Frontside 900 tailgrab in the Mt. Baker, WA backcountry. A few days after this deep bluebird session, Matt returned to the same jump with Jus-tin Hostynek for their first bout of filming together for Isle of Snow . “I think it had maybe snowed three inches on top of our tracks,” Matt says. “The powder was not there at all.” Photo: Colin Wiseman Despite his drive, Matt’s physicality never matched up with his competition. “I was pretty much just hanging out with my friends do-ing the high school thing—partying, whatever,” he says. “Then I start-ed growing around junior or senior year—finally. I probably gained 40 pounds and six inches in those two years. When you’re 19 or 20 years old and got all these new muscles, it’s a good time to get really into snowboarding.” Despite plenty of powder and backcountry access at Stevens Pass, it was the parks that hooked him. And once Matt decided to take snowboarding as seriously as the sports he’d poured himself into previ-ously, he discovered where his natural talent lay all along. “It helped to have friends I was progressing with, like Ryan Brown—we’d been friends since before snowboarding,” Matt says. “It was always an, ‘If he can do it, I can do it,’ thing between us. About two years into it, I ended up getting a shop sponsor with Stevens Pass Snowboard Shop. They watched me go from backside 180s to 720s and were like, ‘Oh, this kid wants it.’” While honing his skills in the park, more established Stevens locals began paying closer attention to the up-and-comer. “I feel like I earned the invite from some of the older locals to go ride the powder lines Stevens Pass has to offer,” Matt says. “One of the first dudes to take me under their wing was Ian Wood; he showed me lots of lines that I still love to ride. My very first backcountry jump was Powerline Gap, which there’s actually a shot from in my part this year.” Around 2011 Matt started riding with a GoPro and landed five “Video of the Day” clips on their social media channels. “It was weird because it made me a bit of a local celebrity at Stevens Pass,” he says. “And I was never really trying to be a celebrity. I’ve just always been into making videos, even outside of snowboarding, and those two things went hand in hand.” In addition to the viral GoPro clips, Matt was putting together sea-son edits, which by that time were chock-full of backcountry hammers. His 2013 highlights caught the attention of another Pacific Northwest legend: 686 Team Manager Pat McCarthy. “I guess I had a knack for landing on my feet that season,” Matt says, “but I think I just got lucky.” THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL 105
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 17.4: Page 107
