The Snowboarder's Journal • The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4 • WHAT MAKES SENSE TO GARRETT WARNICK

“Garrett Warnick in March 2023 along British Columbia’s Cassiar Highway while biking to Alaska. You can see the quiet confidence and optimism in his eyes. These characteristics are what carried him through the trials and tribulations of the trip.” Photo: Stephen Hare

Garrett Warnick, aka Worm, is one of the most underrated snowboarders out there. He’s resilient, an underground hero, seldom receiving the recognition he deserves. Granted, the 29-year-old is a bit of an enigma in the snowboard world. Instead of growing jaded, he hasn’t lost his focus, and has remained commendably respectful and humble. It’s hard to appreciate the struggles when going through them, yet inevitably we feel gratitude about the hardships we’ve endured. As one of Garrett’s former team managers said, “To those whose opinions actually matter within snowboarding, he’s recognized as an A-list talent.” Which was followed up with, “I wish we could’ve done more to support him.”

As the adage goes, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.” Fortunately, Worm knows his value and refuses to sit idle as empty promises fill his hand. Despite setbacks, Worm’s ability to remain highly motivated commands respect. With confidence to grab the reins and take control of his destiny, he is creating opportunities to showcase his incredible abilities.

Truthfully, I can’t say I feel bad for globally known pros who are stepping out of $500k homes to load up new sleds into dope trucks to go get shots, but I certainly don’t envy them. I’m not saying they aren’t deserving of success, or that financial freedom wouldn’t be nice. Yet 30 years from now, sitting around a campfire with their grandkids, what’ll they tell them? That they were the most well-marketed, best-compensated snowboarder of their day?

Grandchildren are gonna want to hear about the time you rode a bicycle to Alaska midwinter. How you hiked for days, swam across a river, broke into an old mining shack for shelter, all to ride a Haines classic at dawn—and ride it well. If I was one of those hypothetical grandkids, I’d prefer the inspiration of these stories over any level of pro-model royalties. Because when it’s all said and done, you can’t put a price tag on this man’s tales and you most certainly can’t buy his grit.

Jared Anderson, Jed Anderson’s big brother, was our coach in the after-school snowboard program when we were living down in Mammoth. I could worm my way to the front of any lift line. He started calling me Worm and it stuck.

When you eat, your cheek starts to sweat a little. Is that some sort of medical condition, or part of your special powers?

I don’t know. The funniest thing is that it’s been tested and proven that whenever I eat, my cheeks will perspire, even if it’s 10 degrees [Fahrenheit] on the side of the Alcan Highway [AK]. I probably just need to slow down when I eat, but I love food too much.

I was born in San Diego but we moved to Bend [OR] when I was about one. I’m now convinced it was because of Endless Summer 2 and Gerry Lopez moving to Bend. Just last night, my mom was going through old family videos my dad made. We were in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. This family video has my dad talking, but it literally sounds like [Endless Summer filmmaker] Bruce Brown narrating. My dad looks like he is Bruce Brown, except instead of having sick surfers Nat Young and Pat O’Connell he’s got his wife and kids.

Obviously, pops was a pretty serious surfer. How’d you all get into snowboarding?

My dad grew up in California in the ’60s. He was a surfer from day one. He had a Volkswagen bug and would just go surf. But when we got to Bend, he got interested in snowboarding and even made a few snowboards. He had a little low-key snowboard brand called Bear Snowboards. There’s still one left downstairs.

I always wondered how, coming from Bend, you’d gotten to be so good at surfing. You’re no slouch on a skateboard either… Skateboarding was my first love. A good friend of mine’s dad would drive us to all the skate parks because he was a super-obsessive skateboarder. With surfing, my dad was pushing me into waves when I was 3 years old. I got lucky on that front. My parents surf really well. My dad forced my mom into learning so that we’d be surfing on family vacations.

We lived in Bend until I was about 12 before my parents got their travel bug. They’d started a window installation company and when they sold it our family then started doing a bunch of traveling. I was doing homeschool for a year or so. We went to Mexico for a month. We also went to South Africa for a month, and my dad got to live out his Endless Summer dreams a bit. After that my parents were looking for a change. My brother [Josh] really wanted to go to Mammoth and was able to convince them to move there. I was 12 and still kind of sucked at snowboarding. But I realized I’d never learn anything unless I tried it. I was always so scared in the past, but when I got to Mammoth, that changed.

Yeah, my parents left when I was 17. That’s when my brother and I got our first spot in Mammoth together. When my brother left for university, I started bouncing back and forth between Bend and Mammoth. I worked at High Cascade for two seasons, so I was up there for summer, and I’d go back to Bend after that. Then winter came and I was renting random rooms in Mammoth. When I was 18 or 19, I lived with Jaeger [Bailey], Mitch [Richmond] and our homie, Fakie. I lived in my buddy Steve’s closet at one point, and four or five different rooms over the years. I’d come back home to Oregon in the summer and bounce around and live on everybody’s couches so I wasn’t really paying rent.

I didn’t want to be the person that I saw. I saw that the person that never left Mammoth was usually close-minded, arrogant and had an ignorant worldview. To this day you see a lot of those same stereotypes in small mountain towns. People that drink too much. They go to the bar. There’s not a lot of room for personal growth in that environment. We’re super lucky as snowboarders to get to travel and I always felt that, since I’m not really making money, the blessing is that I get to travel. I wanted to make sure I was able to take advantage of that and learn how other people live life. I wanted a perception of the world that went beyond snowboarding. Of course, snowboarding was super important to me, but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that snowboarding was everything in life. From a young age, I wanted to disassociate myself from the mountain town vibe.

I was stoked when your brother, Josh, came out to ride with us at Mt, Baker, WA. Josh used to do those The North Face Masters freeride events with my brother, Aaron. Aaron has had the biggest influence on my riding. I’m curious how Josh influenced yours?

The whole reason I got into snowboarding was because of Josh and my older stepbrother, Alex. Josh and I rode a lot together at Mammoth, and when Josh was about 18, he was doing those North Face Masters. I would have been about 15 or 16. That was the last time we were really riding together tough. Gabe Taylor took us out into the backcountry once, to this sketchy zone called the Headwall of Horseshoe. That was my first time ever riding a real line and I was just trying to keep up with Josh, who was already gnarly at that point. Not long after that he started going to school. He came down to Superpark at [Mt.] Bachelor [OR, 2011] with me. I was riding with my brother again. He hadn’t snowboarded all year, but if I was hitting the jump, he was gonna hit the jump. He did this backside seven Japan and got lost in the air and rag dolled on this park landing so hard that I thought he was dead. He was totally fine and the next try he landed. But we reached a point where he started snowboarding less and I was snowboarding so much. Then he would come up and be like, “You’re my younger bro; I’m gonna do the same thing as you” and he even said that it scared him. And that’s what happened with Quinn [Baumberger] and Josh at Baker for Tenderfoot.

The Cholula Triple Air contest at Mountain High [CA]. I went down there with Jimmy Greenleaf, a skier from Mammoth. I won 10 grand in cash. I was tripping. We started driving back up to Mammoth, stopped at the first In-N-Out and bought a ton of cheeseburgers. Even then I knew this was going to be my biggest payday in snowboarding, ever. At one point I had all the money out on my bed, taking photos with it. I bought a $1,000 guitar. I put five grand away for a car and burned through the other five grand. I bought a pound of weed. Before that I always scraped together for weed money, even collecting those rolls of coins for dime sacks.

Yeah, at that time in life it was pretty sick. I look back now even and I’m still thinking, “Fuck yeah.” There aren’t many opportunities in your life where you’re going to get to be that carefree, so I’m glad I went for it. Now if I bought a thousand dollars’ worth of weed, I would be such an idiot.

Tons of them. Lately I’ve been going through some of them. Just last night my mom was looking at some old footage that I hadn’t ever seen. I’ve got this clip where I must be 7 or 8 and say, “Hey, I’m Garrett Warnick. I want to be a pro snowboarder.” The newspaper here in Bend even did a little thing on me a long time ago, and I still have it. The title is “I Want to be a Pro Snowboarder, Surfer Dude like Shaun White.”

I’d filmed a few things but always with an iPhone or GoPro and was putting some of that on YouTube. But it all really started after I’d won that Shakedown contest at Snoqualmie Pass [2011]. That’s the point where I met Jaeger because he lost his keys that night, like an idiot, so he stayed in my hotel room. It was Jaeger, Mitch Richmond and their buddy, Brother Jay [Jordan Smith]. Jay was Jaeger’s brother from another mother and would help him with all his spots and film them. That night Jaeger showed me all his footage and it was the first time it had ever dawned on me that I could do this. I had watched board videos, but it always seemed like it was one step removed from me. But after watching Jaeger’s footage, it clicked. I remember thinking to myself, “All right, the first step is you go out and film.”

We filmed with Ross Phillips. He was super cool, but I never got to film with him again. After that year I had a few shots in the Think Thank movie and I made my own part with my homie Derrek Weimer and Mitch. We put this part out on Snowboarder and it’s still one of my favorite parts that I’ve filmed to this day. The next year was Snowboarder Magazine’s Foreward and the next year I got to film with you and Vlady [David Vladyka of Absinthe Films].

I didn’t realize at the time that you were still so green to the filming game. You filmed two parts with Absinthe, right?

Yep. That first year was Eversince and I had that part to Riff Raff. It wasn’t the sickest. But the next year…

I’d set it up with Justin [Hostynek] and we knew from the beginning that I was gonna film with them. I put everything into that part, trying super hard. Before leaving Europe, we hit this crazy road gap. Jaeger hopped up there to help me build the lip and at the end he’s like, “Dude, I’m not gonna hit this.” So I hit this road gap into these trees and Vlady’s like, “Sick, man. I’ve looked at this forever and nobody ever wanted to do it. You’re the first one that I got to do it.” And I hit that Camel Toe Jump. That year I was putting it on the line. We went up to Alaska. I was going out with Nicolas [Müller]. We touch down and our guide tells us, “Whatever you do, don’t go near that cornice,” then Nico literally goes and rides right off the end, does a nollie backside rodeo seven off the edge. Our guide looks at us and says, “Or you can just not listen to me at all and do that.” That set the tone for the whole trip. I was following Nico and I was super scared the whole time. But Nico left and Mark Sollors and Vlady came up. We’re circling this Spinese Dragon thing that Manuel [Diaz] coined. At the top, I started doing exactly what I saw Nico do. I wasn’t scared. I started digging at the cornice and then I was ready to go. I dropped in and fucked it up. I fell at the bergschrund twice. But something clicked in my brain.

So, you got the Absinthe experience. After that you did a couple seasons with Bode Merrill for Pepper and Melodrama, then you went and did your own thing, Tenderfoot. You went more into the storytelling side with that one. What was your motivation?

At the time, it seemed wack that we were all putting so much emphasis on strictly getting the shot. You’d end the day and were either psyched because you did your crazy trick, or you were super bummed because you didn’t. With Tenderfoot I wanted to shine a light on the other side of snowboarding and that the coolest snowboarders I know are multidimensional people.

Around that time, you seemed to be on a trajectory to becoming one of the next marquee pros. But your outerwear sponsor ended their whole snow program, right?

Yeah. So it had nothing to do with me personally, but it sucked. I was riding at my best and they told me that they’re pulling out of snowboarding. The one sponsor that was supporting me enough to stay involved was gone, just like that.

When we were with Absinthe, we were super lucky. Justin and Vlad brought so much to the table, making sure we were out in the sickest spots with the sickest riders so we could make the sickest things happen. But I didn’t realize how much they brought until moving on from Absinthe.

Manuel Diaz would refer to us as the “baby boys” because all we had to do was show up and ride. Those guys pretty much did the rest for us.

Yeah, and we got the chance to do our best snowboarding with that crew. I was young and know that my riding has progressed a lot since then. I haven’t been able to really showcase my best snowboarding since filming with Absinthe. I’ve been going out and it seems there’s so many things that could go wrong. That’s what I’ve been dealing with for a long time now. I don’t have everything in place, so I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s hard to film a full part of the best snowboarding possible this way.

I still have something to prove. Without being a cocky son of a bitch, I know I can pretty much do anything I see out there these days.

Jeremy Jones said you’ve quickly become one of his favorites to ride with. That’s sort of the snowboard equivalent of being knighted by King Arthur. How’d you meet Jeremy?

I’d gotten on Jones just before we were at Kings and Queens of Corbet’s [2022]. We were hanging out upstairs in the TGR hotel and Steve Jones and Jeremy were both there. I was trying to work my entrance into introducing myself. Jeremy’s son, Cass, was literally watching the video of me eating shit doing a Chicane into the [couloir]. OK, here’s my moment. So I went up and talked to him for a bit.

I went down to the Sierra and we did two camping missions. I’d always learned from people setting super-mellow skintracks, but Jeremy would go straight up anything. He defies what splitboarding is for most people. I showed up wanting to ride fast and hard. I was psyched to go out but was getting skunked every day. It was my first spring mission and all the homies skinned up this icy sidehill. I was in the very back and couldn’t get up. I had to take the splitboard off and luckily had crampons to get me up. When we got up, there was this little bottle from Jim Zellers where he had written something like: “It’s the seventh day of adventure, we’re up here, it’s 1994 and about to ride powder to the bottom.” Being in mountains like that is super cool. You’re not just putting all your hopes and dreams into a 900. There’s more to it and you’ll benefit from it in different ways. You’re going to grow as a person. You know you want to go from point A to B and you’re going to do everything you can to get there. Along the way, you problem solve your way wherever you need to go, hopefully as safely as possible.

And that’s what I love about snowboarding—when you go downhill, you’re thinking in real time. You’re not really thinking. You hit this feature and the next one is already approaching, and your body is in a flow state. It’s so gratifying for the brain because you’re solving all these problems right as they’re happening.

Jeremy wrote this about you: “I hear so many people say, ‘It would be rad to build a jump there or hit that line in the distance,’ but never make it happen. He does. And when he does drop in, get ready to see things you couldn’t imagine. Simply put, he’s your favorite snowboarder’s favorite snowboarder.” Anything to say on that?

We only went camping for four days, but there were more rolls than I’ve ever seen in the Sierra. I knew this was a line trip, but I just want to snowboard on cool shit. If it means riding lines, I’m down. If it means making a jump, I’m down. At the very end of a four-day camp trip everyone was beat, but we passed this perfect jump spot. I went up to Jeremy and told him it’s all good if he wants to keep going to the parking lot, but that I was gonna ride this. He watched the session and was stoked on the whole thing. Meanwhile I’m thinking, “Is this fucked up, having Jeremy Jones stop for me to hit this jump?”

That’s the whole thing where I’m at now with splitboarding: just go do whatever makes sense. Not a lot of people take splitboards and ride a jump. But when you go into the mountains as much as possible, some days are sketchy, and you’re better off in the trees. Some days everything’s breaking, so you’re obviously not going to ride a line, but a jump landing might be good to go.

Even though you are so chill, you are drawn to these really challenging, uncomfortable situations. Your bike trip from British Columbia to Alaska in March and April 2023 really stands out to me. Just driving the Cassiar Highway, with the wildlife and the logging trucks, is gnarly. What made you decide to do that?

My buddies are doing a whole bike movie project called Without a Pedal. They already did a movie where they canoed down the Columbia River near Revelstoke and this is the sequel to that slog project. With the bike trip I thought, “I don’t have any money, this is pretty much going to be free because I’m riding a bike to Alaska.” It was the best situation that I had for last winter. But I never trained for biking or had gone bike touring before. Luckily, I was with my buddy Johan who was in the same boat. It was a lot of problem solving. It was hard work. Each day, the first hour was tough. But after that, the legs, you didn’t even notice they were spinning, man. They just kept turning. You’d roll into camp, get the tent set up, lay down and feel like you just left a music festival.

After a fair bit of trouble, the universe eventually opened her arms to you guys. At least a little a bit more.

Jade City was the halfway point and we’d done two weeks with the whole crew. The vehicle was pulling over in all these sketchy places to film us. All these other little things were happening within the group that was making for a fuss. So, in Jade City things broke down over a stupid little jib and we decided the best thing to do was for the three of us [Garrett, Johan and Nicholas Khattar] to continue. So that’s what we did, and right away we were running out of food. We’d made it to the Alcan Highway, the Alaska Highway, and it was going to be an extra 40 kilometers to go down to Watson Lake to resupply on food. We kept pushing on. At this point I’d run out of weed too, so I wrote on the back of my jacket “I Need Weed.” On day one, three different people all pulled over, so I was good on weed, which was the thing I was stressing the most.

We kept biking and that night we made it to this little town that had just one house. The house ran on diesel generators; it had a bunch of wolf dogs out front. Johan ran in, it was 10 at night, and he came out yelling, “They’re cooking us cheeseburgers.” They gave us a bunch of canned food and we cooked and ate right out of the can—all the chemicals and everything—eating the soggiest ravioli ever, but it was so good. The next morning the people had us in, and they were super rad. Once we left the support vehicle, we started getting help from people. Truckers were giving us water because one of the biggest issues we had was that our water was always freezing. It was usually around 13 degrees. Once we got to the Alaska Highway, we would stay in our tents next to these outhouses. It was funny because we were in this mythical, beautiful place but in a tent by 10 semi-trucks with their engines running all night. We crossed into Alaska from Canada on this big mountain pass, White Pass. At the top you drop around 3,000 feet over 20 miles down into Skagway. So we ended the trip with an epic 20-mile descent down to sea level. From there it’s just a short ferry crossing over to Haines.

After making it to Haines we had one little sunny window. We flew out with [Fly] Drake trying to get a spot lined up for him to drop us off. But the weather came in and we were grounded for the next few weeks. We didn’t have anything to do and we’re sitting in the health food store in Haines and Ryland [Bell] comes up to us. He thought we looked super bummed, so told us he’d come over later. He came over and showed us a zone. He felt so bad for us for biking all the way up there and having our glacier camping plans shut down, so he tipped us to this mining hut we could potentially find. We still didn’t know exactly how to find it, but there was a one-day weather window coming. We saddled up and started skinning up the snowmobile trail in shitty weather. After the approach we found this weird mining shack. It was locked, but we broke in. There were quite a few mice, so we might’ve got hantavirus, but all good. The next day, when it was still super cold about 5 a.m., we split up under this big cornice to get up. It had just snowed two feet, so we were trudging through all this pow, even though it was late in the season. I dropped first and after going through all that to get up there I was so fired up. I took the first two real turns since getting to Alaska, and as soon as I took that second turn, I just felt it. All the fresh snow, two feet of it, was bomber and I knew I didn’t even have to look back. It was such a tease, man.

That’s the thing with mountains. It’s addicting and once you push yourself a little bit, it’s so exhilarating. With snowboarding you get a certain high from dealing with problems in the mountains that rely on your actual fundamentals of snowboarding. Even those first two hop turns above that double rappel in Argentina were crazy, but so mellow in terms of the snowboarding. It’s cool to get the type of adrenaline you would from a back 10 from a completely different side of snowboarding.

Tell me a little about your latest project with Iñaki Odriozola, Inyo and Worm’s Adventures.

I met Iñaki on the spring camp mission with Jones. After that trip neither of us really had anywhere to stay, so we were bumming it in Mammoth, sleeping in our trucks in the parking lots of condo complexes, sneaking into hot tubs and showers. We had a fun time that summer and were both fired up on doing a splitboard project that wasn’t going to be super granola-y. Most of the time you see splitboarding filmed super far away and it’s pretty basic snowboarding. We wanted to do a freestyle splitboard project and see if we could do the snowboarding that’s just as sick as it is with snowmobiling but to have it be foot-powered.

Inyo is the one other guy that I know that is down to do a little bit of everything. There’s not many people that I’ve hung out with that are down to go build a snow cave and shoot silly GoPro shots and make a YouTube video.

In addition to snowboarding, you rip on the piano. I assumed you grew up immersed in music because it’s such a big part of both yours and your dad’s lives, but I couldn’t have been more wrong about that. How’d you get into making music?

When I was young, I went out and got a guitar, but I never really learned how to play it. I was not musically inclined. Flash forward to going to meet up with you and Vlady in Europe; I had flown into Paris and went straight to the train station there, Gare de l’Est. I had four hours before my train would arrive. I was chilling in the train station and there was a piano in plain sight. By the end of that four-hour chill at the train station I left thinking, “I’m gonna learn how to play piano. I’m going to come back here and play it someday before I die.” I still haven’t done it yet and I’m still preparing myself to really know how to play, for when I step back into that train station.

After that trip I came back to Bend. I got a cheap keyboard, the kind that had the light-up buttons. I stuck with it long enough that I bought a $200 piano. I tried getting lessons here and there but realized I could never learn that way. Eventually I met a teacher named Steven Hartwell in Bend. He told me, “You can do this, but you have a lot of fundamentals to learn before you’ll even be able to identify music.” That changed my thoughts on music completely and I started to come at it from a different approach—one that was more mathematical than abstract. Working with Steve is when I really fell in love with it. And that love persisted, but trying to play the piano and be a snowboarder is crazy.

It sounds like you were really finding the passion and figuring it out but were still only scratching the surface. How did that lead to a full-on two-year program at a music school?

When Jaeger had just passed away [in 2019], I didn’t have any filming plans going on, so I really didn’t know what to do. Then Hostynek invited me up to stay with him [in Nelson, BC], so I eagerly went up there. I was riding at Whitewater one day and I ran into a tree. I was riding by myself. I got super lucky. I was going headfirst at this tree, but at the last minute, I got my feet up in front of my head. I saw life flash before my eyes because if my head would have hit that tree instead of my feet, I don’t think I’d be here.

I had all this rage from Jaeger’s passing and the only thing I wanted to do was sink that rage into snowboarding. Before that crash I remember thinking, “I’m gonna hit it faster. I’m gonna go bigger.” You know? All that aggression. Then as soon as I hurt my foot hitting the tree, it was, “What do I do with my life?” That was such a hard point in it all. I didn’t handle it great, and that was right when COVID and the travel restrictions were starting. I decided that I’d just stay with Hostynek, which ended up being around six months. After I came back home, I wanted to learn more about music and got interested in the idea of attending music school. While staying up there, Justin’s wife, Kate, had told me about the music school in Nelson [Selkirk Music School]. So, I applied. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I ended up getting accepted right away. I dove in. I had no idea what I was doing but I was stoked to be learning. My first year all the classes were over Zoom because of COVID. When snowboard season started, I was traveling with my keyboard because I needed it for a bunch of my classes. I went to the Kings and Queens of Corbet’s with the piano and everything.

I was hustling to get the work done and I missed a bunch of classes but luckily my teachers were all super cool. Class over Zoom was hard, and I lost a lot of the experience because music school is such a collaborative place. So I was excited to move up to Nelson for real and take the first in-person semester. It was a two-year program, so I still had one year left when I got there. Everybody was so experienced; I was the least experienced person there and it was sobering having to cope with that fact.

With snowboarding, skateboarding and surfing, I might not be the best guy, but I could always hold my own. At music school, I didn’t have that. I was feeling like I was stepping on people’s toes, as far as my playing went. All the other kids picked things up by ear after hearing it one time and that was not the case with me. I did get to meet a bunch of awesome people that were super motivated, which was another eye-opening thing. It’s easy to complain about how hard it can be to make it in snowboarding, but the people that are going after music are on another level of motivation. There’re times when I’m not thinking about snowboarding but my buddies in music school, the ones that are truly trying to make it with music, I don’t think there’s ever a time they’re not thinking about it. My piano teacher from music school, Dave, his whole world is jazz music. You can’t separate him from jazz music. He is jazz music.

For sure. I mean, with snowboarding it’s a small ocean. So, to be a big fish in a small, white, upper-middle-class-dominated scene isn’t that hard—relatively. But when you change snowboarding to something, per se, football or music, where people around the globe are all interested and your pond is now the entire world, to be good in that field is on a whole other level.

Yeah, what he’s doing is super cool. My dad got diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’d already been involved with some Eastern stuff but more on the outside looking in. After the diagnosis he jumped in full bore. He got involved with a sort of yoga, Eastern religion/philosophy group. He started playing this music called kirtan on a harmonium, which is a one-handed little keyboard instrument. He’s been playing these yoga classes, and he just went to India to start building a music studio for this Mother Miracle school. This was all roughly the same time that I got interested in music, which is hilarious because our approaches couldn’t be further apart. My dad says that you’ve got to sing from your heart, but to me there’s absolutely no point in singing a single note unless you know the exact rhythm and pitch. We get to play together now and then. We played in Leavenworth [WA], recently. Our friends have this prodigy camp and they played music together in this little talent show. These people are super cool. There’s this one dude there and he has a PhD in peace.

That’d be a degree worth going back to school for. So how else can you apply the lessons you’ve learned at music school into your snowboarding?

With snowboarding, it’s always been about just figuring it out. More aggression, more this, more that, go faster, go bigger, hike faster, whatever it is. Piano is always the opposite. It’s about going slower, taking your time. But more than music, it was a good time of personal growth for me. It was the first time I was moving somewhere totally on my own. I knew Justin and Kate, but I wasn’t relying on them to be my friends. I didn’t really know anybody, and nobody really knew who I was, which allowed me to be a new me. I feel like everybody should do that for a time in their life—get away from what you know and be on your own two feet for some amount of time. Another thing that was so helpful was to be the worst at something and still have people like me and want to be my friend.

Yeah, but in November when my school and snowboard season were overlapping, I would sometimes leave music class at the end of the day and go straight to the mountain to splitboard, just so I could feel good about something because I would sit in music class all day and suck. I craved that release you get from being good at something. But we don’t want our identity to be wrapped up in just how good we are at something.

Everything that I needed to do to become a better musician are the same things I need to do in life to become a better person. Like, listening, but it’s like a whole different type of listening. It’s listening with every ounce of everything you have, which I never do with people in my life, and I should. It’s being truer to yourself, not being self-conscious, knowing that if you play that note that you’re gonna be OK. Finding that flow state in an activity that’s monotonous. It’s a frustrating combination because on one hand I just want to practice and get better and be sick. But music really makes you look at yourself. Because I’m never going to be this machine, this awesome player, unless I’m able to slow the fuck down, breathe through this, and listen with all my intent.

The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4

WHAT MAKES SENSE TO GARRETT WARNICK

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