I never felt free as I was when I was snowboarding at Mt Baker at age 14
It was before we could drive, it was before pussy. It was pure
Getting rides, ferries from Friday harbor, finding places to crash in Bellingham with sometimes college girls from Western in which we had to act older then we were
Lift tickets were 12 dollars, then 17 dollars, we were rolling out of FH with just 20 and we somehow made it work
Mountains of snow
You would get off of these monumental lifts that we thought the rest of the world looked like into the hither
Chair 6 Canucks delux, cutting off right after a fat ollie
Into marshmallow fields into the Canyon, or 6 up to Pan face for wind lip down the backside where you grew up in heater meadows
All the secret places we found like Zelda, the field goal, dipping into trees to find bowls and natural halfpipes…
Later on working at Snoqualmie and realizing that it was shit, but putting my two cents in, there is only one thing at Snoqualmie that works and that is Alpental. I would ride it with Jonas and watch him create these beautiful lines up fallen trees and down over 15 ft. drops. It was art and freedom
They were investing heavy in the youth movement, skeletons and shit, it was smart. They had the hippest cat working for them “Krush Kaluza” he was like some mad idiot with a Billy goat goatee. He must have been 25 at the time and had the most amazing network, he knew everyone and everything in the industry. I learned a lot from him. I learned domination. This kid convinced the booth creek (a ski holding company which bought out Snoqualmie) to paint their water tower tank thing to look like a giant Olympia brewing company beer can, then he invited the whole entire Oakley team to come snowboard the mountain with snowboarding magazine to take pictures, they built the massive jumps and shit down half the mountain and rode the riders up on snow machines.
It was like watching clocks
Spinning in the sky
Later that first night after handing out with some asshole named Matty, materialistic tard team manager, we got to hand out with the actual creators… Travis rice getting drunk and making a pyramids of beer cans… and chopping them in half as the camera man took photos
That was all I needed to understand
|