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 snowboard without any steel edges and equipped with the most laughable rubber and plastic binding system ever created. While everyone else learned on a Burton Performer 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 muttered 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 snowboard 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, adorning 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.

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 skateboarding. I was merely snowboarding on the concrete during the summer so I could snowboard the snow during the winter. I watched snowboard videos [on VHS] year-round. 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 Legendary Mt Baker Banked Slalom.

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 favorite riders at the time: Jamie Lynn, Terje Haakonson, Temple Cummins, Barrett Christy, Andy Hetzel, Kevin Jones, Daniel Franck, Johan Olofsson, Craig Kelly, 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 snowboarders, 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.

After a two-year hiatus from riding to serve a volunteer ecclesiastical mission, I returned 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 snowboards 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 providing 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 respect 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.

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. I spent a little over a year there before getting an offer with Burton Snowboards, where I worked as the Graphic Designer 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 exploration 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 opportunity to work for what seemed like the coolest company in the world. Not only did Jake personally respond with a handwritten letter describing life at Burton, he introduced 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 coworkers and I. I arrogantly complained about the disconnect between what I considered to be “true snowboarding” 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.

Perhaps it was good timing, because the notorious 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. It was during my time as Art Manager at Altamont that I got to collaborate with GWAR, speak with Anton Corbijn, and meet artist Pushead, who was also originally from Idaho. It was here that I met Mike Watt from one of my favorite bands Firehose, and Abby Portner- a talented artist who was kind enough to direct a skateboard video for a brand I was starting called Broadcast. Such great times.

2016 brought an opportunity to move back to Idaho and slowly re-enter the world of snowboarding. I opened a branding & design studio called SUPERBASE, giving me an opportunity to apply some specific skills that I acquired from a over a decade of working with various brands- or as the professional people call it, “consumer products.” It is through this consulting business that I remain involved in the industry side of skateboarding and snowboarding, but the thing that I am most pleased about is that I have the ability to get into the mountains and ride more.

In writing this chronicle, I have noticed that I employed the phrase “dream come true” multiple times- and still had to restrain myself from saying it even more. That’s simply because I have been fortunate enough to work with some amazing people, direct some great brands, and visit some unforgettable places. This is all from a passion for skateboarding and snowboarding that began decades prior.