“Seven-hour drive, five hours of sledding, a quick pat down, and Worm boosted this backside 720 in Valemount, BC. One day of good weather was worth the trip.” Photo: Justin Kious The Snowboarder’s Journal: How did you get the nickname Worm? Jared Anderson, Jed Anderson’s big brother, was our coach in the after-school snowboard program when we were living down in Mammoth. I could worm my way to the front of any lift line. He started calling me Worm and it stuck. When you eat, your cheek starts to sweat a little. Is that some sort of medical condition, or part of your special powers? I don’t know. The funniest thing is that it’s been tested and proven that whenever I eat, my cheeks will perspire, even if it’s 10 degrees [Fahrenheit] on the side of the Alcan Highway [AK]. I probably just need to slow down when I eat, but I love food too much. Where were you born? Where’d you grow up? I was born in San Diego but we moved to Bend [OR] when I was about one. I’m now convinced it was because of Endless Summer 2 and Gerry Lopez moving to Bend. Just last night, my mom was going through old family videos my dad made. We were in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. This family video has my dad talking, but it literally sounds like [ Endless Summer filmmaker] Bruce Brown narrating. My dad looks like he is Bruce Brown, ex-cept instead of having sick surfers Nat Young and Pat O’Connell he’s got his wife and kids. Obviously, pops was a pretty serious surfer. How’d you all get into snowboarding? My dad grew up in California in the ’60s. He was a surfer from day one. He had a Volkswagen bug and would just go surf. But when we got to Bend, he got interested in snowboarding and even made a few snowboards. He had a little low-key snowboard brand called Bear Snowboards. There’s still one left downstairs. I always wondered how, coming from Bend, you’d gotten to be so good at surfing. You’re no slouch on a skateboard either… Skateboarding was my first love. A good friend of mine’s dad would drive us to all the skate parks because he was a super-obsessive skateboarder. With surfing, my dad was pushing me into waves when I was 3 years old. I got lucky on that front. My parents surf really well. My dad forced my mom into learning so that we’d be surfing on family vacations. We lived in Bend until I was about 12 before my parents got their travel bug. They’d started a window installation company and when they sold it our family then started doing a bunch of travel-ing. I was doing homeschool for a year or so. We went to Mexico for a month. We also went to South Africa for a month, and my dad got to live out his Endless Summer dreams a bit. After that my parents were looking for a change. My brother [ Josh] really wanted to go to Mammoth and was able to convince them to move there. I was 12 and still kind of sucked at snowboarding. But I realized I’d never learn anything unless I tried it. I was always so scared in the past, but when I got to Mammoth, that changed. Your parents moved back to Bend at some point, but you stuck around Mammoth. Yeah, my parents left when I was 17. That’s when my brother and I got our first spot in Mammoth together. When my brother left for university, I started bouncing back and forth between Bend and Mammoth. I worked at High Cascade for two seasons, so I was up there for summer, and I’d go back to Bend after that. Then winter came and I was renting random rooms in Mammoth. When I was 18 or 19, I lived with Jaeger [Bailey], Mitch [Rich-mond] and our homie, Fakie. I lived in my buddy Steve’s closet at one point, and four or five different rooms over the years. I’d come back home to Oregon in the summer and bounce around and live on everybody’s couches so I wasn’t really paying rent. Why’d you move away from Mammoth? I didn’t want to be the person that I saw. I saw that the person that never left Mammoth was usually close-minded, arrogant and had an ignorant worldview. To this day you see a lot of those same stereotypes in small mountain towns. People that drink too much. They go to the bar. There’s not a lot of room for personal growth in that environment. We’re super lucky as snowboarders to get to travel and I always felt that, since I’m not really making money, the blessing is that I get to travel. I wanted to make sure I was able to take advantage of that and learn how other people live life. I wanted a perception of the world that went beyond snowboarding. Of course, snowboarding was super important to me, but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of think-ing that snowboarding was everything in life. From a young age, I wanted to disassociate myself from the mountain town vibe. 044 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4: Page 44
