The following article was originally printed in the October 2024 Issue of Slush. To access the full article click here.
When did you realize that expedition-style snowboarding was your ultimate calling?
It was in Bolivia in 2018. That was 100% complete pure exploration. There were no guidebooks. There were very rudimentary maps. There was sparse satellite imagery. It was pure adventure, figure it out as you go. That trip worked out. We got the big first descent of Chaupi Orco, a 6,000-meter peak. It was my first time, all of our first times, being that high. It was almost 20,000 feet. It was me, Danny Davis, Gray Thompson, Nat Murphy, and Justin Kious, who was shooting photos. That descent was awesome. The best part about that expedition was this spine wall that we didn't even know existed until two weeks into the trip. We rode it at the 11th hour before we had to go down. It was powder conditions, and we could freeride it like you would in Alaska, but it was at 18,000 feet. So that was the "aha" moment, the universe telling me, "Okay, keep coming this way. You're onto something here. You're on the right path."
What gave you the confidence to think you could manage a high-alpine expedition of that nature?
It was like I had confident uncertainty. It was accepting that there's a good chance you might go there and sit in a tent for three weeks, and being okay with that. Maybe not even stepping on snow or strapping in. But I was well aware of the hazards because I had a pretty good amount of experience at moderately high altitudes. I had been up to 17,000 or 18,000 feet in Chile and in Mexico before. That season, I had ridden volcanoes, I think I went to Whitney twice, and I did a lot of riding in the High Sierra. A lot of camping, a lot of moving with heavy backpacks. You train for something like that by going snowboarding, splitboarding, and winter camping.
But there’s a difference between a day trip at altitude and spending an extended period of time there.
There's that whole other element. Being able to sustain long days on end with a heavy backpack is what it comes down to. I understood the process of expeditions in the sense that it takes time to shuttle all your gear to your highest camp. You move up incrementally and come back down and sleep at lower altitudes. After a handful of rotations, you're ready to stay at high camp for the rest of the trip. In Bolivia, we were well-prepared for the hazards involved in terms of glacial travel, avalanches, altitude sickness, waterborne illnesses. But interestingly enough, the danger—the hazard that almost took us out—was getting caught in a lightning storm at 19,000 feet. Gray Thompson got struck by lightning on that trip. He was fine, but he was shook up for sure. It's interesting because you watch the clip that's in our movie, Range of Mystery, his GoPro is on, and you can hear the buzz of lightning in the camera and hear him go, "Holy shit, I think I just got struck by lightning." We were on this ridge in a whiteout, and we were all covered in metal—all of our glacier gear, you're holding two axes, and everything is ringing. Your whole body to your core is just vibrating. It was scary.
It makes sense. When we fly in airplanes at 20,000 feet, we’re above the clouds.
We immediately descended lower onto the glacier and stripped ourselves of all of our metal. We kind of got into a lightning-prone position, basically crouched down, standing on a rope or a backpack to be grounded. We were counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning strikes, and it was instantaneous. That was just a classic example of a curveball in the mountains where anything can fucking happen.
Besides avoiding lightning, what else did you take away from that trip?
You're always picking up little tips on every trip for ways to improve your quality of life on the next one, whether it's gear or food. Certainly, bringing more food than you think you’ll need has now become a staple after going on food rations in Bolivia. Maybe what I was least prepared for back then was that it was only going to add fuel to this fire and addiction to these types of trips. You only get more obsessed with it after you have this wild, grand adventure, and you're quickly thinking, "What's the next thing that we're going to do because that was so much fun?"
What was that next thing?
Denali, which from a snowboarder's perspective is one of those things that you have to do if you want to progress into this realm of big mountain riding.
It’s like a rite of passage?
It’s such a rite of passage to stepping into the bigger mountains. There are some novelty peaks out there, but Denali truly is a freerider’s mountain. Once you're at the 14,000-foot camp, which was our advanced base camp, all of the proud lines feed right back to there. You're riding 3,000 to 6,000-foot lines right above camp. It's a direct fall line right down to your tent. There's no traversing or bullshit flats. It truly is a great place to post up for a couple of weeks and go shred. Looking back, that trip to Denali in 2019 is one of the greatest trips of my life, not just because we had amazing conditions and rode a ton of lines, but because of the crew that we had. There were nine of us, all close friends, all very talented riders, so the energy and vibes were exactly what we were looking for. I also think we were able to move the needle forward a little bit. In '89 or '90, Jim Zellers and Tom Burt made the first-ever descents of Denali. On our trip, we were able to ride nearly every major trophy line, which aside from a trip that a couple of skiers did in 2007, no one had ever done before. We were able to make some first descents on the North Summit as well, which is something that people have looked at for years. For whatever reason, the conditions lined up for us.
So many riders in your realm gravitate to Denali with varying degrees of success. What do you think are the primary pitfalls that hinder people when they attempt to ride it?
Weather and team dynamics. Ultimately, it always comes down to the conditions on the mountain. You can have the most perfect conditions imaginable, but if you're there with the wrong people, you're probably not going to reach your goal or have the experience that you're looking for.
Have you ever run into that dynamic where somebody is out for themselves instead of out for the crew and their goals usurp everyone else’s?
For sure, summit fever. I, too, can get hyper-focused on a goal. But obviously, there's a fine line when it affects the safety of others. I've definitely been on trips that have been very heavily focused on other people's agendas or their film project or whatever. You lose the plot a little bit when you start introducing cameras into the mountains.
Given the crazy amount of time and resources and human effort it takes to make these types of expeditions happen, I can see how a person's judgment can get skewed. Particularly if the odds of everything coming together that got you there in the first place are slim.
At least with the people I surround myself with, we try our best not to take unjustified risks. So if the line's not in condition, it's not in condition. Deep down, when you go out on a trip, you have a sense of if it's meant to be or not. Since that Denali trip, my biggest expeditions haven’t worked out. I had a few years where all of my big goals worked, and then from 2021 to 2023, they didn’t.
Which expeditions were those?
Saint Elias in Alaska, which I went back to this year, and Dhaulagiri in Nepal. Dhaulagiri is an 8,000-meter [26,000-foot] peak. I was really shooting for the stars there. We never got a proper window to give it a try due to weather. The monsoon season never really ended. Then we got word that Hilaree Nelson had passed away on a mountain nearby, so we pulled the plug after that. You kind of know deep down whether or not things are meant to be. That's the hardest part—listening to your gut. At a certain point, if you truly believe it, if you have all of your intentions set on it, the universe eventually rewards you. But if you scored every time you tried to go and do these grand things, they wouldn't be as special as they are. If you had good luck and always made it to the summit and always got the line, they wouldn't be these holy grail adventures.
And that's when you could also start getting complacent.
Totally. You need to be humbled every once in a while to be reminded that you're just a small speck of Gore-Tex in a sea of rock and ice. But at the same time, you have all these factors, and you're like, "God, I've worked so hard. So many people have dedicated time and their knowledge and their expertise, and we've got sponsors and the commodity of this season." How do you shut that down when you're tired, you’ve got adrenaline, you're excited?
It has to be a skill set in and of itself to be able to sit there and have a rational perspective and wipe all those other factors away.
Where I'm at now on these bigger trips is if I know deep down in my heart that we did everything possible to try to set ourselves up for success, but the mountain won't allow it, I can leave satisfied. Yet that’s also a constant process to figure out, too. Do you have this gut feeling out of fear for the inherent danger of being in that landscape, or do you have a justified fear because you're worried about avalanches or you're worried about something else? That's always the hardest thing to decipher—are these objective hazards versus unjustified fears? Because if you're really pushing it, you're going to get scared. That's a fact. It's learning how to deal with that fear and leaning into it and being able to take a step and ask yourself, "Why is this so scary right now?" Trying to just be as rational as you can be. As for sponsors and their expectation of success, thankfully, with support from Patagonia, there is never any pressure to do anything. They are well aware of the realities of the mountains. Kristo, our boss man, told me, "Hey, man. We just want to support your vision right here. If you go out and sit in the tent for three weeks, it's all good." Therefore, any pressures I feel are internal pressures. We operate in a gray area out there. At the end of the day, you're doing dangerous things. You're going into a dangerous environment. So the constant game is, how do you go into a dangerous place and do it safely? That's why these perceived successes are so rare and few and far between. Then, in turn, that's what makes them so memorable and life-changing.
You build your season around one or two big expeditions. That in and of itself brings inherent stress in that getting to that peak and making the descent can define your whole season. If it doesn’t happen, then you have a gap in your resume. I find it similar to a pipe or park rider training their whole life in hopes of getting an Olympic medal, and if it doesn’t work out, they have to wait another four years for another chance at achieving that goal.
I could see similarities with going for the Olympics because these grand goals do feel like they're on a similar level, but I would rather be at the mercy of the weather than at the mercy of four judges in a booth.
When you back away from something you’ve worked towards, do you get depressed?
The younger me probably got more bummed out than I do now. Even the difference from five years ago to now feels like a big gap in terms of mindset. The younger me would see it very singularly—as success is scoring the line and failure is not. Now, especially after this year, my perspective has shifted in the sense that I did everything I could do, and at the end of the day, it just wasn't meant to be, and I'm cool with that.
Do you think the tragedy of Hilaree passing has given you a bit more maturity in that realm as well?
I think so. Jeremy Jones has this great graph in his book The Art Of Shralpinism. It's a comparison between close calls in the mountains or serious accidents and your confidence. It's a bar graph. You're on the up and up in terms of confidence, and then there's a close call or accident of a close friend or loved one, and then your confidence dips down again. Then it slowly builds back up, and then it dips down again. I've seen that happen to myself firsthand this season alone—having the trip of all trips in India and then going straight into Saint Elias in Alaska and getting beat down again...