. They hadn’t had much luck in Jackson the two years prior, but we got good conditions and a lot of the footage that ended up in the movie was from the few weeks that I was there.

The year after [2016]. Those next years were going to ramp up for contests with the Olympics looming, and I wanted to keep filming as much as I could, so I wanted to have my own filmer. We figured the easiest thing was to try and make a movie. We went into that way overconfident. Up until then I had been on other people’s programs—I was piggybacked into these zones and these jumps by people that knew what they were doing. I quickly realized how much there was to learn to be able to make my own movie.

I went to Japan and didn’t know where to go. The snow was really good, but we weren’t getting the shots we wanted. I felt like a fish out of water. I knew how to snowboard, but I didn’t know all the things in between. It was a big learning year.

We had a bunch of help. Curtis Ciszek took us out in Whistler, and in Japan we got together with Rip Zinger and A-Lo [Alex Lopez]. What really saved the whole thing was linking up with Manuel Diaz in Snoqualmie [WA] and him giving me his seat to ride with Absinthe again up in AK. It was one of the best trips of my life. It was Mikkel [Bang], Kimmy Fasani, Nicolas Müller, and myself. It was my first time riding with Nicolas and it was mind-blowing. That footage ended up tying up Hail Mary. It also ended up in the Absinthe movie that year and although it was short, I’m super-hyped on that part.

When you’re flying with those guys they know exactly where everything is, when the light’s going to be on it, where the snow stays cold. That was when I realized I needed to start remembering the zones, the guides. It’s not all just being able to ride your snowboard, it’s everything that comes with it that you need to have dialed to succeed in filming. It was a good turning point.

And then it was the Olympic year? I had been doing well in halfpipe contests, my sponsors wanted me to go, so I made the call to push as best as I could. I put my heart and soul into it. We did a lot of big halfpipe camps—I was riding so much halfpipe that I knew I could land at the top of the wall and have so much speed… it was sick to be that on point, but after a while it got old. But if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it. Red Bull put me on a training regimen; I had a nutritionist. It was the best shape I’d ever been in. I could feel the difference, my body was connected, I had full control over my board. It was a good feeling, but it took so much work.

The first contest in Copper I beat Shaun [White]—he was pissed, I could tell he had no idea what was going on. My run wasn’t crazy, it was just different, and he had all the double corks. Once you get a first amongst the US dudes, you’re kind of locked into the Olympic Team. I got comfortable after my next result and was named to the team at the final qualifier in Mammoth.

To Pyeongchang. What a weird place. It was so structured. Fly in, take a bus to a hotel, go through processing, talk to ex-Olympic athletes about Olympic pride, being mellow on social media and not throwing out any rogue tweets. Get your clothes to walk in—try to get those signed by Red [Gerard, who won Slopestyle there] so I can eBay them—and then they move you up into the village. It was in the middle of nowhere, minus 10 Fahrenheit and so windy. There were these big gray apartment buildings filled with unfinished condos, plastic everywhere, camp chairs in the living room. Everyone was sharing rooms and you’re eating in this big cafeteria.

There were so many nerves too, but then it’s just like any other contest. The pipe was actually one of the best I’ve ever ridden, but the vibe was weird. Even the practice days, it was an hour and a half to get to the venue, everything is timed to a T and stressful—there’s people telling you where you can and can’t go. It’s just a big production. I’m glad I did it, but I was relieved when it was over. I was hyped I did alright. I would have loved to do better. I went straight to Japan and filmed for a week. It was so nice to be done and go ride pow.

There was no one telling us where we needed to go or what we needed to film. Every day, if it was good, we would go out and snowboard and do what we wanted to do. It makes me want to do this every year.

We recognized that together we can do things our own way. We had a good production crew behind it. We went up to Baldface [Lodge] in late December, party-lapped, partied, got a couple hammers, got some photos, and made a good plan for the rest of the winter. That was the real takeoff for the whole thing.

There was trust in the crew. Everyone had taken avalanche courses leading up to filming and we didn’t set anything off. We can always learn more about that, but I feel we did a good job.

When we were in Revelstoke [BC] in March. We had no idea where we were going, the snow wasn’t good for what we were trying to ride, but we’d always find a high-north-facing pitch where we could get something done. Those days were epic, getting out early, exploring forever and staying late. We ended up getting it pretty good thanks to prior experience.

Sage has been doing this for a while now and even though he’s still learning, he had so much knowledge. He’s on his weather game and took a grip of safety courses. Every trip had a good moment, everyone brought something different to the crew and made it special in its own way.

That was pretty much all Sage. I was egging him on, but I didn’t really realize what I was doing. We were like, “Let’s go look at the ravine gap,” and we’re standing up there and he said, “We probably got it.” Then suddenly we were saying, “We’ve got it,” and built it, and kept that mentality through the whole thing. It ended up working pretty good.

I love everything about it. I love the sled, I love the cold mornings, I love drinking coffee—it’s a solid day of work. It just feels better than staying at some hotel, waking up for practice at 9:30 and walking to the chairlift to get to the halfpipe. I love eating lunch out in the backcountry. You got the view, you warm up the sandwich in the sled, you can bring soup out there, get gourmet. I love figuring out a way to build a jump the best way you can build it. The whole thing is so fun, making everything perfect.

Photo Caption: Ben Ferguson, barefoot in the studio shooting for Joy, his forthcoming film with Sage Kotsenburg, Red Gerard and friends. Portland, OR. Photo: Aaron Blatt

The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 17.2

BEN FERGUSON AND A SOLID DAY'S WORK

Ben Ferguson stands atop a giant glacial wave high above British Columbia’s Pemberton Valley. He drops and charges at the massive natural transition with confidence bred through a career atop the contest scene and a handful of top-tier video parts with Brain Farm, Absinthe, Burton and beyond.

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