Mountain Men Art in motion
There are those who argue that snowboarding simply isn’t a sport. I agree with them. Snowboarding isn’t a sport, it’s an art form. Not only that, it’s the purest, most important art form on earth; no pretentious dealers, no pokey galleries, no awkward private shows packed with unbearable trendies sculling free wine and miniature bruschetta.
There’s only one canvas in snowboarding, and it isn’t for sale. The first time I became aware of it is when I started a small avalanche off piste in Livigno and found myself buried up to my neck. An Australian skier found me maybe twenty minutes later – by which point I’d managed to free one arm and was halfway through smoking what I assumed would be my last ever cigarette.
He asked what had happened, but I couldn’t remember much. A sudden flash of light, a sound like muffled thunder, a not unpleasant sensation of being carried along in the current of a soft white river. It was like a surreal dream, and by the time I got back to the chalet I was sure I’d imagined the whole thing – until I looked up the hill and saw a patch of bare rock in the far distance and my slide below it turning pink in the setting sun. My mind may have had trouble remembering the details of that little dance with death, but the mountain, it seemed, was determined not to forget.
I guess that’s when I started thinking about the legends we leave behind in snowboarding. From rickety chairlifts I began spending more and more time studying the trails left behind by riders long gone, trying to piece together their lines like some snow-bound forensic investigator; a windlip slashed here, a cornice dropped there. I still spent double maths lessons with an issue of Transworld tucked inside my textbook, but where once I was gawping at the tricks themselves, now I was scanning tracks in the background, weighing up the success of previous landings, wondering who and when and what had been going through their minds. It was like looking at the light of long dead stars. One issue even featured a trip to Livigno with Mike and Tina Basich taken the same winter as my avalanche; I recognised the Carosello dam drops immediately from the pictures, and began wondering if any of the lines in the background were mine.
I’ve since been lucky enough to know a few of snowboarding’s true artists firsthand; wild men and women of the mountain who set their alarms for 6am every morning, just in case; who save precious seconds by making sandwiches the night before, sleeping in their thermals and eating their breakfast on the first lift.
It’s riders like these that truly understand the mountain; that live for it, learn from it and come to see it as an extension of themselves. It’s in their duct-taped trousers and four-year-old reversible jackets; the way their eyes are constantly scanning the hill for new lines. In a scene populated by kids who can 270 onto and off of rails without ever having cut a powder turn – in a world where intelligent people spend their hard-earned cash on all-in-one day-glo bodysuits plastered with corporate logos – it’s riders like these that remind us why we’re here in the first place.
We’re all linked on this great white canvas. Our lines have crossed a thousand times – yours and mine with Terje’s, Tom Sims’, Travis Rice’s. Some of them you can even see from the valley floor. They all look the same from the outset, but every one tells a different story, and some of them are more valuable than others. And while the snow may come and cover them up, the mountain never forgets. So next season, assuming it snows at all, model yourself on the wild men and women of the mountain, and try to make your lines count. You’re an artist, after all.
This story originally appeared in Huck #004.
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