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 bur-ied 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 Yaw-goon. 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 di-rected 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 interpreta-tion. 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 gen-eration 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 big-ger 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,—de-spite 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 snowboard-ing 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. 056 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 16.1: Page 56
