The Snowboarder's Journal • The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3 • BODE MERRILL: Forgoes the Formula

For the most part, Bode seems unassumingly normal. Grown in beachy Santa Cruz, CA, his first love was skateboarding. His parents split when he was still young with his mom, Toddy, staying in Santa Cruz while his dad, Bob, moved to Park City, UT. For a while Bode spent winters in Cali and summers in Utah to support the skate rat lifestyle, but in his teens he opted for the opposite. Naturally, his skateboarding roots led to snowboarding in the Wasatch where he fell in love with the mountains. He took to snowboarding quickly, started filming and established himself early on in cult classic videos like The Catfish Chronicle’s It Ain’t Easy (2006), and also by winning contests like the World Quarterpipe Championships in 2008.

Bode’s innate talent and work ethic led him to shooting with Absinthe Films. In his second year with them he landed the ender of Neverland (2009), unloading a bag of inventive tricks from large street features to backcountry kickers and more. From that point on Bode became a household name in snowboarding, eventually prompting invites to film alongside Travis Rice for The Art of Flight (2011) and The Fourth Phase (2016) because, yeah, he can hang in Alaska, too. In 2014, Bode won gold in X Games Real Snow and in 2016 went on to win gold in X Games Real Snow Backcountry, making him the first and only rider to win both video competitions. In both of these videos, as well as others that dropped in between and after them, Bode showcased some truly memorable, out-there tricks—one-foot double backflip, fastplant frontflip, finger flips and so many more—along with an onslaught of more conventional moves that undoubtedly would’ve turned heads on their own. That’s the quick summary of all he’s accomplished, with plenty of details left out. Now 36 years old, Bode is still pushing the envelope of what’s possible on his snowboard.

A man of the people, the mountains, the streets and, of course, the minipipe, Bode is the definition of an all-terrain rider. Despite his world-class talent, he’s so humble that it’s easy to forget all the crazy things he’s done. Bode doesn’t like the limelight and would rather be out in the backcountry building a jump with a group of good friends.

However, getting to this favorable point in life hasn’t all been roses along the way. There’s been plenty of ups, downs, slams, injuries, drama, and several near-death situations. There were some parties that lasted too long, and battles to overcome, but Bode never lets any one of these things define him. Over the past several years he’s toned certain things down—the partying, the size of the jumps he’s hitting (or so he claims)—but the resilience and determination I’ve always admired in him remain intact. Because when something gives Bode a sense of drive—whether it be skateboarding, snowboarding, cats or even emo music—he goes all in.

The Snowboarder’s Journal: You’re getting ready to watch some football soon. How much 49ers gear are you wearing right now?

Bode Merrill: None. But there is a 49ers helmet and a 49ers poncho on the wall and shelf in front of me.

I have two cats. One is named Frank, the other one’s Luna. Their full names are Lunatic Stardust and Frankenstein Cosmonaut. Frank is a black cat and Luna is a tortoise. Frank is very personable. He’s fat, but we’re trying to get his weight down. He lets you do whatever you want with him, he’s super fun. Luna’s a little more skittish, but she’s a princess. She’s way cuter and very loving, sleeps in between my legs every night. But Luna brought a bird into the house the other day, it was traumatic. She’s a vicious hunter.

A giant in his own right, with a long list of never-been-done before tricks under his belt. How many NBDs do you have at this point?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t love that question, and here’s why: It’s hard to define an NBD. Everything that’s done on a snowboard has either been done before and wasn’t documented or we’re just adding a twist onto something that’s a staple in the snowboard world, taking parts and putting them together.

I don’t think anybody had done the double Miller flip you did in Heavy Mental.

Yeah, but Nicolas Müller tried one in the Air and Style. I just take pieces from snowboard history and try to put my own spin on it. In that regard, I don’t feel like I’m doing things that have never been done before.

You got a wildcard spot on the first stop of the Natural Selection Tour in 2021, but you declined your second invitation back to the competition. How did you come to that decision?

I’m not a competitor. I choke under pressure. I did the first Natural Selection because I knew I would be kicking myself in the ass for saying “no” to such a big opportunity. I don’t feel like I did well. I don’t think I enjoyed myself very much. I’m competitive in a fun, friendly way, but when it comes to a big stage competition, I don’t enjoy myself and fall apart. So, it didn’t sound like something I wanted to invest my time into. I wanted to enjoy my winter. My plan was to do nothing and float around, link up with friends, different crews and just have a good winter for myself.

You ended up shooting with Standard Films last winter. How did that come about?

At the beginning of the winter, I was planning on taking the season off from doing a major project and snowboarding for myself, and I got to do that. From the beginning of winter until the end of February, I was snowmobiling, meeting up with different people, different crews, and riding Brighton a ton, which was awesome because it was a powder day pretty much every single day.

During the filming of Space Cadet (2022), Shane Charlebois, Brandon Davis and I crewed up with Teton Gravity Research (TGR) in Wyoming. We were with Todd Jones and his son, Kai, this incredible, phenom skier kid, the nephew of Jeremy Jones. I ended up getting four or five shots in the TGR movie, Magic Hour (2022) and got to be close with Todd. The Standard Films project is a TGR produced movie that they hired Mike Hatchett to direct. So, Todd Jones called me up and invited me to film with them.

I was a little hesitant at first. I was having such a good time just freeriding for myself. But at the same time, halfway through the winter, I was feeling like, “Dang, I love producing a video part and filming and having an end goal.” It was perfect timing. I was also hesitant because I didn’t know the crew or the filmers, but they agreed to hire Shane to film me and Jason Robinson for a while. It was comfortable and fitting. Shane, J-Rob and I started filming together, then Mike Hatchett came out and filmed for a handful of trips along with Brad Holmes, an awesome filmer from Tahoe. It came together naturally; we started to stack clips quick. A big goal of mine was to not travel far from home because I was unsure of my financial status, and we were having the best season. I stayed in Utah pretty much the entire winter, minus one trip to Wyoming.

A lot of people talk about the high risk and reward of your snowboarding. Although, despite it not always translating to the viewers, you’re not an adrenaline junkie and safety is a major concern of yours. Where do you draw the line in terms of risk?

You’re right, I’m not an adrenaline junkie. I’m a trick junkie, and that comes from the last 20 years of obsessing over skate and snowboard movies, trying to emulate what’s been done before me. I have all these tricks in my head and that’s what drives me. As far as progression goes, I think we’ve hit a peak of size and rotation and now it just comes down to creativity. That’s what drives me still. In the past, I’ve tried to take that more creative approach to snowboarding and do it on a larger scale. I’m almost trying to pump the brakes on the large scale and just dive more into the creative process. Nowadays, I don’t really jump that big.

Well, I’m not going nearly the size as some of the big dogs are going. Hitting hundred-foot cheese wedges, big air jumps and slopestyle runs, I’m nowhere near that caliber of snowboarder anymore.

I don’t think it matters either. People are more drawn towards the smaller, creative, obtainable snowboarding these days. Not to say that the big, gnarly stuff doesn’t have its place—I love watching that—but there are ebbs and flows and things that trend up and down throughout our careers and lives.

It’s often the clips where you are just having fun that end up being people’s favorites, like the nose catch front flip off that cornice in Flagstaff, AZ for Heavy Mental.

That stuff is some of the most fun, when you’re just doinking around and like, “Oh, this would be stupid.” I don’t want to dog on people for not being creative, but there was a time where so many [video] parts were just like: “I gotta go through the progression of tricks, I gotta build this jump, I gotta get a back seven, I gotta get a front seven, cab five, cab nine, switch back five…” That’s a great formula, always has been. But what spices everything up are the stupid moments that you wouldn’t necessarily spend a lot of energy or time doing but they, oftentimes, are the most fun, and the most rewarding. I try to balance all that. That’s what makes a good video part in my eyes.

So much of our lives have revolved around snowboarding 100 percent of the time that in my older age, I really look forward to the time off my snowboard as well. I try to soak up all the non-snowboarding activities that I can until the resorts open. I’m trying to not grow up too much in my 30s. I took the whole summer off to enjoy, because last summer I had a bunch of plans to do all this fun stuff then ended up selling and buying a new house and remodeling it the whole second half of the summer and all of fall. I made up for it this summer. I get depressed and lost in my life when I don’t take the time to focus on skateboarding, and it gets hard when you’re in your 30s to put that time aside. I’ve been trying to make that a priority in my life and I’m a happier person. It keeps me young.

That reminds me: you’ve been experimenting with microdosing for a bit. Are you still making vitamin mixed capsules?

I am. I make my own capsules of mushrooms and microdose them. I’ve been doing it for the last two years or so. I started taking them for anxiety and depression and it has helped me a lot. I still take them, not as consistently anymore, but they help me in functions and events that I’m very anxious about attending. They also help me cut down on drinking a lot. I feel that they are a very powerful tool to use in mental health and beyond. That said, I don’t like to eat a bunch of mushrooms and use it to trip. I hate that. But in small doses I feel like they have a very therapeutic property.

If I’m hitting a gnarly spot or scared of a trick or a feature, I will bring a little microdose. It helps center me and calm me down before trying something for the first time. I was standing on top of this big step-down gap that I had been looking at all winter and I was really scared to hit it because it was a short run-in and a big gap. I was breathing heavy, really scared. In that moment it really sank me down into a grounded state and I was able to calm my nerves and relax my breathing and focus on the task at hand. I was able to just drop in and jump off it. I feel like it helps a lot in situations like that. It has a lot of mental health benefits, just like listening to sad music.

How have the traumatic experiences of your past—like being buried while filming in [Haines] Alaska [in 2016]—shaped your growth as a person?

I had some PTSD for an extended period of time afterwards, which made me shy away from backcountry snowboarding and the mountains in general. For my incident specifically, it was a case of getting too comfortable riding something. I’d gotten dropped at the same spot twice before and felt it was safe, but that was in the early morning. Towards the middle of the day, when things started warming up, I got dropped off again on this big pillow mushroom on top of this ridge that was on this giant rock cliff. When the skid of the helicopter dug into it, it failed, and the snow broke away when I was standing on it. For a while I was very, very triggered by heights. I remember camping in Moab the summer after, and we were camping along this cliff line. One night everybody wanted to have a fire next to the cliff and I kind of had a panic attack and had to excuse myself from the trip and just hide for a minute. It really triggered me. It really had an impact on my mental wellbeing for a while.

Like with anything, time helped me heal, but also taking a step back from those things helped me refocus. Slowly going back and riding powder again and realizing how healing and fun a powder day is, especially just riding Brighton where it’s small and fun and you can be pretty safe. I don’t really know if it was one specific thing that helped me heal that wound.

It really helped me take more time and look at the backcountry a little more in-depth, to slow down and observe my surroundings more, instead of chasing the clip, or the rush, or whatever. That whole experience helped me grow not only in snowboarding, but mentally, as a person, it gave me more strength to slow down and take things in more clearly, more deeply, rather than rushing into things in life. I’m not going to say it was a good thing, but it definitely was positive in the end to help me grow as a person.

Sometimes our best lessons are our hardest lessons. Respect for slowly working your way back into the mountains.

For sure. That day before it happened, we were stressing on time and trying to get our runs in. I think the crew was uncomfortable, but we chose to ignore that and pushed on. It was Louif’s [Paradis] first time riding in a helicopter and snowboarding that type of terrain, and I was trying to calm him down because he was scared about riding Alaska. I was trying to lead the path. “No, it’s all good… Things are chill… It’s not as gnarly as it seems, maybe.” But before [the burial] happened, we were riding a face that didn’t have a lot of entry points, so we were doing toe-ins, jumping out of the helicopter onto edges and ridges that the helicopter couldn’t land on. Louif was like, “What the fuck are we doing?” But everyone was like, “Oh, we got to get our runs in.” Looking back that was a big part of it. We should have been like, “Let’s slow down. Let’s assess. Maybe this run isn’t worth it. Maybe we just look at the signs, or listen to the mountain a little more.” We ignored some of the warning signs for sure. And I felt like a lot of that was on me.

Nobody does, but it’s so often that in hindsight, and hearing a lot of different people’s stories about backcountry accidents and avalanches and things like this, that we see those signs are often ignored. With all the training that we do, there is that side of things that is just so valid. When you bring filming into the mix, there’s a sense of urgency that is blinding sometimes. If we were just freeriding it wouldn’t have been as stressful, and maybe we would’ve been more patient and safer.

There’s a lot going on in our heads and it’s not always visible. Aside from the accident, you have dealt with anxiety and depression over the time that we’ve been friends. How do you see that manifesting for yourself at this point?

I’ve always been very awkward and nervous about interacting with people that I’m not comfortable with, and that’s a big generality right there. But there’s only a certain amount of people in my life that I feel comfortable with being around. Outside of that, a lot of times it’s really hard to interact with the general public, or people that I look up to, or people that I don’t know well. It makes me a recluse sometimes, and hard to get things done and manage my life, honestly. It makes me feel a certain disconnect from snowboarding. I feel like I don’t connect with the younger generation. I’m almost scared to try to interact with the younger generation and the kids coming up. And I want to share snowboarding with them and be a part of snowboarding for a long time and be in the mix. But it’s so hard sometimes for me to feel like a part of snowboarding when I shy away from those interactions and those functions and events that put myself in a state of vulnerability. It’s really hard for me to go and try to shoot the shit with people, because I don’t feel like I belong there anymore. And that really hinders me from trying to connect with that side of things. But, at this point, I’m trying to put myself into more situations where I’m uncomfortable, because I think that is a good thing to try to cope with and manage.

I always come back to you being a snowboarder—you simply being who you are—you are always a part of it. You mentioned sad music. How does that tie into things? I noticed you’ve even been peppering emo into some of your edits.

Recently I’ve been making it a point to mix my Instagram posts with the music of my roots and growing up as an emo kid. It’s been fun leaning into being myself more on social media like that. I think that emo, the term and genre, has a kind of dirty stink to it in a lot of ways. But I love it. Because emo music to me is not what emo music is to somebody outside of the circle. People think that this shitty mall pop punk wave of a thing is real emo music and it’s totally not. Those bands like Panic! at the Disco. That’s not emo music. But before that, there’s a long history of actual emo music that people don’t know about.

Emo music stemmed from hardcore music in the 80s. The hardcore scene in the 80s was super extreme. It was hard hitting. There were some people in the hardcore scene that were like, “I want to bring out a little more emotion to this music,” but along those [sad] vibes. So, the first bands that started playing around with this were Rites of Spring and Embrace, and they started bringing more emotion into their guitar riffs as well as their vocals. At first, emo was dubbed emo-core, which was an extension of hardcore. And what’s funny is that name, emo-core, was first dubbed by Thrasher Magazine. Two guys from those bands, Rite of Spring and Embrace, went on to form Fugazi. A lot of people credit Fugazi as the original emo band that influenced the whole emo revolution. That was the late 80s, early 90s. Then came all the bands that to me are really the quintessential emo music in the late 90s, early 2000s. Bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, The Promise Ring, Piebald, Texas Is the Reason, Mineral, American Football. That’s real emo music. Then we saw a kind of the explosion of emo and bands like Saves the Day, Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday—those are some of my favorite bands. The mid 2000s and 2010s was when it all went to shit, and it was more of a scene with Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. That’s more pop punk, and what some people call “mall emo,” which I don’t like as much.

My best friend in the world, Jeff Perry. When I was in high school, he was kind of like my big brother. He’s 10 years older than me, and he was super into that mid 90s, late 90s emo scene, and he got me into all that type of music. Over the years, I kind of fell a victim to some of that mall emo and was in the scene for a sec. I’m just a super nerd about that type of music. So, I’ve done research, especially about the history, like, “where did this all come from?”

You’ve always been very passionate about your interests. That’s why I asked how much 49ers gear you were wearing for the game. Is anybody on their way over to watch with you, or are you going to be screaming at the TV solo?

I’ll be screaming at the television by myself. My wife Monica and I are also packing for Spain. We’re going to Barcelona, Madrid and Mallorca.

I haven’t decided yet, but I think I have to. It is the number one skateboard destination in the world. It’d be silly not to.

I want to go Macba for the museum as well. I love museums and history and things of that nature.

I’ve done plenty of surf vacations, but this will be mine and Monica’s first overseas vacation together. So that’s exciting. We’ve done a ton of road trips and smaller vacations, but this is going to be special.

Most of your trips to foreign cities have been for street trips. You got any more of those lined up?

No, I’m fully done with the streets. That doesn’t mean I’m done with rails, but jibbing is going to be more of a backyard boarding experience for me. At my point in snowboarding, I have no interest in flying to a big city and sitting in a rental van for two weeks, driving around eating junk food and trying to set up spots to evade police officers. The backcountry is so inviting. It’s more of an escape, whereas street boarding is more of an anxiety riddled test.

I don’t think people realize street snowboarding is not really snowboarding. I’m not dogging on street boarding or people that do it. I still love street boarding. But when you’re on a snowboard trip for street stuff, you don’t snowboard. You drive around all day, you find a spot and you set up the spot. You drop in, you don’t do any turns, and you try to get your trick. Then you leave, and that’s it. But when we’re backcountry snowboarding, we get to freeride and turn and powder surf. There’s so much more snowboarding, and that’s what I’ve been more psyched on these days.

I’m excited for this winter. I’ll probably be filming with Standard and TGR again. I’m hoping to take a slow approach to it, like last year. In previous years, I’d start filming as early as possible and go until as late as possible, and that really takes its toll on you physically and mentally. Seeing how much we could accomplish in two to three months’ time last winter was eye-opening. I’m excited to keep filming for this major video project, but also take a lot more time to snowboard for myself as well. It’s going to be a good balance moving forward.

The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3

BODE MERRILL: Forgoes the Formula

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