“Mid-December brought bluebird skies and mild temperatures to the Mt. Baker, WA, backcountry. On one of those days, I joined Robin and her now-fiancée Austen Sweetin for a tour behind the ski area to dig a profile pit. Turned out Austen had an engagement ring in his pocket that day but didn’t feel comfortable proposing in front of me. Sorry, Austen. Hope the late-afternoon party lap made up for it.” Photos: Colin Wiseman GUIDE GOALS “I never set out to be a guide,” Robin says. “In those early years in Whistler, I wanted to go snowmobiling, and I didn’t know how to do it. So I took a first aid course and got a job as a snowmobile guide when I was 19.” Then, when she went to Argentina to coach, she started bringing SASS students into the backcountry. There, one of the campers was buried in an avalanche. Although they were able to dig the kid out un-scathed, Robin realized how unprepared she really was. The same year she went to Baldface Lodge, BC, for a Roxy shoot and started talking with Jeff Pensiero about furthering her knowledge. He extended an invite to work there. The catch was she need to have her Ops 1 certifi-cation. Two years later, in 2014, she was at Baldface for guide training with her certification in hand. Robin tail-guided for three weeks straight at the start of the season and enjoyed the structure it provided to her often-chaotic life. It also helped Robin’s snowboarding. “I began to understand the mountains on a different level,” she says. “I could talk to guides on a film trip, then look at a face and know where the snow would be the best. When filming for Depth Perception , I felt like all of the training and education and experience in that side of my snowboard life was a huge support mechanism and it was allowing me to ride way better.” The more Robin learns about the backcountry, the more she can carve her own path in the mountains. This year, she finished her Cana-dian Avalanche Association Level 2 training, which she’d been working on for three years. Now she’s applying to the ACMG program and is working on technical certifications, in hopes of becoming a lead guide soon. It’s a symbiotic relationship with her snowboard career, one that’s grounding, one that will hopefully set her up for a lifetime of turns. “Part of being a backcountry snowboarder is having the education necessary to reduce your risk out there,” Robin says. “That’s a profes-sional to me. The more time you spend in the mountains, the more you’re exposed to the dangers, and I wanted to be serious about what I was doing—because I’m pretty unserious about a lot of stuff [laughs]. Guiding has become part of my progression as a snowboarder, part of my growth into bigger expeditions, part of what has allowed me to return from the chaos and follow a structured path that has led me to this turning point in my career.” For Fabric , Robin organized a week in the mountains in Baldface’s new tenure. But before that, she had another major life event at Baldface. After spending December in Glacier, WA, Robin went back to Canada. Pensiero invited her to quarantine at Baldface. Her then-boy-friend Austen Sweetin came with her, to the place where the couple had met, many years prior. “On day five of our quarantine, it was the most gorgeous bluebird powder day, and we went out for some turns before breakfast,” Robin says. “It started to cloud over, but Austen kept saying he wanted to go up high to ‘check the weather.’ I’m like, ‘It’s obviously foggy,’ but he kept pushing for it, so we went up there, and he pulled out a ring and proposed. It turned out he’d been car-rying that ring around the mountains for more than a month, just waiting for the right time.” The couple has had to consciously add structure to their relation-ship as they each chase storms all over the world, produce their own video projects, and live the hectic lives that come with professional snowboarding. Yet they’ve found ways to stay grounded: building a container house on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Ucluelet, BC, sharing a home in Glacier, aligning for winter trips when they can. This year, more than ever, they were able to spend significant time together—in Glacier, at Baldface, in Alaska, and at Natural Se-lection in Jackson. Now they’re engaged—another big moment in Robin’s big year. 074 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 19.1: Page 74
