Late 80s - Early 90s

Somehow, despite being born in the seclusion of a small agricultural community in Idaho, I discovered the wormhole known as skateboarding. Maybe it wasn’t en- tirely an unlikely pastime since it seems that most kids in the 80s joined in the boom that skateboarding was experiencing at the time. But when most of the other kids eventually abandoned [sensibly outgrew] skateboarding in favor of sports that involved coaches, teams, and jerseys, I held fast to my skateboard. For me, it wasn’t a sport. It was who I was- and as I predicted, it shaped who I am today.

It was through skateboarding that I eventually discovered snowboarding. How do these two related but very different worlds intersect? Within the pages of my f- vorite magazine Thrasher was a small section called “Cold Snap” that was pub- lished in the winter issues of the ‘zine. This half-page section was dedicated to the emerging craze of snowboarding, and when I first saw a photo of John Cardiel e-perimenting with snowboarding but doing it as if he had been a disciple of the snow his whole life, I was fascinated. Obsessed is a better word for it. After all, what else was I going to do during Idaho’s long, gloomy winters? With the first dusting of snow, my trucks and wheels were removed from my skateboard, home- made bindings were made, and I turned my skateboard into what I thought a snowboard was.

Early 90s

Eventually, I convinced my hesitant but supportive parents to gift me an actual snowboard the following year for Christmas. It was a frugal, purple plastic snow-board without any steel edges and equipped with the most laughable rubber and plastic binding system ever created. While everyone else learned on a Burton Per-former or Sims Switchblade, I learned on a Slippery Deathtrap. I began learning to snowboard by jumping off the haystack in the tundra of Eastern Idaho until I mu-tered up the confidence [and the fare for a $17 lift ticket] to take this plastic hazard and a pair of Snorider felt-lined snow boots (not even Sorel’s) to the local ski resort. At night. My first impression of a ski resort was that the chairlifts were so fun and the lights were so bright. I rode in the shadows of the trees to avoid the icy runs and the jeers from the chairlift. Snowboarding was daunting. But I was hooked.

Around the age of 12, my Junior High School held a raffle contest where the prize was a Rossignol 167 Asym Race board with Nitro bindings. I might have been the only entrant, because I won the raffle and took home what became my first proper snowboard—if you can consider a 167 asymmetrical race board a proper snow-board for a 12-year-old. The most interesting component to this story is that this is around the time that a major style shift was happening and snowboarders began riding short, stubby boards, wearing huge jeans, and jibbing everything in sight. I could regularly be seen at the local mountain with oversized Dickies pants, adorn-ing a wallet chain, and trying to jib logs on a 167 board intended to be ridden with hard boots. I studied everything I saw in the snowboard magazines and did what I could to emulate it. But I couldn’t change the board quite as easily as my clothing. Snowboarding allowed me to skateboard the snow.

Mid 90s

In due time, I saved up for legitimate gear and made snowboarding my regular routine. It had to be. It almost seems like it became the entire reason I kept skate-boarding. I was merely snowboarding on the concrete during the summer so I could snowboard the snow during the winter. I watched snowboard videos [onVHS] year around. Pebble Creek held some snowboard-specific events that further solidified my love for snowboarding, including a riding clinic with Keith “Duckboy” Wallace and a boardercross event that I competed in and won first place in not only my own age group, but I asked to compete in the older age groups after my run and won overall 1st Place. I was given a “Piece of The Rock”, Pebble Creek’s equivalent of the infamous Golden Duct Tape awarded to winners of the Legend-ary Mt Baker Banked Slalom.

Late 90s

Since I was one of the only snowboarders in my little town, the local sporting goods store was kind enough to offer me a deal on Rossignol snowboards. It was beyond generous, because I wasn’t very good. But perhaps they saw that I wasn’t going to give up. Rossignol, via the local sales rep, became my first sponsor. One free board per season? Dream come true. One of my favorite boards was the Dave Seone “Friends” pro model which featured a photographic collage of all my favor-ite riders at the time: Jamie Lynn, Terje Haakonson, Temple Cummins, Barrett Christy, Andy Hetzel, Kevin Jones, Daniel Franck, Johan Olofsson, Craig Kelly, Mike Ranquet, Chris Roach, and a bunch of others. Actually, I don’t know if all of those guys were in the graphic- but they were some of the best, most stylish snow-boarders, so they might as well have been on Dave’s board. We could talk for hours about style. Speaking of Barrett Christy, she rips. I think there is a Ween song written about her. I bet you don’t have a Ween song written about you. If anyone reading this still has one of those Dave Seone snowboards in their possession, drop me an email. It’s pretty funny, but I rode a 161 wide snowboard from the age of 14 onward. I’m not a big dude or anything, I just appreciated the landing gear provided by such a big device. It seemed necessary to ride mountains like Jackson Hole and Grand Targhee. I now ride a shorter board even though I’m a few pounds heavier. Yeah, just a few.

Early 00s

After a two-year hiatus from riding to serve a volunteer ecclesiastical mission, I re- turned in 2002 to an even stronger passion for snowboarding. I apparently thought that in order to be a “serious snowboarder”, I had to be spons’d. So, I went to work bothering companies at SIA for product. Wax. Stickers. Anything. Please. I convinced Glissade Snowboards that I could represent their brand with a lot of charisma and a little bit of talent. They were a rad company with great product. I still remember when UPS delivered the first box of sno-boards to my doorstep. Then around 2003, I became the first US snowboarder to join the Mammut team. I was fortunate enough to get Mammut product for several years, testing and pro-viding design feedback on technical outerwear. This was another situation where I certainly didn’t deserve a spot on the roster of such a highly talented team of mountain athletes. But between getting snowboards from Glissade and outerwear from Mammut, I was feeling pretty darn cool. I will always have the deepest of re-spect for both of those brands. But the DIY ethos was strong with me at the time. It still is. So, despite getting free snowboards from Glissade, I decided to scrape up some cash ($4000, if you’re wondering) and start my own snowboard company. I called it Compatriot. A pretty stupid name, in hindsight. Running a snowboard brand was just a way to make an already expensive hobby even more expensive. My little apartment was packed with boxes of snowboards that needed shipped to shops around the world. It was a pretty fun time, actually. Around this time, I also got married and graduated college. It was “real job” time. But that didn’t stop me from chasing the 90s dream of being a snowboard bum.

Mid 00s

Actually, the need for a real job did, in fact, stop me from chasing my dream of being a snowboard bum. I left Idaho and moved to California for a job at Killer Dana Surf Shop. They gave me a chance and I will forever be grateful for that. One of my first jobs was with Burton Snowboards, where I worked as the Graphic D-signer for their brand Analog. This is worth mentioning because several years prior, I had written a letter to Jake Burton as part of an assignment for a career ex-ploration class in High School. It wasn’t until I had worked at Burton for a few months that I remembered writing this letter to Burton, pleading for the opportu-nity to work for what seemed like the coolest company in the world. Not only did Jake personally respond with a hand-written letter describing life at Burton, he in-troduced me to the aforementioned Keith “Duckboy” Wallace, who later taught me my first and only snowboard lesson via a one-day snowboard camp at Pebble Creek. Things come full circle, and because of this I never saw a need to spin more than 360 degrees Working at Burton would have been the absolute dream job, bu instead of being at their slightly-more-mountainous headquarters in Vermont, I was based in the Orange County office and hardly touched the snow. I lived in Southern California for over a decade and pretty much quit snowboarding during this time.

After all, I was working in “the industry” and didn’t have time to do that sort of thing. In fact, this topic caused quite a riff among my co-workers and I. I arrogantly co-plained about the disconnect between what I considered to be “true snowboard-ing” and designing product in the heat of Orange County concrete. What a dick I was. Sorry to anyone I offended by my insistence that the real snowboarding was always going to be in the real mountains, in the same way that real surfing was always going to be in the real ocean. Or maybe I’m not sorry? I don’t know what should be apologized for and what shouldn’t anymore.

Late 00s

Perhaps it was good timing, because the 2008 economic collapse hit, and I was one of dozens of employees that Burton had to lay off. The future of the Analog brand was uncertain. So was my ability to provide for my family. But within a matter of months, I was offered a management role at eS Footwear and Altamont Apparel. These were two of my favorite brands, with such opposing aesthetics that it was a schizo designer’s dream come true.

Early 10s

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