I fell hard for all that Haines had to offer. The terrain, snow-pack, camaraderie, lifestyle—the entire process of riding in AK set my soul on fire. I immersed myself in the experience and, after that first trip, essentially dedicated my life to spending the better part of March and April up here. Yet, after every season spent on the Absinthe Films heli program, I found my bank account and adrenal glands completely drained. I’m so grateful for those op-portunities and wouldn’t change a thing, but after a few years of going all in on heli, I couldn’t manage it any longer. I had just be-gun to scratch the surface of what I was capable of in these moun-tains, and I wanted to continue progressing my riding here. As the years passed, the dream of riding in Haines again seemed more and more unrealistic, until eventually I wrote it off as something that I would probably never experience again. Today I find myself at the beginning of my first snowboard trip to Haines in over seven years. As the plane descends, lining up with the small-town airstrip before landing, I’m hit hard with the anticipation of getting back into these mountains. Mountains that helped shape me into the snowboarder and man I am today. But I have my doubts. Do I still have the fire? Can I ride the sort of lines I want without the heli? Will I completely lose myself in this place again? I breathe deep, letting it go. A wave of gratitude rushes over me. I’m so lucky to have a friend like Worm pushing the boundaries of freestyle splitboarding, and that he wants me to join him on his big season finale. In Haines I hitch a ride to town and arrive at the mountain market right at 9 a.m. The woman behind the coffee shop counter is a familiar face and asks me about the board bag and backpack I’ve got out front. I tell her I’m waiting to hear back from friends that are camped along the river, out the road somewhere. “Oh yeah, I know your friends,” she says. “Our dogs have taken a liking to them.” She assures me that if I haven’t heard from them by the time she’s off work, she’ll happily drive me out. The boys roll up shortly after. Worm’s first-gen Tacoma is packed to the gills. Worm introduces me to Inyo, then the two shuffle gear around to make room in the truck. We stock up on snacks and head 20-something miles out of town and into camp. There’s a single snowmachine with a couple splitboards leaning against it, as well as a wood pile and sizable hot tent that Worm and Inyo have been residing in for about a month. They fill me in on what their program has looked like so far, with Worm laying down a colorful story: “The chaos outside of the tent is unfathomable,” Worm says. “Nickelback had been blaring for the past six hours when I hear a voice call out, ‘Kegan, let’s go ride the sleds, get the fireworks.’ We’re trying to sleep through mortars nearly hitting the tent, and snowmobiles doing drag races in the street. What the fuck is happening? It’s the beginning of April and we’ve been on the road since March 12. We’ve been sleeping in a tent while trying to splitboard lines for the past month. Around a week ago, we finally made it to Haines Pass, which lies on the Canadian side of the border from Alaska. Yesterday we were able to splitboard up to Caffeine, we scored, and it was our first big line of the trip. We returned to the pass to find our tent had been parked in by a myriad of campers, generators, sled necks and whatever else you could think of. We were the only tenters up on the pass, the last of a dying breed that would do anything for a chance to ride what Alaska has to offer.” I’m genuinely impressed with their program: riding by day, editing footage in the tent by night. They just finished their lat-est YouTube episode and give me the leak. This two-man crew is running like a well-oiled machine, riding and capturing clas-sic Haines lines on an extremely tight budget, without ever going near a helicopter. I’m thankful to be part of it. Three is certainly company, however three is a little light for an extended glacier campout. We’re looking for a fourth, and maybe even a fifth. Worm gets to talking with Carver Culbeck, a local Haines ripper. Just like that we become four. At 22 years old, on top of his youthful stoke, Carver brings a lot of climbing and rope experience to the table—something that Inyo has, but that Worm and I are relatively green with. We’ve got our crew locked in and our snowboard gear, tents and sleeping bags packed—all the stuff to do the thing. I can’t forget that massive duffle bag full of dry food and a multi-gallon tub of peanut M&M’s, our food source for up to 20 days. Now, we wait on the weather and whether our airplane pilot, Drake, will put us toward the top of his long queue of crews looking for an extended stay in the Chilkat. DRAKE CALLS. He’s ready for us. I’m stoked, but also damn scared. The feeling reminds me of my heli days, when we’d get a midday call from SeanDog at Alaska Heliskiing telling us it was breaking blue out the road, and we’d drop everything to rush out to fly. That was something I hadn’t anticipated going through on this trip. Yet my nervous system settles back down when I begin to realize how much slower everything moves with this group’s approach to riding. At the airport, Drake looks at how massive our pile of gear is and shakes his head. He flies Inyo out with the first load, includ-ing his personal camp gear, the camp stove and satellite phone. That’s in case the weather doesn’t allow us to get everything flown in and Inyo is forced to wait it out alone for a few days. Worm goes with the second load, and I with the third. I step out of the plane and there are over 2 feet of blower powder. Carver arrives with the fourth and final load, we empty the plane, and Drake bids us farewell and motors off. Now it’s just our crew and a big pile of gear in what feels like the middle of nowhere. 066 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 22.1: Page 66
