UP TOP COVER Sometimes, like a modern-day Babe Ruth, you call your shot. As photographer Tyler Ravelle explains, “I was out in the Whistler [BC] backcountry with The Manboys crew and I found this little backlit nipple. They were working on a jump and Jody Wachniak was the first one to put his shovel down to come get it. I don’t know anyone else that could not grab their snowboard and have it look that good. He was like, ‘This should be a cover, huh?’ He was telling the crew that he stopped building so he could shoot a cover.” See more of Tyler’s work starting on page 080. Photo: Tyler Ravelle UP TOP 01 Joel Loverin eyes the closeout on a classic line in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. Photo: Justin Kious 02 05 “After a week at Holy Bowly in Banff, AB, I woke up early and was able to get a lift back to the British Columbia interior. Following a six-hour drive we made it back to Kelowna where Jessie Broster picked me up and we decided to go boarding since it would be one of the last days of the season with snow. We went up to the abandoned Bull Mountain Adventure Park to see the caretakers, Don and Jenny. Donny’s old Le Sabre was in a zone where we just had enough snow to set it up. I had a roll of infrared film in my camera that had gotten a little jammed up and was hoping a cool frame would come out of it. Lucky for me Jessie’s favorite trick is a bluntslide.” Photo: Evan Chandler Soanes With both feet unstrapped, Julian Gluck drops in on a waterslide named Avalanche at Roaring Springs Waterpark in Boise, ID. He made a backside turn on the opposing wall and rode back out regular. Photo: Luke Tokunaga 06 03 “Juliette Pelchat’s first scaffolding Big Air experience in Chur, Switzerland. When a rider hits their first scaffolding it’s always a bit intense. On the moun-tain or in the park, you have opportunities to test your speed or pull out of a feature and hike up and ride it again. For a scaffolding Big Air, you don’t get a chance for a speed check, the inrun is icy and, for this event, it was hot so the inrun was also falling apart. You’ve also got 59 other riders pushing to get to the start, which intensifies the pressure. So to show up and ride the jump as comfortably as Juliette did was a personal success for her, as seen here with the frontside 360.” Photo: Chris Witwicki “The winter in Switzerland was a lot warmer than usual. There was a lack of snow with temperatures reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit in mid-February. On this day the temps had dropped and we had to wait for things to soften up. I’ve been to this zone plenty of times, but not with a telephoto lens and this angle. With an unknown timeline for the winter season, we decided to see if this shot would work—a natural hit, a perfect backdrop and Elena Koenz crushing out a method.” Photo: Kevin Cathers 07 Dillon Henricksen flips through the ring of fire at the DIYX STRT Jam in Innsbruck, Austria. The DIYX STRT Jam is the brainchild of Ethan Morgan and Method Mag , a gathering of some of the world’s best street snowboarders for a few days of rambunctious riding and other semi-organized chaos. Photo: Julien “Perly” Petry 04 08 “December 21, the winter solstice, was abnormally cold at Mt. Baker Ski Area, WA. At about 5 degrees Fahrenheit with a couple feet of new snow, it made for an incredibly rare combination of surprisingly stable and bottomless blower. Here, Austen Sweetin digs into an afternoon hack on a day of days bootpack-ing around the resort-accessed backcountry.” Photo: Colin Wiseman “Our trip to Wyoming was my second-ever backcountry trip, first time building a jump and first time battling a trick in the backcountry. This was a sloth roll nose grab. We rode [snowmobiles] for about an hour and a half to the zone and we were next to a riverbed for most of it. It was crazy because it was already like 5 degrees Fahrenheit so to be going like 50 mph next to a river made it almost unbearable. The whole crew was trippin’.”—Zeb Powell Photo: Aaron Blatt 014 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3: Page 14
