The Down Slope. — The Margin

Cover photo of Conor Halliwell in Hakuba by Jonathan Van Elslander

My first day this season was December 14th. Late by some standards. My oldest friend picked me up at the Horseshoe Bay ferry late the night before and at 4am we were driving north out of Squamish for the Duffy Lake highway. Before sunrise we were skinning up a logging road. Unused to the hike, to the elevation, to the weight of my pack, to the feeling of my boots, my board, my pants, I dragged behind and we didn’t drop into our first run until two PM. I nursed a crushing headache all night and fought the eternal losing battle of trying to keep hydrated while winter camping.

My second day this season was December 15th. It was minus ten Celsius and there was ten cm fresh on top of another untracked twenty, and there was a high cloud ceiling, the sun peaking through at times. No wind. We dropped in for our first run at ten AM and got in three more before the day was up. It’s hard to tell if all the waiting made it feel better, or if my judgement was true; it felt like the best day I could remember.

No less than six of my friends were in Japan this January. Eating okonomiyaki, taking the train, hiking past Australian crowds, dropping into birch lined gullies and prototypical pow. The jealousy was a small piece of the load that broke the camel’s back as I decided to get off Instagram for good. The very last thing I did before COVID in 2020 was spend two months in Japan, where perseverance, a willingness to hike, and the luck of running into a friend and making a new one helped me overcome one of Japan’s worst snow seasons on record. I rode famous lines in Hakuba thanks to the friendship and guidance of a man named Conor from Squamish who I had just met. Before I left Hakuba for Hokkaido, Conor and I made plans for our return to B.C., lines to ride, mountains to climb. Snowboarding had never felt more the focus of my future than right then. In Hokkaido I chased dreams of Neverland and the ghost of Nicolas Mueller around Asahidake as I watched Absinthe’s seminal video on my phone in the hostel bed every night. Snowboarding had never felt more a piece of my personal history than right then.

But the COVID doldrums of 2020 coincided with the beginning of a master’s degree that was supposed to set up my future in BC and I limped through winter 2020/21 in Nelson, BC and not snowboarding much. After a chaotic summer (that I’ve written about at considerable length in Slush), I reluctantly moved into a camper on the back of my truck and spent the winter of 2021/22 hopping around parking lots in lonely towns and lonelier mountains. The thrill of solo splitboarding had worn off and no amount of 4 AM wake ups or 40cm slashes could rekindle it. At the end of February I packed up and went home.

Last year I moved back to British Columbia after two years nursing my bank account through the end of my degree, living with my dad in Winnipeg. In that time on the prairies I rode at Spring Hill Winter Park a dozen or so times and made one trip out to Vancouver to ride Mt Seymour with a friend one last time before he moved back home to the east coast. But with my free time in Winnipeg I found new things to do. I spent a lot of time walking in the city, taking photos, sitting in cafes reading, writing, or talking with new friends. Snowboard videos ate up less and less bandwidth of my computer and of my mind. There was no time to indulge in snowboarding, no obsession to make time for it.

When I got back to BC, anticipating my first winter in the mountains in years, I was apprehensively ready to return to the life I had once imagined. I made plans for which zones to discover, budgeted for a pass, reached out to old friends. I wrote a short piece about my trepidation and about the things I learned in the interim which ran in The Snowboarder’s Journal; it was nothing but the truth. My boards really were waxed and ready to go.

And then I got a job offer too good to refuse and moved on short notice to Victoria, BC, four and a half hours from the nearest chairlift, the balmiest climate in all of Canada. Six weeks into my new life I took the ferry to the mainland for that wonderful but rushed weekend in the mountains, but realized in doing it that the obstacles between me and snowboarding weren’t trivial. Though we’ve tentatively made plans for another trip, there’s a good chance those two days will be my only two days this season. That’s the way it goes.

Pick any old snowboard video and collect the list of names. Where have the years taken them? Many of them are still names to be known. One has a podcast, one is still pro. One has a YouTube channel, one is a team manager. One’s name is still on some brand’s website even though all they do now is publish two pow slash photos a year. Then there’s the rest of them. You’ll see their names in the opening credits and say “oh! Them! I remember them!” You mentally collate the places you remember them from but can’t recall anything lately.

The vast majority of names from any video twenty years ago have slipped into snowboarding’s ether. Some of them can be found on Instagram, maybe still boarding, maybe completely on their own. Once a year they post a photo of the view from a ski lift. They might make a story thanking someone for sending them a free pair of goggles. It’s usually pretty clear they don’t snowboard like they used to. Who does? You can only spend so many winters shirking responsibility before life catches up with you. Besides the true dirtbags (I use that term with the utmost love), the trust-funded, or the paid professionals, we all become weekend warriors eventually.

But also within the credits of those old videos is the also trace of those that don’t seem to board at all anymore. They moved back to the Midwest and own a carpentry company or are a physiotherapist. They post pictures of their dog, their kids. Maybe they have a new hobby. Cross-fit. Cooking. Woodworking. Writing and taking photos.

And then there are those names from the credit rolls of yore that have only seemed to disappear. No social media, no local news articles, no trace. But they aren’t necessarily gone. They’ve just become another civilian in this big world. A civilian who once devoted all their time to snowboarding, to focusing their love for it into a video part. Maybe they haven’t put on snowboard boots in twenty years. Would you still call them a snowboarder?

I fell in love with snowboarding when I was 14 at Spring Hill, but I really fell in love with “snowboarding” – the community, not the activity – when I was 18 and moved to Vancouver and got a season pass at Mt Seymour. It was a bumpy transition. These were the tail end of the Party Snake years. There were days The Pit terrain park was almost too intimidating a place for me, always full of long-haired dudes hiking rails, taunting passers-by. They seemed so old to me then. Were they twenty-five? Thirty?

One of my first memories of Mt Seymour was waiting to drop into The Pit as a group of guys built a board-width take off that snaked up the rocks above the park. The peanut gallery milled around. Someone put the final touches on the takeoff with a shovel and a guy with long hair yelled dropping, coming unexpectedly from behind me like an apparition, and launched a triple backflip, which he took to his feet but exploded on impact. The crowd was momentarily speechless and then cheered. Who was that guy? Memories are a funny thing: in my head I’ve somehow inserted Kennan Filmer into that image. But it could have been anyone. Where are they now?

Despite the punk rock ethos and the ties to the truly democratic nature of skateboarding, snowboarding is a bourgeois hobby in disguise. Seymour and an increasingly small group of ski resorts are family owned, and have goals – for community, for business – beyond profit margins. But most of us are beholden to ski resorts that market themselves to the rich. Family owned or not, the resorts have changed. No one can hike up to the bottom of Big Red in Whistler to ride for free. No one can smooth talk their way to a day pass at Seymour. We have little choice but to put up with the prices, the shrinking park crews. We have to find a way to make it work.

Seymour in those days was a punk rock kind of place. It was almost rarer to meet someone who had paid for a ticket than had skipped the line. Boarders dropped into “dark run” with headlamps to build unsanctioned hits. Dudes of increasing sketchiness smoked in the line or on the chair while they told you about you don’t know shit because you weren’t there for the legendary winter of ’99 (when across the valley Mt Baker recorded world record levels of snowfall). At the end of the day a kind of laid-back debauchery ran without restriction in the parking lot. The few who hadn’t been there to catch a ride, wandered down the road, hoping to save money by hitchhiking instead of catching the shuttle bus down to town.

But despite all that community, it was a hard place to make friends. Though the rare gem shined through – Nic Heringa, Alex Stathis, TJ Koskela, the people who always said hi, always asked how you’ve been, even if they didn’t know your name – those groups in the Pit were not nice. They were not welcoming. But they were themselves. Working class guys – almost all guys – from North Van, or Coquitlam, or some other Vancouver suburb. They complained about their foreman at their construction jobs, about piss tests at work, about their roommates. Above all they bitched about not having more time to snowboard.

When we all become weekend warriors, the time is only half of what we lack. The other half is money. When you are young, you can stomach being broke. You can share a bathroom with 4 roommates or even a bedroom with one. You can survive on instant noodles and beer. When we get old and run out of time to snowboard, it’s because we need to work. We need the money for our own place, for our families, for our other hobbies. This is the most integral struggle to building an organic snowboard community: finding a way to afford it.

Eventually we get old. But modern snowboarding itself isn’t even old enough for the senior’s discount in many places. Almost no one knows what it’s like to grow old as a snowboarder, to live a life over seventy or eighty years as someone who devotes their life to snowboarding. Can it be done? A few years ago, the writer Jon Krakauer posted a photo on Instagram of the late and legendary alpinist Tom Hornbeim climbing the continental divide at 91 years old with a rope tied around his waist instead of to a harness. Krakauer himself is still splitboarding alone in those same mountains at the age of 70. There’s no reason you can’t get old in the mountains.

But the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist of snowboarding has always been driven by the young. The cameras filming the videos that are truly ahead of their time are pointed at groups of young friends, the type of people who still have the free time to snowboard, the type of people who are snowboarding for the love of it, not the business of it. The age distribution of snowboarders, influential or not, has traditionally ballooned around teenagers and twenty somethings. As you get older it’s easy to feel like you’re being left behind. And thanks to the boom of the 2000s, an increasingly large proportion of snowboarders are now in their 30s and 40s, wrestling with mortgages, careers, children. Wrestling with all the things that take up our time.

Not to mention this demographic shift is coinciding with an infamous increase in the cost of living in most western countries. As each year goes by, especially here in Canada, it is more and more difficult to find a place to live, to afford a car, to afford a season pass, to take time off work to go snowboarding. Life is expensive and life in the mountains more so. I can’t find a job in Revelstoke or Whistler and I might not be able to afford to live there even if I did. To make things work, I moved where life took me: further away from snowboarding. People have always changed and drifted away from snowboarding. But as time goes on there are more and more people watching snowboarding drift away from them.

No one told me before I moved to Victoria that on a clear day in the winter the Olympic Mountains and their snowy summits are plainly visible. They seem to rise straight out of the ocean and appear so close I find myself mind surfing their ridges every time I catch a glimpse. When I arrived in town, resigned to a life far from the mountains, I was suddenly daydreaming of trips to plan, mountains to climb, lines to ride. But in reality those peaks are a ninety minute ferry and a country away. They are the sort of place you might make the trip for once every few years, if you do it at all. If you can afford it. If you can find the free time. They exist to me as a dream that has become the back drop of my day to day. They’ve become my Neverland.