If it weren’t for his professional freeskiing career, Jacob Wester would be a bonafide Jack-of-all-trades, everyman. He lives in Sweden but devotes a good chunk of his year to surfing whenever trips are possible. He fishes, he plays guitar and apparently he’s picked up tattooing in whatever spare time he seems to have left. He’s a man of many interests, so it shouldn’t be a major surprise that his skiing, or at least his perspective on it all, has undergone a massive evolution since his X-Games days.
“If you had asked the 20-year old me if I thought I would ever spend half a day climbing a steep mountain in crampons and with ice axes in my hands, only to billy-goat my way back down a chute barely a ski-length wide, without a single turn in powder snow, I would have thought you are crazy for even asking such a question,” the 31-year-old former big air and slopestyle athlete says. “Leaving the terrain park for the backcountry, my only aim was to find the deepest snow with the least effort possible, and I didn’t mind catching a ride with a helicopter or a snowmobile to get to it.”
Let’s just say Jacob’s shifted to an “it’s about the journey, not the destination” approach in the decade since. “After three full winters in Chamonix, I realized that if I only searched for perfection I would have to spend most of the winter on my couch,” he says.
Treat it as a metaphor for greater things in life or take what he’s saying at face value and only apply it to skiing if you want. Either way, Jacob Wester throws out something to ponder that might make you question if powder — or perfection — really need to be our “end game.”
