From most people’s perspectives, you still go big. Well, I’m not going nearly the size as some of the big dogs are go-ing. Hitting hundred-foot cheese wedges, big air jumps and slope-style runs, I’m nowhere near that caliber of snowboarder anymore. I don’t think that matters. I don’t think it matters either. People are more drawn towards the smaller, creative, obtainable snowboarding these days. Not to say that the big, gnarly stuff doesn’t have its place—I love watch-ing that—but there are ebbs and flows and things that trend up and down throughout our careers and lives. It’s often the clips where you are just having fun that end up being people’s favorites, like the nose catch front flip off that cornice in Flagstaff, AZ for Heavy Mental. That stuff is some of the most fun, when you’re just doinking around and like, “Oh, this would be stupid.” I don’t want to dog on people for not being creative, but there was a time where so many [video] parts were just like: “I gotta go through the progression of tricks, I gotta build this jump, I gotta get a back seven, I gotta get a front seven, cab five, cab nine, switch back five…” That’s a great formula, always has been. But what spices everything up are the stupid moments that you wouldn’t neces-sarily spend a lot of energy or time doing but they, oftentimes, are the most fun, and the most rewarding. I try to balance all that. That’s what makes a good video part in my eyes. Speaking of balance, what do you get up to in the off season? So much of our lives have revolved around snowboarding 100 per-cent of the time that in my older age, I really look forward to the time off my snowboard as well. I try to soak up all the non-snow-boarding activities that I can until the resorts open. I’m trying to not grow up too much in my 30s. I took the whole summer off to enjoy, because last summer I had a bunch of plans to do all this fun stuff then ended up selling and buying a new house and remodeling it the whole second half of the summer and all of fall. I made up for it this summer. I get depressed and lost in my life when I don’t take the time to focus on skateboarding, and it gets hard when you’re in your 30s to put that time aside. I’ve been trying to make that a priority in my life and I’m a happier person. It keeps me young. That reminds me: you’ve been experimenting with microdosing for a bit. Are you still making vitamin mixed capsules? I am. I make my own capsules of mushrooms and microdose them. I’ve been doing it for the last two years or so. I started taking them for anxiety and depression and it has helped me a lot. I still take them, not as consistently anymore, but they help me in functions and events that I’m very anxious about attending. They also help me cut down on drinking a lot. I feel that they are a very power-ful tool to use in mental health and beyond. That said, I don’t like to eat a bunch of mushrooms and use it to trip. I hate that. But in small doses I feel like they have a very therapeutic property. If I’m hitting a gnarly spot or scared of a trick or a feature, I will bring a little microdose. It helps center me and calm me down before trying something for the first time. I was stand-ing on top of this big step-down gap that I had been looking at all winter and I was really scared to hit it because it was a short run-in and a big gap. I was breathing heavy, really scared. In that moment it really sank me down into a grounded state and I was able to calm my nerves and relax my breathing and focus on the task at hand. I was able to just drop in and jump off it. I feel like it helps a lot in situations like that. It has a lot of mental health benefits, just like listening to sad music. How have the traumatic experiences of your past—like being buried while filming in [Haines] Alaska [in 2016]—shaped your growth as a person? I had some PTSD for an extended period of time afterwards, which made me shy away from backcountry snowboarding and the mountains in general. For my incident specifically, it was a case of getting too comfortable riding something. I’d gotten dropped at the same spot twice before and felt it was safe, but that was in the early morning. Towards the middle of the day, when things started warming up, I got dropped off again on this big pillow mushroom on top of this ridge that was on this giant rock cliff. When the skid of the helicopter dug into it, it failed, and the snow broke away when I was standing on it. For a while I was very, very triggered by heights. I remember camping in Moab the summer after, and we were camping along this cliff line. One night everybody wanted to have a fire next to the cliff and I kind of had a panic attack and had to excuse myself from the trip and just hide for a minute. It really triggered me. It really had an impact on my mental wellbeing for a while. Like with anything, time helped me heal, but also taking a step back from those things helped me refocus. Slowly going back and riding powder again and realizing how healing and fun a powder day is, especially just riding Brighton where it’s small and fun and you can be pretty safe. I don’t really know if it was one specific thing that helped me heal that wound. It really helped me take more time and look at the back-country a little more in-depth, to slow down and observe my surroundings more, instead of chasing the clip, or the rush, or whatever. That whole experience helped me grow not only in snowboarding, but mentally, as a person, it gave me more strength to slow down and take things in more clearly, more deeply, rather than rushing into things in life. I’m not going to say it was a good thing, but it definitely was positive in the end to help me grow as a person. BODE MERRILL 075
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3: Page 75
