BLAKE MADE HIS BED COMPULSIVELY, FLOSSED TWICE DAILY, CLEANED HIS GRIP TAPE AFTER SKATING AND ORGANIZED HIS CLOSET FROM LIGHTEST TO DARKEST. HE WAS EVERY MOTHER’S DREAM. Blake’s snowboarding capability and style today, often de-scribed as effortless, are the product of pure devotion built upon countless hours of effort. He hesitates to call himself a perfection-ist, although he’s bashfully aware that the shoe fits. Teenage Blake was a complete anomaly. Typical male adolescence comes with a messy bedroom, questionable hygiene and a general disdain for things that require effort and are not fun. Blake made his bed compulsively, flossed twice daily, cleaned his grip tape after skat-ing and organized his closet from lightest to darkest. He was ev-ery mother’s dream. Blake watched every snowboard video that came out each fall. Nobody in Jackson watched Think Thank. Blake did. He turned me onto Catfish Chronicles, Keep The Change and dimensions of snowboarding which were so far from our local scene that I could barely comprehend them. It all had value to him, and the parts he liked the most played on repeat for the remainder of the season. Blake feels like this devotion to snowboarding chose him more than he chose it. “I chose to accept it wholeheartedly,” he says. “Now, I can’t imagine life without it. When I’m snowboard-ing, it feels like I’m meant to be there, not in a skill sense, but just the depth of feeling and learning it’s given and still gives me.” Every little ski town has an even smaller snowboard scene, and ours was low-key until one of the best to do it squarely put Jack-son on the global map. Many of Travis Rice’s heroics went down in a few zones we repeatedly heard about growing up. They all required a snowmobile and the proper wayfinding knowledge to avoid getting lost in the maze of whoops, high marks and shit-hooks left by our throttle-happy friends. Most of these zones were discovered by Bryan Iguchi. Guch’s gracious impression on every generation of up-and-coming snowboarders in the valley cannot be overstated. He has nurtured some of the most prominent tal-ents in our little corner of the universe and continues to hum-bly break trail for Jackson’s youth today, having first ridden the Tetons around the same year Blake was born. One of Blake’s first days on his own sled was with Guch lead-ing the way out to a zone made famous in 2008’s “That’s It That’s All.” I happened to be there along with Guch and Adam Dowell. We set out to traverse a series of challenging side-hills and full-throttle hill climbs to get to what Guch called “The Holy Grail.” Everything was going well until one hard chunk on the uphill side of the track knocked Blake off his line and separated him from his sled, which carried on down toward the ravine straight at two trees. “The whole thing happened so fast, and I thought it was a goner,” Blake remembers. He couldn’t do anything but watch. I figured that was all I could do, too. Guch had another idea. He was way ahead of us but reacted when Blake got bucked. He pulled a quick U-turn and bee-lined for Blake’s sled, which had miraculously shot straight between the two trees and was en route to the creek below. Guch pulled a move you’d only expect to see in a Clint Eastwood film. He gassed his sled downhill to catch up to Blake’s. Pulling alongside it like a runaway stallion, Guch intentionally stuffed the nose of his sled into the slope to park it and leaped to Blake’s, landed his ass square on the seat and his hands on the bars, ripped it around, flew back uphill, and parked it right next to then 18-year-old Blake where he stood, his jaw at his feet. Grateful as he was for the rescue, the theatrical display of the skillset he would need to get back into these zones suddenly became crystal clear to Blake. He was more than up to the challenge. 072 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.2: Page 72
