“Last spring Estelle Pensiero hosted the first annual Low Maintenance event at Baldface Lodge, BC. We knew coming into it that Irie was a talented park rider, but his effortless approach to the terrain at Baldface was impressive. This session was well underway, with most riders dropping rider’s right. Irie stepped up to this feature, poked one out and hyped the crew.” Photo: Dustin Lalik Hagley Gap, despite its limited infrastructure and lack of paved roads, is also where Irie’s dad, Otis, gave Irie his first skate-board. “I would skate on patches of cement that I could find in my village,” he says. “We used to go to this coffee shop in Kings-ton for my mom to do her business, and I had this little [PlaySta-tion Portable] that I would use to go on YouTube and watch skate videos while we were there. So, I was tapped into skating a little bit, and as soon as I was back in the US, I was going to skateparks. Pretty quickly I started kick flipping stairsets. Once I saw every-thing in person, it all kind of clicked.” When Irie neared sixth grade, his parents decided they wanted him in school in the States. Although Irie was raised in Jamaica from the time he was 10 months old, his mom is from Waterloo, IA, his dad is from Cabrini-Green, IL, and Irie was born in Cor-pus Christi, TX. “My mom wanted me to have a US transcript here, for high school and college,” Irie says. “But I was only in Chicago for six or seven months. One day my mom came in like, ‘I got a job with Peace Corps, we’re moving to Samoa.’” For the two years he spent in Samoa, Irie could only skate the carport at their house. Despite the beauty of the South Pacific, island life didn’t exactly float his boat, and he was happy when he heard that they were packing up and moving to Armenia. Armenia is where Irie’s skateboarding flourished. “The infra-structure there is super fire, got kind of an ex-Soviet vibe,” he says. “I was skating around old Soviet statues, on granite ledges, stair sets, and gaps. I was never getting kicked out of spots. All the old ads —that’s the Armenian word for brother—would be down with it. I used to skate right in front of the Gucci store on 11 th Ave and the security guards would come out, give me Sprites and just be super curious, watching it and thinking it was sick.” Arme-nia is also where Irie got his first sense of naturally falling into a crew of rippers. He skated with them almost daily from 14 to 16, when his mom’s job brought them back to the States. Next stop: Washington, DC. “So, basically, I got back to the States and worked at a Zumiez that was lowkey in the hood,” Irie says. “The mall went under be-cause most of the employees were just getting over on the companies that they worked for there, with product going dry mysteriously. My boss was a core skater, and he wanted someone to snowboard with. He got me a discounted setup and I would pull up to the moun-tains on weekends with him. My dad was a boarder when he lived in Colorado back in the day. I had snowboarded once when I was in sixth grade, on a vacation in Wisconsin. On my first day, my dad taught me how to turn and stop and we went to the park where I jibbed a box. I also rode a handful of times in Armenia, they have some badass mountains there. In my senior year of high school, I did the snowboarding club thing, getting driven out on a bus to Penn-sylvania to ride Liberty Mountain and White Tail. But I didn’t start really snowboarding regularly until I was in college.” In McHenry, MD, Irie attended Garrett College and started working park crew at Wisp Resort. He progressed quickly and yearned for bigger mountains. Following his final year at school in 2019 Irie moved to northern California where he hoped he could bring his riding to the next level. “Big snow and big mountains brought me to Tahoe and once I came out west, I felt at home for the first time in a long time,” Irie says. “I was always traveling growing up. I felt like I found my community. The local crew Free Dawgers took me under their wing. It was so sick to find a crew who was killing it and accepted me. I was getting much better so quickly with bigger mountains, rails, jumps, more snow than I’ve ever seen, a half pipe, all those sorts of things. Then, it just started snowballing.” IRIE JEFFERSON 041
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3: Page 41
