The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 19.1
CRAZY IN THE RIGHT WAY: Robin Van Gyn Gambles on Herself
Words: Colin Wiseman 2021-09-27 15:00:17
“Halfway through our first stint filming for ‘Depth Perception’ [2017], Robin and I found ourselves stuck in a tiny cabin in the middle of a gigantic forest in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. We were experiencing a huge snow cycle but everything around us was still except the subtle breeze in the trees. We spent the following weeks snowboarding some the best terrain and powder we have ever ridden. To be able to share that experience with her is something I’ll never take for granted.” Photo: Austen Sweetin
Robin Van Gyn has an alter ego. Her name is Athena Ride. Robin’s a bit reluctant to talk about Athena, but she’s also proud of her. Because without Athena, Robin may not have won this year’s inaugural Natural Selection Tour. Or quit her main sponsor of over a decade to better align with her core values as a person, as an athlete, as a snowboarder. Or continued her progress toward backcountry guide certification. Or produced Fabric, a film project of depth, focused on empowering women on boards and beyond.
Robin had a big year. Probably her biggest ever since she became a pro rider. Her winter required multiple quarantines and many calculated risks, but they paid off. She put a lot of pressure on herself. That’s part of Robin’s personality, a self-described Type A individual from a family of Type A’s who, as Robin puts it, are “crazy in the right way.” They’ve had their share of problems, as any family does, but nowadays they’re as tight knit as ever.
Now 38 years old, Robin is just hitting her prime. She’s an accomplished big mountain rider, as evidenced most recently by that Natural Selection win, and multiple standout video parts from her work with Runway Films to the “P.S.” webisode series, then back-to-back TransWorld SNOWboarding Women’s Video Part of the Year wins for her riding in Full Moon (2016) and Depth Perception (2017). She’s actively pursuing a mentor role. She’s got the support of big brands like Yeti, Yakima and Ford to complement her endemic portfolio, and a new board sponsorship from Jones. She came into the game late, not even strapping in until she was nearly out of high school, not finding a viable career path until her mid-to-late 20s. But Robin has always operated on intuition. She’s not afraid to wing it—some of her friends lovingly call her “Robahawk”—and she also knows how to stand up for herself and others and make things happen.
Whatever her goals, Robin just goes.
FREE-RANGE LIVING
Snowboarding wasn’t really on Robin’s radar as a child. Most everything else was. A plethora of team sports, camping and sailing filled her free time, as did piano and violin lessons. She took voice lessons and musical theater and performed song and dance routines (to this day she’s still liable to break out in song-and-dance at any moment). Alongside twin sisters Jill and Lindsay (two years her elder), Robin carved out her own space and learned to laugh a lot. Her mom, Geraldine (aka Geri), recently retired from her tenured professor of physical education position at the University of Victoria—her dad, Frank, is a dentist. With both of her parents working, Robin would shuttle from activity to activity. It was, as Robin says, “free-range living.”
“I grew up swimming in rivers, hiking in old growth forests, sailing off the coast of a little island archipelago, jumping off sandstone cliffs into the ocean,” Robin says, remembering her upbringing in Victoria, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, BC. “It’s so rich in biodiversity and outdoor space.”
She “didn’t have a curfew” and roamed the little city, nearby beaches and mountains with her crew. At one point in her teens, there was an illicit border crossing or two. “I had access to some really nice luxuries as a kid—especially boats,” Robin says. “My dad had this Zodiac dinghy and me and my girlfriends loaded up in it and drove it across the strait [of Juan de Fuca] to San Juan Island multiple times. No passports, just life jackets. At one point, we had to bum some gas off somebody. We would just go. We had friends there, in Roche Harbor.”
One of those friends was Javas Lehn, a well-known snowboarder in the Pacific Northwest. In high school, he invited her to Mt. Baker, WA, where she didn’t even ride—she didn’t know how. But it got her thinking about snowboarding. She eventually rode a bit at Mount Washington a couple hours north of Victoria. Then, upon graduating from high school, Robin moved to Whistler.
“I was a full-on beginner and I moved into a studio apartment with four women—two of them were strippers from Australia,” Robin says. “They were so much fun to be around. But it was, as a young person, kind of sexually awkward. They were older and there would be random men at our place. I wasn’t attached to sexuality in that way. We had a great time snowboarding together that summer, that winter, then I moved out.”
Robin worked random jobs and rode as much as she could. Despite her late arrival to the sport, she wanted to become a pro snowboarder.
“Some things in life are just so clear,” Robin says. “It seemed like a long shot because I was so late to the game. But there was no half-assing it, coming from a family of professionals who might have liked to see me follow their paths. I thought, ‘If you’re going to do it, you better fucking do it.’”
Yet Whistler wasn’t the place for her to do it. “I saw a lot of partying—hard partying—in Whistler,” Robin says. “And I have had addiction in my family, with my twin sisters and my grandparents. It was enough to almost tear us apart at times. I’m able to party, but I do draw the line at a certain point. Hard drugs were everywhere and I didn’t want to be a part of that scene.”
Indeed, Robin’s move to Whistler was about more than snowboarding. She also saw it as an escape. “There were some really tumultuous years with my sisters going through drug addiction and the toll that takes on your family,” Robin says. “My parents were close to separating because they were fighting about how to deal with the addiction. I became really angry and confused—I needed to leave. I needed an outlet and I poured myself into snowboarding—Whistler was my way to get away from the family roller coaster that I felt was out of my control.”
It took years for Robin to process the complications addiction brought to her family. “I was super angry for a really long time,” Robin says. “That showed in my personality. I hated everything. Finally I got sick of being angry. I realized that I had some demons and some forgiveness to get to, because I really love all of my family so deep and dearly that I didn’t want to be angry at them anymore. I realized that I don’t actually need to forgive them for anything because they went through something as bad or worse than what I went through. There were traumatic experiences that triggered their addiction, the guilt of doing the rest of the family harm.
“Family is all you have, the deepest love in your life. I wanted that love back. My whole family wanted it. A few years ago, we made our way through it and we have this beautiful thing. My parents are still together, my sister started a peanut butter company [named Fatso] that is slaying and her twin is doing the exact same thing, killing it in business. They’re all happy and healthy.”
MAKE OR BREAK
After two years living in Whistler, Robin made a deal with her dad: She’d move to Calgary, AB to attend the University of Calgary and he’d help get her a season pass. There, she moved in with high school friends and called a guy she’d met in passing through her Whistler roommates: James Beach. At the time, James was one of the top riders in Alberta. He invited her to a snowboard club party on campus. There, she met core Calgary riders and fell into the thick of it.
Robin spent five years studying and earned her degree. In the first year, she got a job at a local snowboard shop and spent plenty of time learning how to jump at Canada Olympic Park, five minutes from campus. “Of course, I was completely out of control the entire time,” Robin says. “But I avoided injuries, and next thing I knew I was signed up for a contest. I got third at my first one. When I turned 21, I entered everything I could—big air, slopestyle, rail jams, boardercross. Something clicked.”
She had success in regional contests, earned a flow sponsorship from Roxy, went to Superpark at Lake Louise, and met media luminaries such as Pat Bridges and Susie Floros as well as riders who would help her take the next step like Leanne Pelosi and Hana Beaman. A deal with Resorts of the Canadian Rockies followed, which gave her a season pass to the mountains around Banff and beyond. Yet her regional success didn’t carry over to the international level.
“I went to the US Open, and I sucked,” Robin says. “I’d watch someone do a 540, then try to huck a 720, even if I’d never landed one before. I didn’t have the mental game for contests, the consistency. I knew I wasn’t a very good global competitor.”
Again, serendipity struck when she started freeriding in nearby Golden, BC. “It’s weird when something like that happens, where it’s just really innate—you just start going and you don’t really know why,” Robin says. “Just like when I left high school and knew I had to move to Whistler, I knew I had to start focusing on riding the backcountry. I just started going and I didn’t know why or how. I was like, ‘This is what I need to be doing.’”
So she did. Leanne Pelosi had brought her on for MGT’s female summer snowboard camps in Whistler. Then Leanne showed up in Golden with Tara Dakides to shoot for Runway Films. Robin did well on that shoot, and Leanne invited her to join them in Whistler for the rest of the season. Robin phoned a sponsor, asked for $4,000, and got it. “I ended up jumping in Tara’s RV—just me, her and her dog, Buddy,” Robin says. “I basically attached myself to her, and we went and filmed for the rest of the month in Whistler, learning how to snowmobile.”
Robin got a few shots in the friends section of the film and joined the squad full time for the next winter. That led to a shared part. She finished her degree with summer courses at the University of Victoria and spent her winter in Whistler. Then she worked summer service jobs 80 hours a week to fund her winter. Eventually she signed on with South American Snow Sessions, which brought her to Bariloche, Argentina where she progressed her backcountry skills at Cerro Catedral. “Argentina was a fast track to getting better at everything to do with snowboarding,” Robin says. “I learned so much about the backcountry. I learned how to use a beacon. I learned all the safety stuff that I didn’t know anything about yet.”
By 2009, Robin was snowboarding full time for a living. She began filming with Hana Beaman on her “P.S.” webisode series. Hana’s riding and the camaraderie they shared pushed Robin to hit bigger jumps, try bigger tricks. The next step was Full Moon, another brainchild of Leanne Pelosi, which brought the top female big mountain riders together for what became a two-year project.
“Everybody poured everything they had into it because we knew that making a women’s movie was tricky—we really had to nail it,” Robin says. “And we did, which was incredible. I think all of us felt empowered after that, and it definitely extended our careers. For me, it was make it or break it. And I love that pressure. I feel like this year was one of those for me. I was like, ‘Oh, here we go again.’”
Robin laughs after that statement. Indeed, as we spoke, she was still in the thick of producing her own project, still figuring out her board and outerwear sponsors, still in the middle of her mountain guide certification. Still finding that fine balance between making it and breaking it. In fact, that pressure to succeed—whether self-induced or otherwise—is what continues to drive Robin in snowboarding and beyond.
“I really rolled the dice this year,” Robin says, laughing again. “I took a big gamble on myself when I left Roxy—I had been with them for 13 years. But I needed room to grow, to expand in the way that I want to expand.”
She admits that Roxy was the dream, but that’s how life goes—you build new dreams. Robin trusted her heart, just like that move to Whistler, then Calgary, then back again. “I told myself, ‘This is the year for you. You need to do your best,’” Robin says.
“Let’s make sure that everybody is represented and that women—young girls especially—have an opportunity to design their own life without any gender stereotypes holding them back.”
FABRIC
Among the many things Robin was juggling toward the end of 2020 was her commitment to Fabric. An ambitious two-year film project focused on female mentorship in the board-sports world isn’t the easiest thing to pull off, let alone during a global pandemic. But Robin felt it was her time to give back. “Some days I yell, ‘Why?!’” she says with a laugh, “But [Fabric] was one of those things where I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but I do know I need to do it.”
Robin wanted to carry forward the energy of an all-female snow/skate gathering she did with Barrett Christy and Hana Beaman a couple years back at Mt. Baker Ski Area called the Layback. There, she saw connections being made, the web of the women’s board-sports community strengthening. When the event fell through the next season, she chose instead to focus on a film that showed this community building in motion. She identified a group of friends who were prominent enough to help raise awareness of the project and hit the ground running. It became “far bigger than we should have made it,” Robin says, but that’s Robin’s way. When COVID hit, she lost funding halfway through production, but she entered 2021 with a streamlined version of the project: five 10-to-20-minute webisodes rather than a full movie.
Featuring prominent riders like Spencer O’Brien and Leanne Pelosi alongside Hawaiian surf stylist Mainei Kinimaka, skateboarder Kristin Ebeling, artist and board-sports enthusiast Hannah Eddy and many others, Fabric documents various ways in which women can empower other women and build momentum toward something greater. Whether it’s Sandy Ward of the Lil’wat Nation helping Spencer explore her indigenous identity, or Leanne Pelosi taking Juliette Pelchat under her wing for backcountry missions around Whistler, the series helps viewers discover the many connections available in the mountains and beyond that can elevate the board-sports community through cooperative action, big or small.
As multifaceted as it was, Robin managed to pull off a winter and summer of shooting from the BC interior to the California coast, alongside Justin Taylor Smith, who’s been functioning as a DP, co-producer and more. Ultimately, the goal is to further break down gender stereotypes and inspire young women to get out and live exactly the kind of lives they want to live.
“I never felt like I was an anomaly,” Robin says. “I never felt like I was especially outdoorsy, or especially good at snowboarding. I just loved it. And if I have one hope for the project, it would be that it inspires more women to participate in outdoor activities—to not be afraid to take a surf trip to Mexico with your girlfriends, to go out into the mountains by themselves. Women are still really underrepresented everywhere [in the action-sports world]. It’s getting so much better by the minute, but we’re not there yet. And when we work together, we get really good. Let’s make sure that everybody is represented and that women—young girls especially—have an opportunity to design their own life without any gender stereotypes holding them back.”
GUIDE GOALS
“I never set out to be a guide,” Robin says. “In those early years in Whistler, I wanted to go snowmobiling, and I didn’t know how to do it. So I took a first aid course and got a job as a snowmobile guide when I was 19.”
Then, when she went to Argentina to coach, she started bringing SASS students into the backcountry. There, one of the campers was buried in an avalanche. Although they were able to dig the kid out unscathed, Robin realized how unprepared she really was. The same year she went to Baldface Lodge, BC, for a Roxy shoot and started talking with Jeff Pensiero about furthering her knowledge. He extended an invite to work there. The catch was she need to have her Ops 1 certification. Two years later, in 2014, she was at Baldface for guide training with her certification in hand.
Robin tail-guided for three weeks straight at the start of the season and enjoyed the structure it provided to her often-chaotic life. It also helped Robin’s snowboarding. “I began to understand the mountains on a different level,” she says. “I could talk to guides on a film trip, then look at a face and know where the snow would be the best. When filming for Depth Perception, I felt like all of the training and education and experience in that side of my snowboard life was a huge support mechanism and it was allowing me to ride way better.”
The more Robin learns about the backcountry, the more she can carve her own path in the mountains. This year, she finished her Canadian Avalanche Association Level 2 training, which she’d been working on for three years. Now she’s applying to the ACMG program and is working on technical certifications, in hopes of becoming a lead guide soon. It’s a symbiotic relationship with her snowboard career, one that’s grounding, one that will hopefully set her up for a lifetime of turns.
“Part of being a backcountry snowboarder is having the education necessary to reduce your risk out there,” Robin says. “That’s a professional to me. The more time you spend in the mountains, the more you’re exposed to the dangers, and I wanted to be serious about what I was doing—because I’m pretty unserious about a lot of stuff [laughs]. Guiding has become part of my progression as a snowboarder, part of my growth into bigger expeditions, part of what has allowed me to return from the chaos and follow a structured path that has led me to this turning point in my career.”
For Fabric, Robin organized a week in the mountains in Baldface’s new tenure. But before that, she had another major life event at Baldface.
After spending December in Glacier, WA, Robin went back to Canada. Pensiero invited her to quarantine at Baldface. Her then-boyfriend Austen Sweetin came with her, to the place where the couple had met, many years prior. “On day five of our quarantine, it was the most gorgeous bluebird powder day, and we went out for some turns before breakfast,” Robin says. “It started to cloud over, but Austen kept saying he wanted to go up high to ‘check the weather.’ I’m like, ‘It’s obviously foggy,’ but he kept pushing for it, so we went up there, and he pulled out a ring and proposed. It turned out he’d been carrying that ring around the mountains for more than a month, just waiting for the right time.”
The couple has had to consciously add structure to their relationship as they each chase storms all over the world, produce their own video projects, and live the hectic lives that come with professional snowboarding. Yet they’ve found ways to stay grounded: building a container house on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Ucluelet, BC, sharing a home in Glacier, aligning for winter trips when they can. This year, more than ever, they were able to spend significant time together—in Glacier, at Baldface, in Alaska, and at Natural Selection in Jackson. Now they’re engaged—another big moment in Robin’s big year.
“I’ve been able to trust my instinct, to follow my heart and be me.”
MENTAL MANIFESTATION
“Athena Ride was something I came up with, with the help of my friend Genna [Holgate], who I met while working in Argentina,” Robin says. “Athena’s name comes from the goddess of war and one of the first female astronauts, Sally Ride. She’s a calculated warrior, and she doesn’t care what anybody else thinks.”
Athena’s the manifestation of all that Robin’s been working toward the past few years, a mental device to block out the noise and chaos of her multiple directions, a tool to focus on the moment and singular goals. “[Athena] just goes and does what she knows how to do, in the way that she wants to do it,” Robin says. “The last few years for me have been about being true to myself, riding like Robin and showing up like Robin and being good with that. Maybe she’s not the most styley, but she can definitely get down to the bottom of the mountain, go big and land.
“I made a list of things that are best parts of me. And instead of listing the things I don’t like, I turned them into strengths. I don’t like how aggressive I can be—how I aggressively go after everything in life. But I learned this year that aggressiveness and motivation is how I got here. I’m succeeding because I went after the things that I wanted, and I’ve carried that momentum forward. It’s OK to be competitive, to take charge of your life and go for what you want—it’s really been the key for getting where I am, and I feel so lucky to be here.”
The culmination of Robin’s year was winning the Natural Selection finals at Alaska’s Tordrillo Mountain Lodge. Last summer, she channeled her energy toward preparing, enlisting the help of her old Calgary roommate Chris Witwicki, who is now the lead freestyle coach for the Canadian National Snowboard Team. With the help of Genna, Robin found ways to compartmentalize her focus, from Fabric to guiding to riding and competing—and it paid dividends. Although Robin crashed in the Jackson leg of the Natural Selection Tour, she qualified by winning the Canadian stop, and blocked out the noise to throw down in Alaska.
“I had done all this mental training, I had done all this physical training, and I felt ready,” Robin says.
She made it through prelims in second place, then they moved to a steeper face for their last runs. She got to the bottom in one piece, stomping a large drop in the process. “When they announced that I won, I collapsed into a ball. It was the pinnacle of my career,” Robin says.
But then she was back into filming, back into Fabric, back to Alaska with Austen and Eric Jackson and Jamie Anderson, into her myriad roles as rider, producer, mentor and guide.
“This year has been a roller coaster, and I know I’m not done yet,” Robin says. “But this year I’ve felt more true to myself than ever. I’ve been able to trust my instinct, to follow my heart and be me.”
And that’s Robin. She’s strong, she’s opiniated, she’s honest. She’s not afraid to bite off a little more than she can chew. She’s gonna have fun along the way. She’ll speak up for herself, but she’s also committed to elevating those around her. Give thanks to Athena Ride.
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