“There are certain riders who can stake claim to certain tricks, and I feel like Ben Ferguson has his signature all over the method. A long time ago, I remember seeing a video clip of him doing a massive one off a hip and thinking how much I would love to shoot a method with him. A couple years later, our paths finally crossed at Peace Park in Grand Targhee, WY. On day three, the sunset was perfect, and the quarter pipe was firing. I knew it was going to happen. On the last hit, Ben did a method.” Photo: Andrew Miller To Pat’s point, the method was a huge standout in your video parts and contest runs. That was a James Jackson thing. James told me to think about doing the method like doing a back three—set up turns the same way, then pop off the lip like you’re doing a back three. He was also always against grabbing in front of the binding, and I would always grab between the legs. But after watching Terje [Haakonsen] and [Nicolas] Müller footage I started to grab in front of the binding and find more tweak. James gave me shit, but everyone else was hyped. I’ve never seen him grab in front of the binding [laughs]. Then you started filming with Travis Rice? I got a call from [Ryan] Runke saying Travis wanted me to film in Jackson for The Fourth Phase . I was immediately so nervous. And Rice called me the following week to check in, make sure I was down, asking if I had a sled. I told him I did because I had theoretically won one as Peace Park Standout. I showed up, had to rent a sled, and ended up wrecking it toward the end of filming. That was just after the X Games where it was snowing so hard that no one could take a second or third run. I end-ed up sticking my first run and got a podium, first X Games medal— partied kind of hard and stayed in Aspen too long the next day. We got the latest start driving to Jackson in a snowstorm, got there around a quarter to three in the morning and slept at the Motel 6 in the center of town. We woke up at 4:30 and went to the trailhead. That was the first time I had met Travis, and there was gear and sleds everywhere, probably 20 people. The ice trenches on the trail out were so deep. You did not want to be someone who was holding up the crew, so it was pretty heavy in the morning. We ended up riding a couple lines off the bat with [Mark] Landvik and Cam Fitzpatrick, then we built two different jumps until 7 p.m. The sun was going down, words were being exchanged, people were getting heated as we worked so late. I was so tired I had the shivers and passed out immediately when we got home. Thankfully, the next day was a down day. Eventually I just turned into part of the crew and learned a lot from all those guys: keep hustling, dig until you can’t dig and then keep digging. Put another block on. I had always known how to work hard—if you care about it, work hard, my pops showed me that. But going out with those guys was a different level. You got quite a few shots in that movie. I was just trying to hang. My mindset was that I wasn’t going to front double 10 this jump, but I can do a switch back one method, big switch back rodeo, or seven off my toes, and these were tricks that weren’t at the forefront of people’s minds when they’re hitting bigger jumps. I was trying to take a different approach and people were psyched. They hadn’t had much luck in Jackson the two years prior, but we got good conditions and a lot of the footage that ended up in the movie was from the few weeks that I was there. When did you film Hail Mary with Tyler Orton? The year after [2016]. Those next years were going to ramp up for contests with the Olympics looming, and I wanted to keep film-ing as much as I could, so I wanted to have my own filmer. We figured the easiest thing was to try and make a movie. We went into that way overconfident. Up until then I had been on other people’s programs—I was piggybacked into these zones and these jumps by people that knew what they were doing. I quickly realized how much there was to learn to be able to make my own movie. I went to Japan and didn’t know where to go. The snow was really good, but we weren’t getting the shots we wanted. I felt like a fish out of water. I knew how to snowboard, but I didn’t know all the things in between. It was a big learning year. But it all came together into something pretty solid. We had a bunch of help. Curtis Ciszek took us out in Whistler, and in Japan we got together with Rip Zinger and A-Lo [Alex Lopez]. What really saved the whole thing was linking up with Manuel Diaz in Snoqualmie [WA] and him giving me his seat to ride with Ab-sinthe again up in AK. It was one of the best trips of my life. It was Mikkel [Bang], Kimmy Fasani, Nicolas Müller, and myself. It was my first time riding with Nicolas and it was mind-blowing. That footage ended up tying up Hail Mary . It also ended up in the Absinthe movie that year and although it was short, I’m super-hyped on that part. When you’re flying with those guys they know exactly where everything is, when the light’s going to be on it, where the snow stays cold. That was when I realized I needed to start remembering the zones, the guides. It’s not all just being able to ride your snowboard, it’s everything that comes with it that you need to have dialed to suc-ceed in filming. It was a good turning point. BEN FERGUSON 047
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 17.2: Page 47
