Big-Mountain Snowboarding It's back
Big-mountain snowboarding is thriving in a period of unprecedented support. But will the next generation of pro acrobats venture into the backcountry and away from the park?
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As I squint through the hammering snow to analyse the terrain, the mountain looks as if it is slowly inhaling and puffing up its lungs. I’m at Snowbird, Utah, in late January, 2010, the site for the first North Face Masters big-mountain stop of the season, and lake-effect snow is funneling buckets of dry powder onto the venue, covering rocks, filling in dry patches, and creating new landing zones everywhere.
After a dry start to the season, the twisted irony is that the snow might now be excessive. Competition organisers are wrestling with how to let about a hundred riders cut loose over eighty-inches of fresh snow and not have the whole thing slide. I’m just trying to reconcile my decision to enter this comp, having voluntarily thrown myself to the monster that is big-mountain competitive snowboarding.
To put it bluntly, big-mountain comps are not exactly a walk in the park. Eschewing the man-made obstacles and freshly groomed pistes of freestyle events, big-mountain freeride contests are held at the apex of some of the world’s most extreme terrain; think cliffs, crevasses and bone-breaking rocks. Riders typically have a day or two to study the venue and memorise the ideal line, knowing they’ll be scored on line choice, fluidity, air and control (though exact criteria varies from comp to comp). Then, whether they’re tackling powder, ice or anything in between, they go fast, look for places to jump off things, and put themselves in compromising situations.
Big-mountain events may look wild and free, but they’re far from disorganised. Having grown into a well-oiled machine, big-mountain snowboarding seems to be revelling in a period of unprecedented exposure. The North Face Masters tour, the only multi-stop tour in North America, is entering its fourth year, offers a $60,000 prize purse with equal cash rewards across the genders for podium finishers and had registration waiting-lists – as well as a handful of high-profile pros like Travis Rice and Lucas Debari – at every stop in 2010. The Freeride World Tour (FWT) – a mostly European circuit with closed venues, select riders and higher cash incentives – has added two stops to 2011 and introduced a juniors tour for snowboarders seventeen and under. In addition, sponsors and organisers stepped in to resurrect the World Heli Challenge in New Zealand and Alaska’s King of the Hill event, after multi-year hiatuses.
[...] Back at Snowbird however, in the year 2010, the scene is thriving, alive, screaming in my face and freaking me out.
The comp that was supposed to be a two-day ordeal has become a one-day, one-run event on account of relentless snowfall. Waiting at the top of the venue and not wanting to miss my turn, I check the start sheet roughly fifty-seven times in twenty minutes, folding the paper into a small square before putting it in my pocket only to pull it back out every few minutes. The steep curvature of the terrain makes viewing other riders impossible and I can’t hear the announcer, leaving an eerie calm to the air with little to do.
I hear “Three, two, one – rider on course” from the start-gate monitor and drop in. Heavy metal rattles through my head. After a knee-testing cliff-to-flat in the upper section and some fun airs through the trees, the lower zone approaches as does the proximity and energy of the crowd. I’m set on a twenty-footish cliff that a week ago would have landed me on bare rocks. While chopping jump-turns through a six-foot wide chute, I eye the cliff and take a moment’s pause, aim it and send it. I land on my feet and ride away. The stress flows out of me as I skid to a halt at the finish and the sun almost peeks out of the ominous clouds.
It’s an amazing feeling. And despite (or perhaps in spite of) industry trends, the community that’s mushroomed out of this positive energy has never abandoned big-mountain lines. “There are so many people that love freeriding and are coming out of the woodwork for these comps,” says Forrest Burki, winner of the 2010 North Face comp at Crystal Mountain, Washington. “We tend to be of the solo soul-shredder breed and these contests give us a chance to congregate.”
Check out the full feature in HUCK#024, out now.
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Big-Mountain Snowboarding (text) by Dave Zook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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