Backside 180, Haines, AK, 2010. Photo: Scott Sullivan “AT THE END of the day, you can worry about a lot of things,” Wolle says. “The art is to ride how you want to ride on the best of the days. In 2007, something clicked.” It was a poor snow year for much of North America, but Wolle went to Alaska toward the end of the season. He’d been riding Alaska for several years by then and conditions looked good. But the trip began with a near-death experience. “I was hiking a ridge searching for an entry to a line while Justin [Hostynek of Absinthe Films] and Nico [Müller] were shooting around the corner. I knew there was a big cor-nice on the ridge. I was 50 feet away, but still too close. Hiking back in my own bootsteps there was a huge crack and I started tumbling down with a 40-foot cornice, getting rolled over without a board. I reached the bottom and I wasn’t hurt or buried—nothing happened and every-thing was OK. It made me want to focus on the positive things in life.” Wolle understood the accident as a simple miscalculation that could have led to devastating consequences. After the heli picked him up, he strapped right back in. “I had some good runs that day, and after that, some amazing days,” Wolle says. “Everything’s a process. When you ride AK, you build confidence in certain conditions, making the right decisions at the right times. Everybody puts a lot of money and effort into getting you there. In the end it’s just details, but it takes years to learn. Certain days it really clicks.” Cornice mishaps aside, Wolle put it all together that year. He opened Absinthe’s Optimistic? by launching into Alaskan faces, spin-ning off spines, buttering off pillows, bonking snow ghosts. He played the mountains of AK and interior British Columbia like a skatepark. The next year, he threw down for Ready . Wolle was voted Rider of the Year in the 2008 TransWorld Rider’s Poll, at the age of 30. This is the part of the story where most riders would cash in, sign that big contract, maybe get an agent and an energy drink sponsor, then coast toward legend status. But Wolle didn’t stray from his course. Perhaps because he’d already been in the game so long he didn’t feel the need to blow up. “I love snowboarding and I got super lucky to have great sponsors,” Wolle says. “It was always good to not have a manager, to be happy with what you’ve got. The relationships with those companies turned into friendships. They keep me motivated. Why change that?” 048 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 15.2: Page 48
