“I hadn’t shot much with Robin yet, and I saw as soon as she sent this cliff in the Whistler, BC backcountry that we were gonna get gold—big drop, blind takeoff, solid landing. Her motivation was through the roof. I wanted her to land her tricks more than with any other riders because of it.” Photo: Jérôme Tanon MAKE OR BREAK After two years living in Whistler, Robin made a deal with her dad: She’d move to Calgary, AB to attend the University of Calgary and he’d help get her a season pass. There, she moved in with high school friends and called a guy she’d met in passing through her Whistler roommates: James Beach. At the time, James was one of the top riders in Alberta. He invited her to a snowboard club party on campus. There, she met core Calgary riders and fell into the thick of it. Robin spent five years studying and earned her degree. In the first year, she got a job at a local snowboard shop and spent plenty of time learning how to jump at Canada Olympic Park, five minutes from campus. “Of course, I was completely out of control the entire time,” Robin says. “But I avoided injuries, and next thing I knew I was signed up for a contest. I got third at my first one. When I turned 21, I en-tered everything I could—big air, slopestyle, rail jams, boardercross. Something clicked.” She had success in regional contests, earned a flow sponsorship from Roxy, went to Superpark at Lake Louise, and met media lumi-naries such as Pat Bridges and Susie Floros as well as riders who would help her take the next step like Leanne Pelosi and Hana Beaman. A deal with Resorts of the Canadian Rockies followed, which gave her a season pass to the mountains around Banff and beyond. Yet her re-gional success didn’t carry over to the international level. “I went to the US Open, and I sucked,” Robin says. “I’d watch someone do a 540, then try to huck a 720, even if I’d never landed one before. I didn’t have the mental game for contests, the consistency. I knew I wasn’t a very good global competitor.” Again, serendipity struck when she started freeriding in nearby Golden, BC. “It’s weird when something like that happens, where it’s just really innate—you just start going and you don’t really know why,” Robin says. “Just like when I left high school and knew I had to move to Whistler, I knew I had to start focusing on riding the back-country. I just started going and I didn’t know why or how. I was like, ‘This is what I need to be doing.’” So she did. Leanne Pelosi had brought her on for MGT’s female summer snowboard camps in Whistler. Then Leanne showed up in Golden with Tara Dakides to shoot for Runway Films. Robin did well on that shoot, and Leanne invited her to join them in Whistler for the rest of the season. Robin phoned a sponsor, asked for $4,000, and got it. “I ended up jumping in Tara’s RV—just me, her and her dog, Buddy,” Robin says. “I basically attached myself to her, and we went and filmed for the rest of the month in Whistler, learning how to snowmobile.” Robin got a few shots in the friends section of the film and joined the squad full time for the next winter. That led to a shared part. She finished her degree with summer courses at the University of Victoria and spent her winter in Whistler. Then she worked summer service jobs 80 hours a week to fund her winter. Eventually she signed on with South American Snow Sessions, which brought her to Bariloche, Ar-gentina where she progressed her backcountry skills at Cerro Catedral. “Argentina was a fast track to getting better at everything to do with snowboarding,” Robin says. “I learned so much about the backcoun-try. I learned how to use a beacon. I learned all the safety stuff that I didn’t know anything about yet.” By 2009, Robin was snowboarding full time for a living. She began filming with Hana Beaman on her “P.S.” webisode series. Hana’s riding and the camaraderie they shared pushed Robin to hit bigger jumps, try bigger tricks. The next step was Full Moon , another brainchild of Leanne Pelosi, which brought the top female big mountain riders to-gether for what became a two-year project. “Everybody poured everything they had into it because we knew that making a women’s movie was tricky—we really had to nail it,” Robin says. “And we did, which was incredible. I think all of us felt empowered after that, and it definitely extended our careers. For me, it was make it or break it. And I love that pressure. I feel like this year was one of those for me. I was like, ‘Oh, here we go again.’” Robin laughs after that statement. Indeed, as we spoke, she was still in the thick of producing her own project, still figuring out her board and outerwear sponsors, still in the middle of her mountain guide certification. Still finding that fine balance between making it and breaking it. In fact, that pressure to succeed—whether self-in-duced or otherwise—is what continues to drive Robin in snowboard-ing and beyond. “I really rolled the dice this year,” Robin says, laughing again. “I took a big gamble on myself when I left Roxy—I had been with them for 13 years. But I needed room to grow, to expand in the way that I want to expand.” She admits that Roxy was the dream, but that’s how life goes— you build new dreams. Robin trusted her heart, just like that move to Whistler, then Calgary, then back again. “I told myself, ‘This is the year for you. You need to do your best,’” Robin says. 068 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 19.1: Page 68
