TOP TO BOTTOM “Storm day at Revelstoke Mountain Resort, BC. I had found this spot earlier in the season and held it in my back pocket hoping for a good day with some homies. Worm with the frontside air off this inbounds tree jib.” Photo: Daniel Stewart “There were a lot of ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ moments on this bike trip to Alaska. The group had a very sarcastic and humorous, albeit dark, take on a lot of these trying moments, and I feel Worm illustrates that mindset well here. Further up the road we would get snowed in, blown off our bikes by semi-trucks, battle frigid weather, encounter sketchy snowpack and infighting, which led to the departure of half the team 434 miles into the trip.” Photo: Stephen Hare Smooth. Tell me about your first trip with Dr. Jones. I went down to the Sierra and we did two camping missions. I’d always learned from people setting super-mellow skintracks, but Jeremy would go straight up anything. He defies what split-boarding is for most people. I showed up wanting to ride fast and hard. I was psyched to go out but was getting skunked every day. It was my first spring mission and all the homies skinned up this icy sidehill. I was in the very back and couldn’t get up. I had to take the splitboard off and luckily had crampons to get me up. When we got up, there was this little bottle from Jim Zellers where he had written something like: “It’s the seventh day of ad-venture, we’re up here, it’s 1994 and about to ride powder to the bottom.” Being in mountains like that is super cool. You’re not just putting all your hopes and dreams into a 900. There’s more to it and you’ll benefit from it in different ways. You’re going to grow as a person. You know you want to go from point A to B and you’re going to do everything you can to get there. Along the way, you problem solve your way wherever you need to go, hopefully as safely as possible. And that’s what I love about snowboarding—when you go downhill, you’re thinking in real time. You’re not really thinking. You hit this feature and the next one is already approaching, and your body is in a flow state. It’s so gratifying for the brain because you’re solving all these problems right as they’re happening. Jeremy wrote this about you: “I hear so many people say, ‘It would be rad to build a jump there or hit that line in the distance,’ but never make it happen. He does. And when he does drop in, get ready to see things you couldn’t imagine. Simply put, he’s your favorite snowboarder’s favorite snowboarder.” Anything to say on that? We only went camping for four days, but there were more rolls than I’ve ever seen in the Sierra. I knew this was a line trip, but I just want to snowboard on cool shit. If it means riding lines, I’m down. If it means making a jump, I’m down. At the very end of a four-day camp trip everyone was beat, but we passed this perfect jump spot. I went up to Jeremy and told him it’s all good if he wants to keep going to the parking lot, but that I was gonna ride this. He watched the session and was stoked on the whole thing. Meanwhile I’m thinking, “Is this fucked up, having Jeremy Jones stop for me to hit this jump?” That’s the whole thing where I’m at now with splitboarding: just go do whatever makes sense. Not a lot of people take split-boards and ride a jump. But when you go into the mountains as much as possible, some days are sketchy, and you’re better off in the trees. Some days everything’s breaking, so you’re obviously not going to ride a line, but a jump landing might be good to go. Even though you are so chill, you are drawn to these really chal-lenging, uncomfortable situations. Your bike trip from British Columbia to Alaska in March and April 2023 really stands out to me. Just driving the Cassiar Highway, with the wildlife and the logging trucks, is gnarly. What made you decide to do that? My buddies are doing a whole bike movie project called Without a Pedal . They already did a movie where they canoed down the Columbia River near Revelstoke and this is the sequel to that slog project. With the bike trip I thought, “I don’t have any money, this is pretty much going to be free because I’m riding a bike to Alaska.” It was the best situation that I had for last winter. But I never trained for biking or had gone bike touring before. Luckily, I was with my buddy Johan who was in the same boat. It was a lot of problem solving. It was hard work. Each day, the first hour was tough. But after that, the legs, you didn’t even notice they were spinning, man. They just kept turning. You’d roll into camp, get the tent set up, lay down and feel like you just left a music festival. After a fair bit of trouble, the universe eventually opened her arms to you guys. At least a little a bit more. Jade City was the halfway point and we’d done two weeks with the whole crew. The vehicle was pulling over in all these sketchy places to film us. All these other little things were happening within the group that was making for a fuss. So, in Jade City things broke down over a stupid little jib and we decided the best thing to do was for the three of us [Garrett, Johan and Nicholas Khattar] to continue. So that’s what we did, and right away we were running out of food. We’d made it to the Alcan Highway, the Alaska Highway, and it was going to be an extra 40 kilometers to go down to Watson Lake to resupply on food. We kept pushing on. At this point I’d run out of weed too, so I wrote on the back of my jacket “I Need Weed.” On day one, three different people all pulled over, so I was good on weed, which was the thing I was stressing the most. 050 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4: Page 50
