The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 16.1
Full Go: On A Roll with Mary Rand
Words: Mary Fenton 2018-09-17 18:36:01
It’s February, and we’re at a cabin in the woods in Skykomish, WA, on an uncharacteristically cold Pacific Northwest day. Mary Rand lives here with her boyfriend Derrek Lever, their dog Otis and buddy Travis. We’re about 15 minutes from Stevens Pass.
“Skytucky” is more of a railroad outpost than a town, and the chickens up the road have their own doublewide trailers in which to roost. Mary has been coordinating the day’s logistics for a couple weeks now, and we load up in Derrek’s truck and head out early, ahead of the traffic. Storms here are measured in feet, and a decent one just passed.
We’re here to ride some of Mary’s favorite spots on a down day from filming a forthcoming Vans movie featuring her alongside Leanne Pelosi and Hana Beaman. It’s dark, cloudy, wet and white on evergreen—the perfect setting for a classic Northwest day. Mary, 26, knows all the parking lots at Stevens Pass by name, and we head into Lot G to suit up. She dresses in black-on-black with black gloves, a black pack, a pop of orange in her goggles, long chestnut hair and slate blue eyes poking out.
We’re here on the six-year anniversary of the Tunnel Creek avalanche—a massive slide off Cowboy Mountain that killed three of the Stevens Pass family. The air is heavy, and avy danger is considerable.
For Mary, who’s equally at ease sending urban features and backcountry airs, it’s just another day at work. It’s a job she loves, and she’s good at it. With humble New England beginnings, steadfast determination and enough grit to build a sandcastle, it’s not by chance that she’s on the verge of becoming a backcountry icon.
“I was basically just the adult in the room,” father Mike Rand said over the phone from Narraganset, RI. “Most people have to discover what they want to be. She’s just doing it. Always has.” With everything that can go wrong while trying to turn a kid into a functioning member of society, it’s a glowing parental endorsement. Mary didn’t have a traumatic childhood. She doesn’t have any family drama, big adversity to speak of or harrowing near-death experiences. She was 9 years old the first time Mike and mother Pam let her go snowboarding by herself. “It was never a social thing for her,” Mike said. “She begged us to go on her own.”
About an hour into the day, her folks got a call from Mary saying she was on the side of Flying Fox at Loon Mountain, NH, with a broken elbow. “The adult who stopped to help said she was probably right. We felt like the worst parents ever.”
Mary was the last in her family to switch from skiing to snowboarding. At age 6, she told her dad, “I know I’m on skis, but there’s a snowboarder inside me.”
She did everything for her herself, starting about age 7. “We’re so proud, but had so little to do with it. It was all her,” Mike said. “I can take a little credit for teaching her how to carve, but that’s it.”
Mary is grateful that her dad, whom she calls the quintessential soul boarder, laid down a serious foundation. “You see [a lack of fundamentals] in some of the bigger riders, like, wow, you can do that trick, but you have trouble getting down the hill? It’s crazy,” she said.
The Cascadian spires of her new home resort are a far cry from the fences she used to ollie at the 310-vertical-foot Yawgoo Valley Ski Area and Water Park in Exeter, RI. Home to the use-what-you-got Yawgoons crew, which consisted of Mary and big bro Marcus, along with Dylan Gamache, Brian Skorupski, and full-time dentist/filmer Brendan Gouin, Yawgoo was where Mary first caught the bug for logging shots.
She decided she wanted to be a pro snowboarder sometime mid-high school, joined Loon’s recreational team and earned flow sponsorships from Volcom and Rome. She qualified for four USASA Nationals but could never afford to go. “She never cried about it. It just was what it was,” her dad said.
When Volcom invited Mary to compete at the 2009 Peanut Butter & Rail Jam finals at Mammoth, CA, her parents weren’t feeling the travel costs. So, she created a Powerpoint deck to sway them. She would use money she had saved from waitressing and coordinate and book all the travel logistics. They said yes. They also sent Marcus along to look out for her. Mary finished third and brought home an oversized cardboard check for $1,250. Her folks were psyched. “It made us realize, holy crap, we should be supporting her more in these ambitions,” Mike said.
“I was just stoked to get free gear,” Mary said. “Every step felt like the biggest win, each moment in time the biggest deal ever.”
Mike and Mary’s mom, Pam, told Mary she should be riding all the time. Snowboard academies weren’t in the budget, but the family had a little cabin on 4.5 acres of land near Loon called Mumsy Acres, named after Pam’s late mom. Mike shelved his construction business to go live there with Mary for her senior year of high school. He would teach snowboarding so she could ride every day. Mary worked with the principal of the Lincoln-Woodstock K-12 school to put classes and curriculum together, then she rolled into AP calculus in snowboard gear after riding all day. “There were only 35 kids in the grade. I stuck out like a sore thumb,” she said.
Marcus went to Camp of Champions in Whistler one summer and came back with flow from Sims and Spy, and Mary soon caught the camp bug too. She graduated high school, coached at Windell’s in 2011, filmed with the Too Hard crew, went to Camp of Champions, and then onto High Cascade, where she filmed with Jetpack. She put down a full part alongside Jess Kimura in 2014, which earned her TransWorld’s Rookie of the Year. She followed it up with a segment in street-centric underground favorite Rendered Useless in 2015, which led to the Reader’s Choice award, alongside nominations for Rider of the Year and Video Part of the Year.
The mountains were calling, and it was time to pick up and go. In late 2015, like an actor’s pilgrimage to Hollywood, Mary headed west to Index, WA, to live with Derrek in his home state, and ride more powder. The move made sense. “Her whole scene, the whole production of a day, she’s so totally focused on snowboarding,” Vans filmer Jake Price said.
Earlier this year, Mary had a big cliff in mind near Stevens that she wanted to hit for a project with Beaman and Pelosi. “I just knew it’s what she wanted in her video part,” Price said. They had two windows to shoot it, and neither was very good, but they still gave it a try.
“I hyped her up—told her it wasn’t that big, you got this, no big deal and so on—but when she got to the top and I was setting up at the bottom, I thought, ‘Holy shit, this thing is so much bigger than I thought it was,’” Price said. “I don’t know that any other rider I’ve filmed with would have hit it. She was up there, nervous as hell. I could feel it in the air. She strapped in, got it dialed and just went for it. It was such a badass move.”
Big Air Mare is a fitting nom de plume for this sprite from Rhode Island. The area surrounding Stevens Pass is a fitting location for a snowboard movie classic. The three coming together is kismet. Price has directed, edited or filmed a dozen-plus shred films. Hana, a Bellingham, WA resident, is in her 18th season with Vans; Leanne, who lives on Vancouver Island, BC via Calgary and Whistler, is coming off directing Full Moon Film, an all-female backcountry flick. Price wanted to get behind this project “for the whole of snowboarding.” He wanted to make something different, special and timeless. “A cool, artistic film with a female edge—not girly, not message-y,” he said. “Bring it back to what it is, that we’re all snowboarders and that’s all that matters.”
Yet for Mary, the pressure to perform would be there with or without the opportunity to star in this movie. “I put pressure on myself because I’m addicted to the adrenaline of it,” she said. “It just feels natural to me to be in the zone, grinding every day. Once you’re on a roll, stacking days, there’s no time to think. You’re just in the moment, working, sweating, dead tired, wanting to give up. But you keep going, keep hiking, walking up that line or those stairs one more time.”
We make the short hike to Hollywood Bowl at Stevens Pass. Foot traffic is heavy for a day in the backcountry, and most people aren’t wearing packs. A crew of locals including Kurt Jenson and Matt Wainhouse are ahead on the ridge, and Brian Schaefer is shooting from below. As we come around a bend through a patch of trees, we see a two-foot-deep avalanche crown stretching a couple hundred feet across the bowl. Mary calls Waino on her cell. Her roommate had been buried up to his neck. A snowboard is missing but will soon be recovered. No one is hurt.
We reach another group at the top of the hike. One of them asks us which way to go. “You really shouldn’t be asking that up here,” Mary said. “Do you see that avalanche? That’s class 1 data, people.”
We turn back down the bootpack to find some low-angle slashes inbounds. Focused, smart, driven, calculated, fluid, but not reckless, Mary wants to get the shot, and she’s going to work her ass off to get it, but she knows when to say when.
Arbor teammate Marie-France Roy concurred. “She’s a fiery little nugget. She knows what’s rad, what’s not rad and how to be creative. She’s a true snowboarder. She skates, surfs, she breathes it—she’s a Yawgoon. She’s also realizing that filming is a lot harder than it looks. When you come from the East Coast and watch backcountry footage, you think, ‘I can do better than that.’ Then you get out there and it’s so humiliating. She knows it, and she’s not the type to back down from a challenge.”
The learning curve for filming backcountry snowboarding is steep. It requires lifting 500-pound snow machines, traveling in avalanche terrain, intuiting crew dynamics with lives on the line, breaking trail through hip-deep snow. Mary learned a lot last season. “She was so attentive,” Price said. “She’s small, and she got thrown around by her machine a lot. On day one she was struggling, but on day 30 she was kicking ass—just charging. I have no doubt next winter she could run her own crew.”
Hana agreed, “It was a whole other level of intense with her this year. She’s so driven—just full-go. She got thrown into the fire and had to hold her own. She would get super worked up. It’s hard to see that you’re improving when you’re in it, but from the outside, it was like, dude, you’re crushing. You have no idea how much time and effort go into the stupidest shots.”
Mary watched how they functioned as a crew, how someone directed from below, “looking at this tree, that tree, talking to each other like 2-year-olds, spelling out every last obstacle.”
She learned something new every day. And in the past two years, she’s stacked a grip of firsts: heli lines, buying a decent snowmobile, avalanche safety classes, learning how to get speed for a hand-built kicker, reading the mountains, memorizing lines and keeping fluidity for the camera, no matter what.
“I didn’t want to be the loose end of the crew,” Mary said. “I went in headfirst, spent as many hours in the mountains as I could, just watching how it all works. I feel way more confident than I did last year, and I know I’ll feel twice as confident next season.” Once she began to land in powder, it became a matter of interpretation. And that’s where she really shined.
“Finding new lines, looking at a face completely different than someone else, I’ve used all my experience riding rails to find similar things in the backcountry,” Mary said. “I’ll be scared shitless riding a line, then hit a cliff that others wouldn’t hit. There is just so much you can do in the in-between.”
There’s a generational gap, Hana said, “between what we thought was cool and strived to do in the backcountry and what the next generation is bringing and thinks is cool. It’s been neat to see Mary take some of her sweet style into the backcountry, to see how she’s reading the mountain and snow and the different tricks she wants to do.”
It’s a sense of time and place Mary’s been building toward, and one for which she’s well suited. “A connection to nature, something bigger than us, it puts me in my place,” she said. “It puts everything into perspective to think of the task at hand, whether it’s snowmobiling on the trail, hiking, or standing on top of a line.”
Mary’s in a good place with sponsors—Arbor, 686 and Vans,—despite a snowboard industry that fell into a lull during her breakout years. She has a signature Vans all-weather line coming out for 2018-2019 and is poised to be the future face of the Vans women’s snow program. Still, she works in the summers—this year at the Whistling Post, one of two watering holes in Skykomish. “We’ll see if snowboarding can provide any assets besides experiences,” Mary said. “As great as they are, experiences can’t feed you and your dog.”
Mary feels like she can only film for so long before she decides, “Wow. This is really fucking self-centered and I need to think about someone else for a minute.” At the same time, she’s inspired seeing Hana and Leanne creating legit parts at 35 and 38, respectively. And Mary continues to hustle. She’s about to earn a bachelor’s degree in business management through Colorado State University online. She’s also worked with the Chill Foundation and has been learning about nonprofits and event planning. School scratches an itch that “improves and works toward other areas of life,” she said. “I know this career won’t last forever, and I want to have an idea of what I may want to do after.”
She has a list of life aspirations on her phone: finish her degree, learn Spanish, become a yoga teacher, travel, gain more experience gardening vegetables…
“I can be particular and I’m very organized, so gardening in the Northwest has definitely been a challenge,” Mary said. “You can’t be perfect, and there are going to be bugs in your lettuce, stuff is going to die, but life is going to go on and you’re going to be fine. I’ve learned a lot of life lessons in the garden.”
And she knows this to be true. Indeed, Mary reaps what she sows.
Photo Caption: A parking-lot portrait at Stevens Pass, WA, Mary Rand’s adopted home resort. Photo: Carson Artac
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