“The Whistler, BC backcountry had been suffering from little snow and lots of wind, leaving most spots scoured. We found this honey hole of a zone, spent an entire day riding it, then came back the next day. That’s when Beau noticed this backside pillow air, which set up perfectly for a method.” Photo: Ben Girardi It started in classic Canadian fashion, at a toboggan hill in Ontario. He first “snowboarded” on an old skate deck before strapping into a Black Snow. The Bishops were a hockey family for the most part, but Beau’s grandparents liked skiing. They took Beau and his older brother Craig to Mount St. Louis when he was 11 years old, for their first day of real snowboarding. “We spent the whole day basically belly sliding, until my grandpa took us to the bunny hill and taught us how to use edges,” Beau says. “He’d never snowboarded, but he was able to figure it out.” From there, he grew as a snowboarder with his friend Dan Fair, whose family had a chalet at Blue Mountain. They’d bring Beau to ride on weekends. As Beau finished high school, he decided to pursue professional snowboarding. His dad, Wayne, understood—he’d chased a dream himself, playing in the International Hockey League for five years. He’d been an enforcer, making it as far as a farm team for the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche. “He definitely raised me to be tough and never give up,” Beau says. “And he fully supported my snowboarding. He wanted me to go for it.” With his family’s blessing, Beau moved to Whistler in fall 2004. He tuned skis and snowboards at a shop near the base of the Village Gondola at night and rode every day. There, Beau met Dave Fortin. He picked up the Whistler program fast, started filming with Gnar-core, and gained sponsorship via Ride Snowboards, Dragon Optics and Westbeach. Under the mentorship of Gerhard Gross, Dave Rou-leau and Myrosha Daley, Beau built on the fundamentals he’d learned in Ontario’s notoriously icy parks. He came up alongside such guys as Chris Rasman, Emanuel “E-Man” Anderson and Rusty Ockenden. They embodied the ideals of Canadian snowboarding: Hold nothing back, respect your predecessors’ style, and indulge in just enough de-bauchery to keep things raw. The price of admission, however, went beyond talent. During Beau’s first summer in Whistler, he got a seasonal job with a log-home-restoration crew. He spent his days on scaffolding, grinding and sand-ing logs behind a respirator and goggles. “It’s probably the dirtiest job I’ve ever done,” Beau says. “Your whole body is covered in an inch of sawdust, you’re sweating like crazy, and you’re hanging over some gnarly cliffside with no harness trying to reach the end of a log. There were a lot of moments when I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing? I came here to snowboard, not wreck myself working on some mil-lionaire’s house.’” BEAU BISHOP 049
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 17.1: Page 49
