Depending on how talkative your friends are, the experience of hiking up a line in the backcountry on your splitboard can be a rather quiet, meditative experience. For snowboarder and aspiring psychotherapist Nicholas Wolken, he views the experience of trudging from civilization in the valley of the Swiss Alps up to the peaks as a metaphor for what’s simultaneously going on in the mind. As he and his friends ascend from the hustle and bustle of town to well above treeline, their heads grow clearer.
“Going up on a splitboard, slow by nature, you start to gaze around. With not much to do, your mind wanders freely,” says Wolken.
In the beautiful flick above, Wolken and friends drill down on the connection between human psychology and experience in nature, and how splitboarding, in this case, can be a form of therapy for a world that often feels “sick.”
