Sometimes you just gotta let the goods come to you. Photo: Tino Rischawy//Unsplash
One minute I was darting through the trees, the next I was soaring through the air, body spinning horizontally. Unplanned airtime — but for a second, I thought maybe I could land the plane.
Then I slammed into the cat track, my back hitting first. The sound I heard from the chairlift above me was not a hoot of praise, but an “ooh” of concern. I stood up, knocked the snow off my goggles, and gazed back at my curling tracks in the fresh Japanese powder.
Over the last five years, aside from a few brief trips to the mountains, I’ve focused on finding momentum and longevity in surfing. Moving to California gave me a chance to surf daily — which, especially at first, brought its own set of physical and mental hurdles.
Snowboarding, on the other hand, always came relatively easy to me, in part because I focused fiercely on it starting at age 11. A buddy and I spent two do-or-die days teaching ourselves at a small mountain in New Hampshire. Our attitude: we’re doing this no matter how much it hurts, so we can fast-forward through the “falling leaf” BS to the tweaked tail grabs we saw in Transworld.
Two painful days later, we were conquerors, proud of the dark bruises all over our legs. For skateboarders, the learning curve was quick, and the only hindrance was that I lived many hours from any real mountain. My rural hood, though, provided a hill that filled with snow in the winters, where a neighbor and I learned how to spin 3s and 5s, fall gracefully, and where my dad would bring out score cards and a folding chair and “rate” our tricks.
By the time I moved to Tahoe, working at pre-Palisades Squallywood alongside my motley crew, I was stoked in trees, steeps, and the park. Our first season broke snowfall records, and I’ll never forget some of those lonely, deep carves across KT-22, the Palisades, and the Fingers in the early morn — on the days that I wasn’t teaching “falling leaf.”
Back to current-day Japan, where I found myself on an inherently excellent adventure: my wife and I’s honeymoon. Zooming out for a second: Japan, and specifically Hokkaido, was as amazing as we’d heard — more, even. The lightweight snow, delicious food, sick terrain and steamy onsens blew our minds and warmed our hearts as we trekked across the region from Furano to Rusutsu to Niseko in search of deeper and deeper drifts. Yet as we grinned our way through untouched tree runs, a strange thing happened: I found myself competing with a younger version of myself.
Case in fact, on our second early morning in Furano, I took off on my wife, boot-packing up a barely tracked slope, following strangers on a fool’s errand. After a sweaty hike, I did find an open face of virgin powder, but it came with a taste of some sketchy terrain that kept my heart in my mouth for a few turns. What I didn’t find, was my wife, who bailed halfway through. Luckily, she ditched the hike, not our marriage.
For better or for worse, I was guided by the same impatient hunger for fresh tracks that sunk its teeth into my brain all those years ago. Early in our trip though, despite the near-perfect conditions, I found myself frustrated. As we wolfed down ramen and nursed sore legs, I pinpointed what I saw as the difference, for me, between snowboarding and surfing. In surfing these days, I’m moving forward, pushing myself and progressing. In snowboarding, at least for the first few days, I was struggling to catch up with the snowboarder I used to be.
Back in our 20s, a sense of competitive freedom reigned. The mantra “no friends on a powder day” was etched in stone, as was getting up before sunrise to pack the line. We hiked for new, creative lines, dropped cliffs and neighborhood roofs when the hill closed. Years later, I find I still only have one speed in snowboarding, for better or worse: pedal down.
At first, coping at that speed was painful. I was testing out new gear and hadn’t snowboarded in years. My legs and back screamed (ironically, my back hasn’t been right since a park injury in my 20s). My heels blistered. On one groomed section, flying, I tried a 180 -> nose press -> 180 out — something I used to do in my sleep — caught an edge, and slammed so hard I saw stars. I enjoyed a few more acrobatic tumbles: one where I landed upside down, my board wedged under a rock, another where my tired legs couldn’t follow my mental demands and I clipped a tree with a resounding THWACK.
It was abundantly clear that my body was going to take more than a day or two to work out the kinks. But that didn’t make me want it any less. Ollieing off a little cliff and grabbing mute or method took real effort. A smart man would take it easy. Instead, I kept telling my perplexed wife I “wanted to jump off things.” I pushed her to hike for fresher turns. I took solo laps at the end of the day in the dusk, music blasting in my ears, searching for the guy who got chairlift hoots for going big — not ohhhs cast in sympathy.
I can’t imagine it was fun for my wife, a great rider in her own right, when I took off without knowing where I was going, hauling ass for freshies, or following Australian teenagers to a sketchy powder field. When I didn’t want to wait to consult the map (I’ve never believed in trail maps, or stopping). A few times I had to consciously tell myself to take a breath and appreciate where we were and who we were, in the moment. But then I’d fall right back off the wagon: flying around, taking no prisoners, and sometimes ending up alone at a random lift, tapping my phone with frozen fingers.
A few days in, though, I felt something click. A deep carve through an impossibly light foot-and-a-half of fresh, snow pitching behind me just like a wave. A tucked a corduroy groomer, hand scraping the surface. There were still moments of frustration and impatience with myself, with my body for not keeping up. Yet, more and more flashes occurred when my old stoke returned, when I found myself screaming at the sky in exultation. I began to find the indelible joy that snowboarding used to provide when my body was leaner, my head lighter, and the rest of the world felt cracked open before me. We can train our bodies to improve and embrace our younger selves. It just takes a few casual injuries, endless apres-ski Sapporos, and a beyond-understanding partner.
I also had to push myself to accept that riding snow might feel different now. Tree runs that weren’t crazy steep and didn’t require laser focus let my legs heal a bit. Riding alongside my wife, hooting at the fluffy powder that just kept falling, provided a new sense of euphoria – a different euphoria than making it down a technical line. Slashing the gullies and natural halfpipe as if I were on an endless, cold right-hander brought my new love for surfing to the snow.
I thought maybe I’d lost snowboarding — or that it’d been replaced by surfing. But that’s not the case at all. Things change and we evolve as snowboarders, surfers, skateboarders, and humans. That 20-year-old in far-too-baggy pants flying down that old headwall with reckless abandon is a part of me, but I’m also stoked to continue to evolve — especially as long as I can keep riding fresh lines in Japan.
