Let’s rewind to how you met Mike. A friend of mine in high school, Steve Bolenger, knew this guy named Mervin. Mervin had one of the only vert ramps in Washington at the time. I had grown up skating, skiing and racing bikes. I was done rac-ing BMX and I wanted to start doing something else. In Skateboarder Magazine I noticed all my favorite skateboarders were surfers—guys like Gregg Weaver and Larry Bertlemann. So, I decided in high school that I wanted to surf but didn’t know how I was going to do it. Through Steve I met Mervin, who was friends with Mike. I had gone down to California with a couple friends and bought a used single fin. We had surfboards, but I wanted to start making my own surfboards. Mike was down in Burien, and he was making surfboards for Mervin. In ’83 or ’84 Mervin introduced me to Mike. We chatted with Mike about surf, building surfboards and getting materials because Mervin wanted to build boards too. We both ended up building boards in a garage together. At the time there were almost no surfers in Washington—just a small, older crew at Westport. They were in their mid-30s and they were either Vietnam vets or fishermen or maybe both, but there were only about 12 of them. Then there were just a few of us young kids, and Mike, myself, John Heine and Mervin became a crew. We skied together, snowboarded together, and traveled the coast and explored all the surf spots together. That set my path through life. We would rout slots along the side of the board to slide the steel edges in, then I would epoxy in the steel edges and wrap ’em with nylon webbing and cinch ’em up tight. We’d come back later and put epoxy sidewalls on ’em. That first year that I really started working with him, we started ex-perimenting with the first finless, deep-side-cutted boards. We wanted the boards to work at a ski area—an experiment to see if the sport was gonna be more than a backcountry sport. Were you taking cues from Sims and Burton? Olson was responsible for the geometry at that time. He’s kind of a con-trarian, so anywhere Sims and Burton went, we were going the opposite way. Those first finless Gnus had wide noses and progressive sidecuts with deep flare at the back foot—the camber was centered at the back foot; everything was synced up under the back foot. When you were on hardpack and you put it on rail, it acted like a fin back there and held. Sims had pointy surf noses and Burtons at the time were pretty straight. They weren’t really using ski theory. We grew up skiing. Mike was using ski-carving theory and mixing that into snowboard theory. We went up to Mount Rainier in October to test them. We hiked forever and found this dirty, brown, sun-cupped patch. A storm was coming in. The snow was icing up. We took four or five short runs and he asked me, “What do you think? You think it worked?” And I was like, “I think I felt a turn.” We drove all the way home in near silence, thinking. Later that fall, Mike went down to Bend [OR] and had a day with his brother where he realized it worked amazing. Then, he was all in on snowboards. That season, riding at Ski Acres, I remember looking at the trenches that we made with these progressive radius carving boards—to see those lines from the chairlift was mind-blowing. I knew the sport was gonna be real at that moment. I had to commit to snowboarding, and I had to commit to chasing those dreams. It was the unknown. There was no road map for construction or parts. It was a leap. But my parents sup-ported me because they saw how committed I was. So, you’re 19 or 20, and these guys come into your life, and this is it. Both Mike and Mervin are amazingly positive people, and they were inspiring. They’re doers. Mervin was a contractor and he just built things. And Mike is a creative genius. They opened my mind to the idea that anything’s possible. Mike hired you as an abrasive technician? When I first snowboarded with those guys, they gave me a loaner five-fin snowboard that Mike had made. He’d been building boards since ’77. We went up to Ski Acres [now Summit at Snoqualmie Central, WA] and it was a pow day. First run, I rode top to bottom and didn’t fall. We rode all day. Those boards had two fins on the side in the front, then three at the tail with a bunch of tail rockers. So when you stood on ’em and tipped the back foot down, you engaged the sidecut. But on hardpack, they didn’t work. I think it was winter of ’84. Mike was making boards under Gnu. His buddy John had been helping him, but John didn’t really think snowboarding was going anywhere. I’d grown up fantasizing about working in the ski industry for K2. I was floating through college, get-ting good grades, but didn’t know where I was going with it. And Mike needed help to build boards. Snowboarding was a new sport. Nobody knew that it was gonna be real. So, the question was: Will they ever work on hardpack? Mike wanted to quit school and build boards. He gave me a job. It was in a horse barn in Burien. Mike cleaned the gutters of the lady’s house for rent. The barn didn’t have much insulation. 074 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 74
