In September of 2001, Peter Turner checked his voicemail at the soon-to-be-defunct Colorado offices of Volant. On it was one very long, very excited message from Shane McConkey, who had called from New Zealand. The message consisted of a string of superlatives, sprinkled liberally with F-bombs, and can be conservatively paraphrased as: “These are the best Goddamn skis ever made.”

“It was absolutely hilarious,” recalls Turner, who at the time was Volant’s R&D manager and the one who made sure McConkey went south with some peculiar new boards. “He was down there with some of the best skiers in the world and it was really nasty conditions—wet, heavy stuff. Everyone else was doing eggbeaters while he flew down the faces. It was an amazing review.”

The maiden voyage of the Spatula was taken somewhere deep in the Southern Alps and it was the penultimate moment of McConkey’s shadow career as a ski design iconoclast and innovator. This was the first ski to acknowledge that powder snow is the exact opposite of hard-packed snow and therefore required the exact opposite design philosophy—hence, reverse camber and reverse sidecut. But while his insistence on such bizarre (at the time) concepts finally came to fruition in New Zealand, the ideas behind it began gesticulating a full five years earlier.

It was the summer of 1996, and McConkey was having beers in a pub at the base of Las Lenas, Argentina. He was a full season into his crusade to convince his peers that the Volant Chubb—the fat ski that started it all for him—was way better than whatever race stock GS ski they claimed was the ultimate powder ski. This was right in the middle of the shaped ski revolution, and so increasingly the race stock GS skis in question featured deeper and deeper sidecuts. When these deeper sidecuts were brought into powder, they exaggerated something that McConkey had begun to realize: sidecut actively works against you in deep snow.

The skinnier the waist of a ski is in relation to the tip and tail, the more focused the weight of the skier will be on the part of the ski least able to float in powder snow. McConkey would eventually deem this phenomenon “The Pool Cover,” since taking shaped skis into powder was akin to running across a pool cover: your weight sinks right to the bottom while everything around you tries to float. But back in 1996, when he sketched a pair of skis with reverse sidecut onto a Las Lenas bar napkin to illustrate what the ideal powder ski might look like, his own friends—the skiers with whom he was defining what we now call “big mountain skiing”—mostly thought he was crazy.

“Some even laughed at it,” McConkey himself would recall years later. “I took the napkin home and kept it in my ‘cool and funny stuff’ file in my cabinet.”

A few years later, Turner was in Squaw Valley with a foot of fresh snow and a quiver full of variations on McConkey’s signature ski: the Huckster. The skis all reflected the prevailing design wisdom of the time, which sought the best of both worlds by increasing both the waist width and the sidecut. The idea was that the former would promote float while the latter would allow the ski to rail turns on hard-pack. In practice, however, all the increased proportions did was create the same Pool Cover effect.

“After testing he said, ‘Try this ski,’” Turner says now. “I did a run off West Face, in 75 Chute, and it was like, ‘Shit, these work really good.’ Then on the run-out, they were really weird—floppy. I pulled them off—they were just regular Chubbs—but when I put them together I realized why they didn’t ski right on the groomed run.”

The skis belonged to Scott Gaffney, who helped test that day. When it was all over, he mentioned to McConkey that he really preferred his beat-up old Chubbs to any of the new Hucksters. It turned out, those beat-up old Chubbs were completely bent up at the tips and tails.

“I was just stating a preference and didn’t have any inkling of why one was better than the other,” says Gaffney now. “At that moment, the light clicked on in Shane’s head.”

That same night, McConkey dug out the old bar napkin with his initial ideas about reverse sidecut, paired them with what he’d just learned about reverse camber, and the Spatula was born.

Everything about the Spatula was at odds with everything about how Volant’s skis were made. The ideas didn’t make sense to the engineers, the concepts were impossible to build with their existing tooling, and the company was facing a financial crisis that had everyone but Turner and engineer Ryan Carroll completely disinterested in pursuing McConkey’s radical line of thinking. It took them two years to design, engineer, and build the first four pairs—all which were done by hand, on-site in their office, before being shipped with McConkey to New Zealand.

Not long after Turner received McConkey’s ecstatic message, he included McConkey’s and Carroll’s name on a provisional patent for the Spatula. Not long after that, Volant was bought by Canadian hardgoods manufacturer Gen X, who quickly turned around and sold Volant to Atomic. And not long after that Turner found himself facing some completely baffled Austrian ski engineers.

“They told me, ‘There’s something wrong with the file you sent us. The curves are all wrong. The ski is backward. You need to resend the file,’” Turner says. “I said, ‘Make it. That’s what we want.’ They looked at me like, ‘You have got to be kidding.’”

Atomic produced 300 pairs of the Spatula—bringing the total number produced to something less than 1000—before they lost interest. Not long after that, they lost interest in Volant altogether. But there’s a reason why New Zealand was the penultimate moment in McConkey’s shadow career as a ski design iconoclast and innovator. The ultimate moment was still to come.

In early 2005, McConkey showed up on the heli pad in Whistler for a day of skiing with clients of his new sponsor, K2. It was the sort of boondoggle for your sponsor’s retail partners that qualifies as “work” when you’re a pro athlete, but McConkey chose that morning to make a point.

Before leaving his hotel room, he took his Apache Chiefs—at 131/98/116, a respectable powder ski by most people’s standards—and secured wire around the rivets in the tip plate. He then tied the wire off around the toe piece of the bindings, crudely but effectively reversing the camber on the skis.

“Theoretically, the snapping of the cables could have severed his leg or an appendage of a much-valued K2 distributor,” recalls K2 Brand Manager Jeff Mechura. “We decided we better build McConkey some skis.”

Not that Mechura didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed McConkey after Volant folded. A consensus freeskiing icon by that point, McConkey encountered no shortage of interest from several major manufacturers. But he was abundantly clear that he had no intention of signing with anyone who didn’t take his design ideas, and the Spatula, seriously.

Few who skied them could disagree that the Spatula was a quantum leap forward in powder ski design, but it was nevertheless something of a zero-sum game: arguably the best powder ski of all time was arguably the worst conceivable ski for nearly any other condition. And while any robust product line needs a great powder ski, manufacturers primarily sell skis designed to work where people primarily ski: variable-to-hard packed snow.

“The reverse sidecut thing was just wacky,” says Mechura. “In anything other than powder, it works way too hard against you. But we could tell from the beginning that reverse camber had real potential—and not just with our powder skis.

When K2′s designers explored how reverse camber might be applied to more traditionally accepted ski designs, they discovered a whole lot of grey between the black of the Spatula and the white of their standard cambered and sidecut products. Their first foray was the Pontoon; a ski that addressed the Spatula’s lack of versatility by shifting the reverse camber toward the tip and tails—a concept now universally known as “rocker”—and keeping the ski camber-less underfoot with slight sidecut throughout. To ensure it still floated like a Spatula in powder, they gave it truly ridiculous specs: 160/130/120.

At the time, McConkey was both surprised and impressed: “I would have built something completely different,” he said in the 2007 edition of K2′s SKEEZE Magazine. “I’m glad they didn’t listen to me, because the Pontoon is ten times better than the Spatula ever was.”

This, of course, is nothing more than humility on McConkey’s part. The Pontoon was born of a series of sketches he provided to K2′s designers, not at all unlike the sketches he gave to Turner and Volant seven years earlier. “You look at those sketches,” says K2 designer Matt O’Laughlin, “and they’re full-on engineering drawings. But the point with Shane is that he never let the details drag him down. An engineer or a designer would get caught up in the details of ‘How do we get through this problem?’ Shane had the larger idea in his head, and that’s how he got through that stuff.” The idea, it turns out, was a whole lot larger than maybe even McConkey realized.

Today, Powder’s Buyer’s Guide features over 100 skis, half of which feature some variation on the rocker concept. Browse the big mountain lines on offer from most of the major manufacturers and you’ll find rocker applied throughout, but the concept is no longer just considered powder-specific. With park skiers noticing how their powder skis butter off lips and tip press on rails and boxes more easily, companies like Armada and TK are exploring how the concept can be applied to more traditional park skis.

That McConkey’s ideas, which were so out of sync with mainstream ski design just five years ago, can now be so ubiquitous raises two important questions. The first is: what ever happened to that patent Turner filed in 2003?

“A provisional patent is just a foot in the door,” he explains. “By the time it came up, Atomic had bought the brand and they weren’t interested in the patent. They just dropped it. It’s all public domain now.”

While the product directors at most manufacturers will tell you they began exploring things like reverse camber as soon as the Spatula hit ski racks, the truth is that what many of them were doing was exploring how legal it may or may not be to even pursue it. But if the Atomic acquisition signaled the death of the Spatula for Volant, it was in fact the rebirth of ski design for everyone else.

And even the tragic death of McConkey himself can’t change the answer to that second important question: If his first runs on the Spatula were the penultimate moment of McConkey’s career as a ski designer, then what’s the ultimate moment?

Look at the racks in your local ski shop. That moment is now.

Issue: October, 2009
Assignment: Feature story about a tiny ski area outside of Los Angeles and the struggle to keep it alive.

HED: L.A. Story

The wind whips the car back and forth, and it’s snowing hard, hinting at a bitter cold outside. Winding along the Angeles Crest Highway as it zig-zags up the southern slope of the San Gabriel Mountains, we duck in and out of low clouds and catch glimpses of ridgelines hundreds of feet above. The road looks like it belongs in the southern Sierra or central Oregon, but then we see the spotless white Cadillac Escalade on 22-inch rims that we’re following and remember: We’re less than 50 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

And I’m with the kind of skiers and snowboarders you can only find in Los Angeles; Rob Bruce, a TV director and ski filmer, and Kevin Zacher, a photographer who shoots big-budget auto campaigns and snowboarding. In the last few days, Rob’s had meetings with Hollywood execs, Kevin’s shot photos of gorgeous models, and I’ve ridden set waves from a decent northwest swell. But now, we’ve barely climbed above the smog and we’re about to go…skiing?

A road sign that reads “Ski Lifts” points forward, as if there were any other direction to go. The Crest Highway traverses the San Gabriels and with the exception of two state highways and a handful of National Forest access roads, you can go neither left nor right. Just beyond mile marker 50, tucked into a steep north-facing gully, a 32-year-old double chair bearing the name “Mount Waterman” ascends a perfectly gladed face. The roadside snow banks tower eight feet high and are carved to accommodate a sliver of parking spaces.

The mountain isn’t quite open but we’re here for a sneak peak. Founded in 1942, Mount Waterman was one of the first ski hills in North America. It provided the first on-snow experience for generations of families in Los Angeles. But since 1999, when the original owner sold it, the area has fallen off the map. It has seen infrastructure crumble, controversial new owners come and go, permit trouble, closures, and death. It’s operated only intermittenly since the winter of 2001/02 and was erased from the Southern California ski landscape in 2006. But, with any luck, its grand reopening will happen soon.

The Cadillac eases of the Crest and Rick Metcalf, Mount Waterman’s new owner, steps from the behind the wheel into the grey light and blustery wind. He’s wearing ski pants and a thermal top, but his slight sunburn is more beach than mountain. Metcalf looks and walks tall, with a broad chest thrust out from his six-foot-plus frame and the confidence of a guy not afraid to tackle a big wave or a bigger mountain. At 44, he has the thining hair and the girth of a guy who probably doesn’t do either as much as he used to. This is the man who stands to save Mount Waterman—provided he can actually get the place open to the public. As we’re suiting up in the storm, he walks over. “Any of you guys have a hat I could borrow?”

It should be good skiing today. Seven days ago, a three-foot dump produced the best conditions of the year. But that doesn’t guarantee anything in these mountains. That’s because San Gabriel snowpack is best described as “yes.” As in, Do these mountains get deep, light powder? Yes. Do they also get rain, sleet, 60 mile-per-hour winds, and 72-hour melt cycles mid-winter? Yes. Sometimes, they get it all in one storm. Nailing the conditions here requires an obsessive attention to the National Weather Service and a willingness to accept that your best guess will be wrong 50 percent of the time.

Chair one takes us maybe 600 vertical feet straight up from the road and a moist cloud hangs above the tops of the huge lodgepole pines lining the lift path. The place looks like a local ski, but doesn’t sound like one—it’s wrapped in an eerie silence broken only by murmer of conversation that barely make it from one chair to another. On Sam’s Alley, a steep gully that carves down the area’s northwest boundary, the tree skiing rivals the best that Mammoth has to offer. We’re standing at the top, where it’s untracked and looks promising. Kevin drops in and makes a sweeping arc across the pitch. His board makes a sound resembling a highway plow blade scraping the pavement, loud enough to echo through the trees. He comes to a stop 100 feet below us and grimaces. The gully is still untracked.

Even if the poor visibility didn’t make the skiing nearly impossible, the difficult snow conditions would, so after a few runs, we call it a day. We gather back at the cars to discover a thin layer of ice across everything. As we’re getting out of our boots, Metcalf walks over again. “You guys got an ice scraper I can borrow?”

Sixty-nine years earlier, an 18-year-old student at USC’s engineering school named Lynn Newcomb skied from the top of Waterman’s north-facing gully and thanked the convicts. Were it not for the prisoners who the California Division of Highways mustered in 1929 to hack their way into the mountains above the town of La Canada Flintridge the Angeles Crest Highway wouldn’t have made it this far. Newcomb’s family established a homestead, the Newcomb Ranch, six miles west of here back in 1888, but until the convicts went to work, reaching the snow above 7,000 feet was impossible.

In 1939, Newcomb bought skis out of a mining equipment catalog and earned the ridge the hard way—climbing straight up the gully. For two winters, he explored Waterman’s terrain entirely on his own. Then one day, his father, a contractor who made his fortune building the first generation of mansions in Bel Air, came to him with schematics for something called a chairlift. “I said, ‘Where are you going to put it?’” Newcomb, now 88, recalls. “And he said, ‘I’m not going to put it anywhere. You are.’”

On January 1, 1942, Mount Waterman opened for business. After a few years in the Army Air Corps training pilots to fly P39s, Newcomb got to work developing the place in the same manner he skied it: learning as he went. He struck a deal with the region’s first forest fire squad. They needed practice hacking down trees, and Newcomb had trees to hack. Newcomb also knew the Division of Highways required lumber for a tunnel they were planning to build nearby. So he offered the felled trees in exchange for the convicts dragging them off the hill. Hence, the perfect glades that to this day greet skiers on their way up Chair 1.

Newcomb operated Mount Waterman nearly continuously until 1999, installing all three of Mount Waterman’s double chairlifts himself. During that time, the Crest Highway was completed and new ski areas like Mountain High and Big Bear popped up further east in the San Gabriels and the San Bernadinos. Eventually, these areas became full-fledged resorts with detachable quads and—more importantly in a region that’s as likely to carry a two-foot base as a 10-foot base on any given season—snowmaking. “I wanted to have snowmaking,” Newcomb says, “but I didn’t have that kind of money and I didn’t want to beg for it. I didn’t want a corporation—fuck those guys.”

Combined with modern lifts and ever-expanding terrain parks, the other resorts capitalized on the snowboard boom of the mid-90s in a way Waterman couldn’t. “The parents had to go where the kids wanted to go, and that was the park,” says Tom Moriarty, a lifetime Waterman local.

Newcomb would likely never have sold the ski area were it not for his wife of 57 years contracting cancer. In 1999, Newcomb sold to a group of four investors called the Angeles Crest Resorts. Mount Waterman became a corporation, and things went sideways from the get-go. ACR had massive expansion plans and little patience for bureaucracy.

Two years later, a chairlift at the Kratka Ridge ski area—a second, even smaller ski area a few miles down the highway from Waterman that ACR also purchased—was damaged by an avalanche and sat un-repaired for months. In the summer of 2001, ACR was cited for operating without proper permits. Then, in December, the still-unrepaired lift went up in flames. Thus began a downward spiral of disputed charges and suspended permits that kept the area from opening for all but a handful of days over the next four winters.

Characterizations of what went on at Waterman during the ACR years run the gamut. Still mired in disputes with the Forest Service and state agencies, ACR didn’t have the permits to legally operate. But they had a key to the gate in order to let what they could liberally call “maintenance crews” ride the lifts.

Select locals would get invited to help dig out Chair 1 in exchange for a day of skiing in all-time conditions. On a morning in December 2004, Zacher found himself at the base of then-closed Waterman with 15 other people, amping as the latest storm dumped around them. By early January, more than eight feet would fall across Southern California, shattering early season records in the San Gabriels and the San Bernadinos. Zacher was there because he knew a guy who knew a guy.

While hardcore SoCal skiers and boarders struggled through waist deep snow on the comparatively flat runs of resorts like Big Bear and Mountain High, a select few friends (and friends of friends) of ACR were treated to laps of steep untracked tree skiing an hour from Sunset Boulevard. “It was as good as it gets,” Zacher says. “You might see someone on the lift, but otherwise, it was just my friends and I taking high speed laps through nice, cold, blower pow. It was like heli-skiing.”

Those out of the loop called it a private ski club that was willfully kept closed by a group of wealthy investors using the place as an ice-cold tax shelter; others believed the group was sincere in trying to bring the area into the modern era, but fell victim to antagonizing agencies that didn’t want to see further development in the Angeles National Forest. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

In January 2005, an epic storm cycle turned nasty as temperatures shot upward and 15 inches of rain fell at higher elevations. A subsequent cold snap deposited a layer of bulletproof ice. On January 22, Barry Stubblefield, the most active of ACR’s investors, slipped at the top of Waterman’s signature front-face run, Robyn’s. Stubblefield slid the length of the run out of control. The first thing he hit was the tree that killed him.

Stubblefield is described by those who knew him as the motivating force behind ACR. Without him, the corporation effectively shut down, and Waterman entered two winters of hibernation.

Stubblefield’s death reverted ownership back to his brother, an executive vice president with Enterprise Rent-A-Car who had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with the project he had bankrolled for his brother. By the spring of 2006, Mount Waterman was officially in non-compliance with the Forest Service. All that stood between the mountain and the wrecking ball was a few months of bureaucratic paper-pushing.

Then Rick Metcalf showed up. Metcalf is the embodiment of the California Dream—circa 1982-ish. Growing up in La Canada Flintridge, they spent their summers surfing and their winters ripping the steep moguls beneath Waterman’s Chair 1. It’s not hard to envision the two of them playing hooky, strapping long boards to the roof of a Chevy Camero, and stopping by the mall to pick up a few Valley Girls on their way to the beach. Even at 44, he boasts of an annual “Quad-fecta,” when he and the boys will get in sessions skiing, riding motocross, waterskiing, and surfing between a single sunrise and sunset.

The savvy guys from around here grew up and traded the tank tops for broker’s licenses. After a good start in commercial real estate, Rick moved into the mortgage business and rode that wave right up to the peak of the state’s unprecedented real estate explosion “I foresaw the market coming to where it is now,” he says, referring to the recent tsunami of foreclosures. “I got out of that, and then I was looking for something to do.”

Metcalf was in the bidding before ACR purchased Waterman in 1999, so when he heard the Forest Service was on the verge of tearing out the existing infrastructure in the spring of 2006, he got back in touch with Newcomb. For his part, the old man was trying to convince the Forest Service he find someone to buy the place back from ACR. Since ACR was looking to sell for a song, Metcalf, along with his brother and two other investors, very quickly became the proud owner of his childhood ski hill.

“I dove in feet first without thinking it all through,” he admits. He composes a list of things he didn’t expect when he purchased a ski area: “Mountain people with quirky personalities; everything that goes into the chairlifts, from the bull wheels to the shiv wheels to the whisker switches, all the braks and the emergency things, load testing … the kitchen …”

ACR’s fatal flaw was thinking that Mount Waterman could ever be more than what Lynn Newcomb intended it to be: a local ski hill. But it’s a rare character in this day that looks up a lift line and doesn’t see a “resort” in the making. In the ski resort business, if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking. But in the local ski hill business, if you’re not growing, it’s probably because you have everything you need.

Rick Metcalf thinks Mount Waterman is just fine the way it is. Now all he needs are customers.

On February 16, 2008, for the first time in four seasons, Mount Waterman opens to the public. By 10:30, cars line both sides of the Crest Highway beneath Chair 1 and 106 tickets have sold at $45 a pop. The snow is corning up in the sun, remains rock solid in the shade, and can be charitably described as variable.

The place is clearly a work in progress. Chair 3 is inoperable because it’s encased in ice.The kitchen in the Warming Hut at the top of Chair 1 has been completely gutted and is at least several thousand dollars away from functioning, so Metcalf hired caterers working beneath a tent to appease the Forest Service’s requirements to provide food and drinks. There are no experienced groomers to tackle the area’s steep terrain. Chairs 1 and 2 operate at a fraction of their full speed due to concerns that overworking them could result in a malfunction no one on site will know how to fix.

In search of something that doesn’t require a New England ski tune, I follow a cat track that crosses beneath Chair 1 toward the mountain’s east flank. The infamous Robyn’s is still in the shade, but it looks like there’s sun around the corner. I putter along the track as it slowly loses elevation and a ridge springs up between me and Waterman’s north face, which funnels back to Chair 1.

Coming to a stop, I strain to hear the sounds of skiers and snowboarders, but am greeted with only the sounds of the mountains. This, I think to myself, must be what Mount Waterman sounded like when Lynn Newcomb discovered it—before he put up things like chairlifts and trail signs. It takes me about fifteen minutes to side-step up the ridge and make my way through the thin trees back to the area’s (unmarked) boundary.

At the picnic tables outside the Warming Hut, Newcomb sits in blue jeans, Sorrels, and an ancient ski jacket. His slate-grey eyes are set deep and the lines in his face are like the canyon walls that serrate the ski area he founded. He receives hugs and handshakes from an endless line of people who thank him for building the place where they all learned to ski. The crusty old guy is so overcome by the outpouring that he damn-near tears up.

Meanwhile, Metcalf bounces between the base of Chair 1 and the Warming Hut, greeting customers and huddling with ski patrol over where to erect fences and the status of the still-dormant Chair 3.

“It’s kind of a soft opening,” he admits. “So far, there haven’t been any ‘Oh my God! We need that!’ moments.” I think about mentioning the cat track to nowhere, but Metcalf is distracted by a few well-wishers of his own and I decide against it.

After all, the vibe is celebratory. Long-time locals reconnect in the parking lot before crossing the highway and settling in for the long lift ride up the short pitch. Cheers and laughter echo through the trees, as if the volume on a long-forgotten soundtrack has suddenly been cranked. Under the mid-winter sun, with a small swarm of families and friends enjoying the place just as it is, Mount Waterman looks like any number of mom-and-pop ski hills in the Midwest or the Northwest interior.

Then I see the Japanese tourists on Chair 1 wearing Nikes and carrying digital cameras around their necks and remember: we’re less than 50 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

EPILOGUE: Mount Waterman operated for another four weekends after it’s opening day in February, 2008. Between December 2008 and the end of the 2009 winter, the lifts ran another fifteen wekends. Ticket sales doubled, up to nearly 300 a day on the strength of local billboard and radio advertising.

“Last season I was pretty overwhelmed,” Metcalf admits when reached this past spring. “But the fear of the unknown was really the biggest thing. The overwhelming part is over and this season ran really smoothly. It was a lot of fun.”

He hopes to move to a Thursday-through-Sunday schedule for winter 09/10, and remains optimistic about recouping his initial investment. There will no doubt be of few “Oh my God! We need that!” moments in the future, but the ski area’s locals—new and old alike—will no doubt welcome them. Because if Metcalf is having those moments, it means Mount Waterman has a future.

You won’t believe this, but when the plane went out of control, it was oddly empowering. United flight 267 from Denver to Jackson Hole touched down at 9:16 PM on February 24 and proceeded to do none of the things commonly associated with planes landing. There was no bark as the tires gained purchase on the runway; no sudden deceleration, no roar of the wind. Instead, the 84 ton Airbus A320 simply bounced and rattled along the pavement in excess of 150 miles per hour as if it were cleared for departure and not arrival. If any of the 119 passengers didn’t realize something was wrong, the flight attendants screaming, “Crash positions! Get in your crash positions!” were a dead giveaway.

But here’s the thing: I know what a fishtailing car feels like when the fishtail is corrected. And while the plane was clearly fishtailing, I could feel the pilot carefully steering into the skid, just like we’re all taught in Drivers Ed. And it was somehow comforting to realize that there was someone at the wheel with a game-plan on how to wrestle this thing under control. I’ll admit the loud crash indicating a near complete loss of pressure in one of the tires shook my confidence a little bit, though.

Still, no one screamed. There were a few shouts and some worried exchanges of glances, but then there was the lady behind me loudly proclaiming, “Oh, not again!” See? This sort of thing must happen all the time. I fly thousands of miles a year and have never experienced it, but it was only the second time I’ve flown into the famous cowboy town. Maybe pilots pull the e-brake and fishtail into the gates for sport around these parts.

Then the pilot’s correction became an overcorrection and we began a distinct clockwise rotation before crashing through the eight-foot snowbank running alongside the runway. But that’s when we finally began to slow down, and the soon-to-be-paralyzing fear eased with our speed.

We ground to a halt some 70 yards into a field covered by three feet of wind-blasted snow. The flight attendants shouting to assess injuries was drowned out by the collective exhaling of everyone on the plane. And as the unbearable tension of the past few moments settled like the cloud of snow surrounding us, it occurred to me that I had just survived a plane crash. I turned to a friend sitting behind me and we slapped a high five. That, my friends, felt empowering.

And when the guy a few rows back started screaming, “Fire! The engine’s on fire!”? That, my friends, was goddamn fucking terrifying.

My ears started ringing. My peripheral vision went black, the darkened cabin felt many yards away from my brain while it came to terms with the fact that there was a fire beneath the wing of our plane–otherwise known as the fuel tank. The admirably restrained panic of 119 people burst into the open. Somewhere at the brain end of my tunnel vision, I anticipated an explosion of heat that would turn me and my seat into Mac and Cheese.

I stood up quickly and moved into the aisle, the woman in the window seat of my row blowing past me as I stopped to do the only thing I could remember being told not to do in the pre-flight emergency information that I ignored two hours earlier: I opened the overhead bin and grabbed my jacket. Later, I would recall reasoning to myself, “I’m in the middle of field in Wyoming in the dead of winter. It’ll be cold out there!”

I’m proud to report that I executed my emergency slide with perfect form–arms crossed across my chest and a slight hop to my feet at the bottom. The two poor bastards who were first out did as they were told and helped everyone off the end of the slide, meaning they were doomed to go down with the exploding ship. Meanwhile, I was trudging through the crusty old snow as fast as my untied boots would take me.

Clambering down the snowbank to the runway as fire trucks slid to a stop near its end, I looked back and saw no flames from either engine. The passengers coalesced around each other as we made our way to an out-lying terminal where United airlines employees–who were panicking for a completely different set of reasons–would pretend there’s some sort of standard operating procedure after a plane flies off the runway.

I found my buddy, made sure we were both okay, and made a mental note to remember the most immediate lesson of my first plane crash. Never–and I mean never fucking ever–throw your buddy a high five until your goddamn positive the engine’s not on fire.

Issue: 2007
Assignment: Profile of Jon Olsson, star of the new Warren Miller film, Playground.

DEK: Jon Olsson’s eerie consistency in competitions made him the world’s highest-paid freeskier. When that consistency disappeared, Olsson’s career teetered on the brink. Inside freeskiing’s greatest comeback.

At the base of the 2006 X Games slopestyle, thousands of fans crowded excitedly around the podium, elevated on a stage fit for an Eminem show. Colored spotlights swept over the fans as an announcer howled out the names of the day’s third, second, and first place finishers in what became a big air contest after blowing snow made the slopestyle event impossible. One-by-one, Andreas Hatveit, Charles Gagnier, and TJ Schiller made their way to the stage and accepted their medals. Champagne bottles popped, the young champions were doused, and the crowd roared. It was the first time in four years that Jon Olsson was not on the stage to bask in the celebration.

From 2002 to 2005, Olsson competed in every Winter X Games slopestyle and halfpipe competition and didn’t miss the podium once. Tanner Hall may have hauled more gold medals, but when it came to consistency, Olsson dominated the event unlike any skier in its history. More than one judge has pointed out that Jon would win more gold medals if he didn’t make everything look so damn easy. To the screaming fans, the 2006 podium might have seemed like an appropriate passing of the torch to Schiller, who is one of Jon’s closest friends, and Hatveit, who many have pegged as the Scandinavian most likely follow in Jon’s Swedish footsteps. It was nothing of the sort.

Olsson looked to be at the top of his game. He shared the spotlight of his sponsor, Head Skis, with only one other skier—some racer named Bodie Miller. As the winter-sport face of the Swedish fashion brand J. Lindeberg, he’d been elevated in his own country to a status just below that of the famous footballers. He was the most significant Swedish skier since Ingmar Stenmark, and at 23-years-old, he was entering his prime. But long-time observers of the sport knew something is wrong.

“He skied scared,” says X Games judge Shane Szocs. “You could tell he was uncomfortable with the jump, uncomfortable with the tricks, uncomfortable with his competition.”

Jon’s performance—an eighth in the halfpipe and a fifth in the big air—was the public’s first glimpse of an issue that had plagued him for over a year. It began when, like a pitcher losing control of his fastball, Jon lost his mastery of halfpipe transitions. “I don’t know what happened,” he admits now. “My head wasn’t there. I’d come up the wall scared. I sucked. I dug a hole for myself, and then said to hell with the pipe. I’m going to just jump.”

That was a good enough plan, until Hall and Simon Dumont both suffered hideous crashes at the end of the 2005 winter. The latter overshot an enormous man-made jump, the former came up short on a huge backcountry gap, and both suffered shattered feet, ankles, and internal injuries requiring months of recovery. Jon missed both sessions by mere days, and his already fragile mental state didn’t take the close calls well.

Brick by brick, cliff by rail by booter, the foundation upon which his skiing ability was built crumbled. So, while the X Games medal ceremony went on without him, Jon quietly left the venue in what he would later call “A black hole.”

“I knew I had to do something,” he says now.

Olsson called Daniel Lofti, a Swedish aerials coach who managed the water ramp facility in Stockholm. Back when big air events were still won by inverted aerialists, a young Olsson competed against Lofti. Lofti threw a full-full. Olsson beat him with a switch 720. They’ve been friends ever since. Olsson asked if Lofti knew of a water ramp he could train on. The Stockholm ramps were frozen solid and every other facility Lofti could think of was closed for the winter. A few days later, Lofti found something.

“Can you fly tomorrow?” Lofti asked him.

“Can you come coach me?” Olsson replied.

A few weeks later, Olsson and Lofti stood outside the Kangaroo Freestyle Park with a key they had picked up at the offices of the Australian Ski Federation before making the drive an hour from Melbourne. It was nearly 100-degrees out, and inside they found a pool crawling with leeches and ramps so dilapidated, they had to harvest pieces of the plastic in-runs from all of them just to make one serviceable jump. Then they got to work.

“I had been thinking about this double flip,” Olsson explains now, “thinking it’s got to be possible because I’d seen snowboarders doing something similar.” In fact, that past fall on Lofti’s ramps in Stockholm, Olsson began tinkering with the most elemental aspect of new school aerials: the axis around which tricks are spun. The evolution of terrain park tricks began with traditional mogul-style rotations around a simple, upright axis. Rotating inverts like misty and rodeo flips followed, leading to more refined spinning tricks like flatspins and D-spins, which tweaked the axis in different directions.

Olsson, who burst on the freeskiing scene in the summer of 2000, had been innovating ahead of the curve ever since. But he earned his fifth place in the X Games big air with an off-axis switch 1080; of the 40 jumps thrown that day, more than 30 of them were switch 1080s. Even the top three finishers were throwing switch 1080s—they just had more progressive grabs than Jon. He had entered the X Games plagued by the virus of self-doubt. He left knowing that he was on the verge of irrelevance.

“Before, I’d enter competitions knowing that if I just stuck my trick, I’d win. I hated sitting in the start knowing I had the same stupid trick as everyone else. Knowing that, if I stuck it, I might win,” he says now.

In Australia, Lofti stripped Jon’s jumping down to its most basic components. On the facility’s trampoline, he un-learned, then re-learned how to backflip. Piece-by-piece, they rewrote his mental code to regain the tricks he doubted himself on. Then they moved to the ramp.

Most water ramp facilities feature fans that blow under water, breaking the surface tension and creating pillow-soft landings. Fungus aside, nothing was bubbling in the Kangaroo Freestyle Park water. So, for padding, Jon donned a rubber dry suit in the scalding heat and began hucking. Despite the suit, he repeatedly slapped the water, emerging at the end of each day with ugly blue bruises running down his legs and sides. He also emerged at the end of each day a few steps further ahead of the curve.

While his peers in the Northern Hemisphere continued to compete or headed into the backcountry to film segments, Jon flew through the Australian air, discovering a way to combine different spins with different axis of rotation. In doing so, he single-handedly advanced the evolution of park tricks a full generation. It took him eight days.

In late March of 2006, Jon unleashed his “Kangaroo Flip” at his eponymous invitational, which happens to be the biggest winter sports event in Sweden. While perhaps the deepest big-air field in new freestyle stood agape, Jon casually spun through 900 degrees of rotation, the axis shifting ever so subtly between the first 360 and the final 540. Anytime an athlete wins an event named after himself, suspicions are bound to be raised. No one raised any at the 2006 Jon Olsson Invitational.

“It was a huge win,” says Dumont. “Everyone throws down for that comp. And the Kangaroo Flip let everyone know what the potential is. It’s a whole new aspect to skiing.”

Jon’s confidence grew. A few weeks later, at the World Ski Invitational in Whistler, on a jump too small for his double, he nevertheless bested Gagnier and Schiller to once again stand atop the podium. He carried that confidence all the way to the 2007 U.S. Freeskiing Open, where the entire field was left skiing for second when he introduced America to the Kangaroo Flip on the final jump of the course.

Today, Jon the Skier is still a work in progress. He admits that both his pipe and big-mountain skiing are below where they should be in terms of his confidence level. But Jon the International Superstar Playboy is a fully realized concept. Due in part to the size of the European ski market allowing the sport’s bigger names entrée to the mainstream marketing consciousness, and in part to his 2003 signing with J. Lindeberg, Jon now spends as much time staring out from marketing campaigns, propagating the Swedish stereotype of ice-blue eyes and a severe visage as he does skiing. The results have been, to use bit of Swedish understatement, lucrative.

“Even my mom and dad thought I was an idiot,” he says of the move to Lindeberg. After all, Jon was already a prominent face for Oakley, arguably the most potent marketing force in skiing. “But I’ve always done what I believe in, and I thought it would be cool.”

Whether or not it was a good decision to start wearing hot pink one-piece suits with fur-trimmed hoods depends entirely on your definition of “cool.” Having a hip fashion house introduce you to an entirely new market as the cutting edge of winter sport style is sort of cool. Watching your income reach levels where it actually makes sense to move to a tax shelter like Monaco is sort of cool. Being asked to walk the runway of a fashion show, which requires mostly just sitting around backstage with a bottle of champagne while supermodels undress all around you is, by any red-blooded heterosexual male definition of the word, cool.

How significantly has Jon’s career taken off in the past few seasons? Simple, says Dumont: “In Europe, Jon is a God.”

These days, Jon’s off-snow activities are at least as interesting as his on-snow ones, and they take up almost as much time. There is the event, which next winter will expand to include an open event in Colorado and a second invitational held in the middle of Manhattan. There’s the line of outerwear he’s designing with his new sponsor, Cross Sportswear, which is the new brainchild of Swedish skiwear magnate Peter Blom. And then there are the cars.

Jon’s grocery-getter is a bright yellow Lamborghini Gallardo (“It doesn’t get more obnoxious,” he admits), and he just completed the purchase of a modified BMW M3 that once held the record at the track where he races in Gotland, Sweden. But his baby—the car that requires hours of emails back and forth with his mechanics each week—is the Ultima GTR. It’s a British supercar that, when properly assembled, is the fastest zero-to-one hundred-to-zero street-legal car on the planet. Needless to say, Jon’s will be properly assembled.

All of which is enough to bog down the mind of a skier still carefully reconstructing his own psyche. But when it all gets to be too much, Jon takes a timeout on the balcony of his apartment, overlooking the bejeweled streets of Monte Carlo. There, awash in Mediterranean air and the anonymity of being one of the poorer guys in one of the world’s richest places, Jon sits with a sketchbook and makes note of every single car passing beneath that isn’t as fast as his Ultima will be. He’s seen nearly all of them, although he’s still waiting on a Porsche GT1 and the absurdly rare Mercedes CLK GTR. It’s sort of like a shopping list for his future self.

Jon’s is a world that few 24-year-olds will ever even sniff, and one that has proven to swallow whole plenty of the young men who find themselves in it. But somehow, he just doesn’t come off as one of those “causality of his own success” kind of guys.

“Before the Kangaroo I had these huge endorsement deals, but I couldn’t ski. And the money didn’t make me happy,” he says with a shrug. “I was in a hole and I didn’t give a crap about the money. I can’t be happy unless I know my skiing is awesome.”

A few nights from now, Jon will successfully defend his World Ski Invitational title, bringing his gold medal total since his trip to Australia to three. It’s only been a little more than a year since his meltdown at the X Games, but he is, in a word, happy. “I’m going to compete until I’m 30, at least,” he says, the ice-blue eyes melting with a smile. “I have to. With these cars, I can’t afford to quit.”

Issue: August, 2006
Assignment: Feature interview with vert skating legend Bob Burnquist about how he approaches a competition run.

DEK: If all goes well, four-time X Games Gold Medalist Bob Burnquist will pack 18 tricks into his skateboard vert run. That’s a lot to think about in 45 seconds.

1. Mind Games

Burnquist begins by drawing the ramp on paper and skating it in his mind. Last year’s X Games ramp feature street-style obstacles such as handrails. This year the layout is more traditional, but with added flash. Next, he plots out each trick one to 18. “If my numbers are clustered on the ramp, that means I’m sticking to only one section. I want my tricks to be staggered across the ramp. Then I take that run to the ramp and see if it’s possible.”

2. First Impressions

“At the X Games there’s no prelim, so I don’t have to worry about making the final,” Burnquist says. “To gain confidence, my first run isn’t as complicated as my second and third runs, where I add all the technical tricks. Then it’s all or nothing.”

3. Rocker Booster

After dropping in, Burnquist usually begins his run with a huge backside 540. “Once I make that, everything else is boom, boom, boom,” he says. But starting off big saps a lot of energy, so Burnquist begins with an air trick and ends with an air trick and ends with a super technical lip maneuver. In the middle? “I always include a switch kickflip,” he says, “because no one else does it.”

4. Improv Night

Burnquist pays particular attention to his foot placement as he lands tricks. “It’s a lot of dancing, a little samba thing us Brazillians do,” he says. And when something goes wrong? “I have to be able to improvise. I have a Plan A, but also a Plan B, Plan C and Plan D.”

5. Combo Order

Burnquist tries to avoid doing setup, or simple, tricks before complicated ones. “Instead of setting up a combo, I make my whole run a combo. I might throw one setup trick before a five- or six-wall combo.”

6. Switch A Flip

If Burnquist has one major advantage over competitors, it’s his mastery of switch skating—staking in the stance opposite his natural one. “Luckily, I tried it early on,” he says. “I’m way more comfortable with it than anyone else.” But he admits that his tricks often confuse the judges. “Sometimes, that goes against me, but I’d rather they be confused. That means they’re excited.”

7. End Scene

Lately, Burnquist has been ending his runs with a trick he only recently mastered: a switch backside tail slide to revert. “I tend to pick a wild card on my last wall because, by then, there’s so much excitement, I might just land it.” Risky, because a fall can mean the difference between first place and tenth. “You have to believe, and you have to be positive. There are no gold medals in the pessimistic world.”

DEK: What does a kid who redefined skiing for Generation X Games do for a second act? He grows up.

After finishing second at the 2005 U.S. Freeskiing Open slopestyle, Tanner Hall had a full day until the halfpipe event, so he and his friends went out to blow off some steam at a place called Fubar. Hall was easy to spot; the baggy clothes, casual bling, and other sartorial standards of hip-hop culture tend to stand out in a vanilla resort town like Vail. By his own admission, Tanner had too much to drink and mouthed off to the bartenders about their choice of music, making him a target when he tried to go back in after closing to find his wallet.

According to a story in the Vail Daily the next day, Tanner continued yelling about the music, asked loudly if the employees knew who he was, and then poked the bar manager. His friend allegedly threatened someone with a bottle. According to Tanner, he didn’t get two steps inside the bar before the bouncers dragged him into a bathroom, choked him until he nearly passed out, and shoved him face-first into a toilet.

Tanner emerged from the bar drunk, scared, and facing several cops. He freaked out, crying and reportedly telling the police “People are jealous because I’m the best skier in the world.” He demanded that the bouncers be arrested, but the bouncers were calm, sober, and not loudly proclaiming their greatness. Tanner was charged with disorderly conduct and thrown in the drunk tank for the night.

He was only 21 years old, but for the past four years Tanner’s dominance of slopestyle, big air, and halfpipe competitions made him one of the most high profile skiers on the planet. His arrest was widely reported in the ski media and the threads that popped up in online forums became a bash-fest in which he was ridiculed for being a “bitch,” “thug,” and a “crybaby.”

What received far less attention was this letter, published in the Vail Daily’s “Letters To The Editor” six days later:

“I’m sorry, To the people of Vail and visitors: (Recently) I went to the Fubar with every intention of just having fun with my friends. I ended up getting out of control.

“I would like to apologize to those involved as well as my family, sponsors, fans and friends. My actions and attitude were totally unacceptable and I make no excuses for my actions. I cannot change what took place; I would if I could.

“I know better than to put myself in that position and I will do my best to never let it happen again. Vail is a great community for the U.S. OPEN and I hope that it continues to be for years to come.

Please accept my apology, Tanner Hall Kalispell, Mont.

The incident wasn’t the first or last time his actions off snow overshadowed his achievements on it. But the public emergence of a contrite, thoughtful Tanner who took responsibility for his behavior only made a question that’s been bouncing around skiing for the past few years more vexing: Is Tanner Hall the arrogant poster boy for the sport’s celebrity-obsessed youth culture, or is he just a talented kid whose spotlight-illuminated youth has exposed the warts of his adolescence?

“At times, I’ve taken things too far. I’ll be the first to admit it,” says Tanner. Dressed in his trademark baggy sweat suit, with scruffy blond hair and a scruffier chin beard, he’s sitting in an empty restaurant in the Mammoth Village, where he’s just arrived with his film company, The Bigger Picture. They have a few shots to nail down in the next couple of days, but for the moment, the “C-Crew” has dispersed, the sun’s going down, and Tanner is reflective. “I want to see another kid do what I did—start winning X Games at seventeen, start doing well every single year, with money coming and all that. It’s hard to control yourself.”

The X Games win he refers to is the 2001 Big Air, which was followed almost immediately by a win at the U.S. Open Big Air and snowballed into a competitive record that currently sits at ten X Games and Open titles and eight more podium finishes in those events. The only other U.S. skier who’s even in the conversation when it comes to competition results is Bode Miller. His contest winnings alone are in the mid six figures and, when added to his endorsement contracts with Oakley, Armada, and Red Bull, put him on a pay scale that’s nearly Bode-esque, as well.

But numbers only get you halfway. The very look of kids in the terrain park can be traced to Tanner’s film segments, first with Poor Boyz Productions and Matchstick and more recently in his own films WSKI106 and Pop Yer Bottlez. Everything from axis of rotation to timing and location of grabs to a suitable waist size for ski pants can be found therein, and the segments have been studied and imitated by casual fans and pro skiers alike. Put simply, says park skiing pioneer Mike Douglas, “Tanner Hall is the most influential freeskier in the world.”

All of which is pretty impressive, when you consider his parents made him sign a contract when he was sixteen saying he’d never ski again.

In September of 2000, Tanner was supposed to be completing his first year at Park City’s Winter Sports School, where his classes would end in November and his pursuit of an Olympic mogul career would begin in earnest. Instead, he was back in Kalispell, obsessed with the terrain park skiing he’d recently discovered, expelled from school for poor grades and smoking, and facing parents who refused to talk to him—unless it was to scream about how badly he’d fucked up, which his mother did with some regularity.

“We were so mad and so hurt,” explains his father, Jerry. “We’d pumped so much money into the sports school, and now it was all gone. He was going without an education. I really thought he was lost.”

All Jerry knew about terrain park skiing was what Tanner’s coaches told him—that it was a trend and wouldn’t last three months. He saw no path for his son beyond the local high school and a contract making him promise he’d buckle down and get his degree. But Tanner wouldn’t budge. Growing up, he saw his friend Andrew Crawford take off as a professional snowboarder. He knew there was career to be had in skiing that looked nothing like the one the Winter Sports School—or Kalispell high school—would prepare him for.

After weeks in a tense standoff, Tanner and Jerry returned to Park City under the auspices of packing Tanner’s remaining belongings. Tanner talked his dad into one last session on the water ramps, knowing that in reality he was auditioning for his future.

Water ramps come in two shapes—twister daffy spread and lay full full. They’re covered in a temperamental plastic surface that poorly mimics snow, and they’re simply not designed for what Tanner showed his dad that day: a fakie Rodeo on the largest ramp in the complex. It was an unheard of accomplishment at the time. “He was like, ‘Holy Smokes!’” Tanner says, remembering his father’s reaction.

“His mother and I were having conversations after he signed the contract,” Jerry says now, “and these were not fun conversations. But we realized that, if we penalized him too much, he could end up a total waste. So we gave in.”

Tanner and his parents agreed to a new deal—he had one winter to prove that he could do something with his skiing outside of all the programs and disciplines that they understood. Tanner responded by winning every single big air competition he entered. By the end of the winter, contract offers poured in, checks for thousands of dollars arrived in the mailbox, and Tanner was in Beirut for a Rossignol photo shoot.

“That’s when the odyssey started,” Jerry says now with a chuckle.

The Mammoth terrain park teems with riders in town for up-coming ski and snowboard contests. They gather in crowds above the jump inruns, jockeying for position and side slipping down a few feet at a time until one gets the drop on another and points it. From a gondola above, Tanner and C.R. Johnson try to spot their friends. “Man, there are a lot of skiers down there,” says C.R. There are a lot of skiers down there and they all look just like Tanner.

In the fall of 2001, Oakley launched the marketing campaign for its new line of outerwear largely on the strength of a two-page spread advertisement. In it, a futuristic, egg-shaped chair sits against a white background. In the chair, a young man decked out in the new gear leans forward lazily, examining a book of mini-disc CDs through mirrored sunglasses. Headphones hang from his neck and wispy white dreadlocks fall from his head. It’s Tanner, and from that moment on, his image was as powerful as his skiing.

“Sometime around the winter of 01/02, Tanner went from being a young phenom to something more threatening,” explains Chris O’Connell, the President of Newschoolers.com, the most active online forum for skiers. “Most of the threads that popped up were overwhelmingly negative. He had defenders, but you had to get down into the threads to find them. Whether it was his clothing, or the C-Crew, or his film company, he was just a magnet for haters.”

Tanner has always bristled at the common notion that his upbringing in the heart of cowboy country should somehow cancel the influence that black music and black culture had in his youth—as if hip hop didn’t penetrate beyond the city decades ago. “Look,” he says, with no shortage of exasperation in his voice, “I’m sorry I don’t listen to Iron Maiden or ‘Eye Of The Tiger.’ I grew up on black music, and if you think I’m the only person from Montana who wears baggy clothes and listens to hip hop, you’re crazy.”

Still, Tanner’s wholesale adaptation of hip hop culture failed to filter out some of its more cartoonish elements—like the unwritten rule that any time a camera is pointed in your direction, you must immediately begin flapping your arms and questioning the camera’s toughness. A quick review of his film segments over the last few years proves he learned this rule all too well—culminating in Pop Yer Bottlez, where Tanner, C.R., and the rest of the C-Crew guzzle bottles of champagne while scantily clad women bump and grind all over them. Scenes like this contribute to the diss most frequently leveled against Tanner on Newschoolers.com, and the one that makes him the angriest: “Tanner Hall thinks he’s black.”

But Tanner refuses to draw a line between his personal style and his style on snow, because to him it’s one and the same. “The big clothes, they don’t just feel relaxed, they look relaxed,” he explains. “They help you float in the air. Back in the day, nobody was thinking about this stuff, and so then it was, ‘Why does Tanner ride so low? Why isn’t he all pencilled out?’ I’m sorry to say this, but skiing looked so goofy for so long! From 1980 to 1998 … what were they thinking?”

In the fall of 2002, Tanner left Rossignol to help start Armada, a new ski company that hit the ground running with an all-star team, of which he was the undisputed king. And while he showed no signs of slowing down—earning his third X Games gold in a row that January—he did show signs of strain.

Always possessed of a wicked temper, Tanner started flying off the handle at the wrong time, like when his friend was busted rolling joints during the premier party of Oakley’s ski film 1242 and he had to be restrained from screaming at the security guards. In an interview with Freeskier Magazine that fall, Tanner was asked how he felt about the fact that ski racers made so much more money than freeskiers. Calling it “bullshit” and dismissing racing as just “skiing one icy-ass run,” the fact that Tanner gave racers like Bode their props was completely lost in the stir that his comments created in skiing’s mainstream. A columnist in the Denver Post called him “moronic,” and downhill superstar Daron Rhalves offered to show Tanner what racing really involves on a World Cup downhill course. When no response came, he was perceived by many as wimping out.

In January of 2004, he got into a shouting match with the event director at the U.S. Open, and the next day’s Vail Daily featured him, mid-scream, in a large photo on its cover. And while he describes his night in the drunk tank at the 2005 Open as the worst night of his life, it was followed a week later by yet another incident that gave cause for the media to pile on.

Leading the X Games slopestyle toward what would have been a historic four-peat, Tanner was edged in the last run of the event by Charles Gagnier. In the aftermath, as the judges decision was dissected and the cameras and tape recorders swarmed, Tanner swung visibly between struggling to congratulate Gagnier and seething at the judges. His complaints were seized upon by Devon O’Neil, who wrote a scathing piece in the Aspen Times referring to Tanner’s earlier arrest and chastising the freeskiing community as a whole for enabling Tanner by continuing to champion him. “Until Hall’s actions start cutting the food supply, he’s as good a representative as he wants to be,” wrote O’Neil.

“It was awful to see some of the mistakes he’s made,” says Jerry Hall, talking about that week in January. “After he went to jail, he was so pumped up on wanting to prove that it was bogus, winning meant everything to him. He didn’t handle second place very well, and he should have been thrilled … A lot of people think [Tanner] is spoiled rotten, and to a degree he is. Not many people say no to him except his mom and his dad. But he’s learning to adjust. And he’s made huge strides in the last six months.”

Indeed, if his early success put Tanner on a path to arrested development culminating in his consecutive meltdowns in Vail and Aspen, the following months brought him up to adult speed faster than he was prepared to handle.

Four and a half years after blowing his father’s mind on the Park City water ramps, Tanner Hall blew the world’s mind in the Utah backcountry. It was two months after the 2005 X Games when he dropped in fakie on the 120-foot monster known as Chad’s Gap, reaching speeds over 40 miles-per-hour before flawlessly rotating off-axis, two-and-a-half times while his tightly-held grab helped maintain an elegant body position despite the enormous gravitation forces swirling around him. It was a combination of courage and skill that only a handful of skiers could match, and the assembled filmers and photographers knew they were watching something special—until things went horribly wrong.

Unaware that the afternoon sun had slowed the snow on the inrun, Tanner came in for another 9 that looked perfect but left him just a few feet shy of the landing. The impact was catastrophic and a video camera hundreds of feet away captured the sickening thud. Both of Tanner’s ankles and one heel exploded before his momentum scorpioned his feet over his head and he somersaulted down the landing. He was screaming before he came to a stop.

Even in a resting state, Tanner is a pent-up ball of energy with a constant need for movement. Suddenly, that energy was confined to a couch for three straight months, while his doctors debated whether specific damage he did to his talus and calcaneus bones would inhibit his ability to ever absorb impact on skis again.

“Man, the day is long,” he says now of those months. “You can go through a lot in your mind when you’re on a couch for three months.” Specifically, he finally came to terms with the fact that, while he might still feel every bit as young as the kids populating the park-skiing explosion he helped ignite, he can’t ignore the shadow cast by the heights he’s achieved. “I just came to realize that I have to be smarter about how I carry myself,” he explains. “I don’t want the parents of kids who look up to me saying to them, ‘You are definitely not doing that! We’re putting you in racing tomorrow and you’ll never touch twin-tips again!’ Because I want kids to realize how cool our sport is. I want kids getting involved. I take that stuff seriously.”

In December, Tanner went to Helsinki, Finland to gather footage on the city’s legendary rails. But any excitement he felt at determining that his recovery was 100 percent vanished upon learning that C.R. had sustained a devastating head injury in a freak skiing accident. In an induced coma and breathing with the help of a respirator, Tanner’s closest friend in the world faced a prognosis infinitely worse than the one he faced nine months earlier.

When Tanner finally walked into C.R.’s hospital room, he found only the approximation of his friend. C.R.’s whole head was swollen, his face jaundiced and yellow where it wasn’t dark purple, and tubes snaked across his body. His eyes didn’t open, his body didn’t respond to touch, and the only sound was the murmur of his family and the beeping of machines. Tanner’s knees buckled, and he broke down sobbing.

“It changes your perspective on life,” he says now. “Our lifestyle, we travel, party, and ski. And then we wake up and do it all over. And, you know, we don’t really fall that often. To go from that to seeing your best friend, and you don’t know if he’s going to live or die—that’s a real life situation. It just forces you to realize, life is too short. It’s too short to get so stressed out about such stupid stuff.”

“If you look at action sports, there’s only a handful of true icons,” says Mike Douglas. “Skateboarding has Tony Hawk, surfing has Kelly Slater, and, with snowboarding, it looks like Shaun White could reach that level. By being mature and having everything together, those guys are taking their sports way beyond their own little worlds. They’re projecting to a much wider audience. Tanner has the potential to do the same thing for skiing, if he can keep his emotions in check.”

In spite of C.R.’s accident, last winter went remarkably smoothly for Tanner. For years he’s threatened to quit competing, only to feel the pressure to prove himself one more time. But when the X Games slopestyle was condensed into a big air contest, he happily pulled out and for the first time spent a few stress-free days enjoying his status one of the event’s legends. He’s decided to continue competing only in halfpipe, because he feels the split second reaction time and constant adjustments at high speed directly apply to his current obsession: developing big mountain chops.

With C.R.’s remarkable, on-going recovery adding to his peace of mind, Tanner avoided the spotlight all season—aside from trips to the top of the X Games and Open halfpipe podiums. He spent more time on his snowmobile and in helicopters than he ever has, exploring the backcountry and discovering that there are whole realms outside the terrain park to conquer.

For four days in Mammoth, Tanner hits the park for the first time in months. He arrives around lunchtime, just as the snow is getting soft, and spins laps non-stop until the very last chair. Mostly, he gives direction to the C-Crew members who are there to film. But occasionally he slips into the packs of riders jockeying for position above the jumps, blending in to the point of disappearing, until he gets the drop on someone, rockets toward the lip, and blasts an inverted right-side spin with a true tail grab. Then he looks like no one else in the world.

Back in the restaurant, the setting sun casts a horizontal, golden light—the kind of light filmmakers try to capture when they want their hero to look thoughtful. “The biggest pressure I feel now,” he says, “is just learning to keep my cool when I get pissed. That’s my what my job demands. But for a super emotional kid, it’s not an overnight change. And that creates more pressure, because I’m trying, man, and I’ll make progress for a couple of days and then something happens that moves me back. But then I’ll go skiing, and all my worries will go away. It’s like what T.J. Burke tells Carl the ski school director in Aspen Extreme after Dexter Routecki dies. He’s like, ‘Man, skiing is the easy part.’ That’s the truth, right there.”

Whether you love or hate that most Hollywood of ski movies, there’s no denying that Aspen Extreme is a cultural reference any skier knows. And whether you love or hate Tanner Hall, there’s no denying that he is, above all things, a skier. As he quotes the classic film, Tanner breaks into a grin that could almost be described as boyish if the first lines of manhood weren’t already etched into his face.

DEK: A 2005 Skiing accident put CR Johnson’s career on ice. Now with his mind on the mend, he’s fighting to return to the top of his sport.

The steep, technical aspects of the line last only a few hundred feet before emerging into a wide-open apron. C.R. disappears beneath the ridge. In a matter of seconds, he reappears far below, arcing huge radius turns with little effort at warp speed toward the part of the resort where the mere mortals ski.

Just a few minutes later, C.R. follows his best friend, Tanner Hall, through a stand of trees and off a tiny little natural jump that’s formed on a side hill. C.R. is one of the best halfpipe skiers in the world, one who consistently redefines what “big” means with regards to skiing transitions, but the moment his skis leave the ground, something is clearly wrong. His legs and arms shoot out awkwardly, and he rotates backward. He’s only a few feet off the ground, but it’s almost like he’s never been in the air before, his limbs grasping for purchase against gravity. He lands in a heap.

“What are you doing?!” Tanner asks, panic easing from his voice as he realizes C.R. is all right. “It’s way too early for you to be jumping! You know that.”

C.R. grins sheepishly and apologizes. It’s been more than six months since he jumped off anything, because it’s been less than three months since anyone knew if he’d ever ski again.

On December eighth of last year, C.R. was skiing Brighton, Utah after an epic storm cycle dropped close to six feet of snow in less than a week. He was shooting for the new film Show & Prove, but it was too early in the season to warrant anything beyond mellow powder skiing. Still, when C.R. tripped up in the deep snow on the far side of a rollover, four riders were right behind him. He tumbled to a stop and lifted his head out of the snow just as another skier dropped out of the sky on top of him. It was a one-in-a-million shot, but the skier landed directly on the sliver of exposed skin between C.R.’s helmet and his goggles.

The tiny gash that opened up on his forehead gave little indication of the extent of C.R.’s injury. Neither did the original CAT scans, which indicated a small amount of bleeding in the brain that wasn’t unusual with a severe concussion. But over the next three days, it became clear that this wasn’t simply a severe concussion. The impact smashed C.R.’s brain into the front of his skull before shifting it violently backwards into the rear. Each subsequent CAT scan revealed increased bleeding, and the doctors ultimately decided to induce a coma in hopes that the lack of stimulus would prompt the brain to heal. Four days later, they ended the inducement, but C.R. didn’t wake up.

For the next three weeks, C.R.’s progress was constantly tempered by setbacks. His eyes opened, but he contracted pneumonia. He responded to questions, but he developed a staph infection. He began talking, but his lungs were ravaged by a fungal outbreak. C.R. had to relearn the most basic functions—swallowing, talking, handling small objects—from scratch, but the doctor’s were cautiously optimistic. “They kept telling me, young people do well off these injuries,” says Russ Johnson, C.R.’s father. “He’s young, he’s healthy. You’ll see. He’ll come around.”

C.R. did come around, and more quickly than even the doctors imagined he might. On January tenth, after a week in the hospital’s rehab unit, he and his family stopped by the neurology ward to say goodbye. The staff crowded around the front desk, delighted to see him walking and talking on his own.

C.R. has no recollection of this, and the weeks that followed remain hazy. But things come into sharper focus beginning around March 7—the day he returned to snow.

“Of everything that I had to relearn,” says C.R., “learning to talk again, learning to walk again—the one thing that came back really naturally was my skiing. I could just,” he pauses, unsure how to explain it. “I could just ski.”

“He skied beautifully,” Russ says with a smile, recalling that day on Squaw Valley’s West Face, when they disregarded their promises to C.R.’s mother about sticking to groomed runs and immediately made their way to the resort’s most famous powder run. “Even then, he was probably one of the best skiers on the mountain.”

It’s late July in Truckee, California, and they sit on the deck of the house C.R. grew up in. It’s been nearly four months since he completed any formal mental rehabilitation, and his physical rehabilitation has given way to physical training. He’s regained the 25 pounds he lost in the hospital and then some. In a T-shirt and flip-flops, behind stylish sunglasses, he looks like a your average pro skier in the off-season.

Indications of the trauma he suffered are subtle. He constantly pops his ears—a new physical tick that leads to a perpetually sore jaw. He sometimes loses his train of thought, answering questions in a slightly circuitous manner. And while his memory has improved dramatically, he’s no longer able to organize whole weeks of his life in his head like he used to. Russ jokes that C.R. has to write things down like any 60-year-old man.

C.R. doesn’t display the kind of wholesale personality shift that afflicts some victims of severe head injuries. So, it’s tough to tell if the split-second delays in his answers to questions are a result of the accident or if he’s simply more thoughtful in the wake of what he’s been through.

“It’s tough to explain,” he says, “but it feels like, for 22 years, there was someone else walking right next to me who saw everything I saw and did everything I did. On the day of the accident, it was like I was suddenly in that body. You see everything the same and do everything the same, but it’s just not the same. I haven’t woken up one day yet where I felt the same as I did before the accident.”

Perhaps it was this new “body” that was so unfamiliar with the air when C.R.’s skis left the snow that day in Mammoth, exposing him to an element of the sport that won’t return as quickly as his turns did on the West Face. But despite any inner-duality that he now perceives, C.R.’s response has been single-minded.

“I love skiing, and I want to come back just to prove to myself that I can overcome this. It’s the first time I’ve struggled, the first time I’ve really had to face adversity. I’m not settling for ‘what if?’ I’m determined.”

In his film segments over the last few seasons, C.R. embodied freeskiing’s ascendant generation—raised in terrain parks, focused on the backcountry, and obsessed with halfpipes. His plans for the coming winter illustrate this; an early season devoted to developing a solid halfpipe run that culminates in a shot at X Games gold before disappearing on powder missions for the rest of the winter. “I’m more excited about filming in the backountry,” he admits. “But there’s nothing more fun than standing in the gate at the X Games, with all the pressure on one halfpipe run, and dropping in.”

A month after his flirtation with gravity in Mammoth, C.R. was on Mount Hood’s glacier, tinkering with small tabletop jumps and working the transitions of the halfpipe. He says his air sense hasn’t gone anywhere, that what he really needs to redevelop is his confidence. He’s humble in his assessment of how the sessions went, admitting that the jumps were small and the pipe was scary. But, he says, “once you can see those tricks in your head, all you need is the confidence to set your body in motion. I can see the tricks in my head.”

Photographer Chris O’Connell was on Mount Hood, and dismisses C.R.’s humility. “It was a shitty pipe and he was going eight to ten feet out, rarely missing a grab or the tranny. There were a bunch of snowboarders there doing a magazine shoot and he was going way bigger than them. I was awestruck—it was game on.”

It takes two years for a brain to completely heal after a trauma like the one C.R. endured. As he sits beneath the mid-summer sun and discusses a September trip to New Zealand for pre-season halfpipe training, he figures he’s between 70 and 80 percent of where he needs to be next winter. There’s another year-and-a-half before a complete assessment of his injury can be made, but one thing is already clear. This is no longer a recovery; it’s a comeback.

DEK: Looking forward with skiing’s latest throwback.

Eric Hjorliefson might be the future of skiing, but he sure as hell doesn’t look like it.

It’s late April on Whistler and it’s not “Pissler” conditions but it’s damn close. The 23-year-old happily spins laps through McConkey Trees, which is now a bump run, and off the Peak Chair, where visibility drops to about ten feet and terrain changes are detected by your knees hitting your stomach.

He wears a plain black jacket and pants that actually fit him. His long, unkempt hair is barely contained by a road-crew orange touque that can be purchased at any one of the 2,859 gas stations on the Trans-Canada Highway. His boots are clicked into a pair of his signature 4FRNT skis, which look suspiciously like old Super G boards—very long, devoid of camber and … wait for it … with tails on the ends.

“I don’t ski backwards much,” he says as quad chairs pass silently by him into the mist. “So I’d rather not compromise how my skis perform when I’m doing the kind of skiing I really enjoy, which is making huge turns that feel effortless on big mountains, just because I might want to go backwards every now and then. The way I see it, you can’t run full speed backwards, so why would you ski full speed backwards? It looks like a really good way to break your knees.”

Eric Hjorliefson might be the future of skiing, but he sure as hell doesn’t sound like it, either.

Two years ago, when every jibber worth his twin-tips was spouting off about how he wanted to ski more big mountain, Hjorliefson entered the mainstream ski consciousness with his segment in MSP’s Yearbook. Equal parts park tricks and big lines, it was tough to tell if he was more comfortable spinning 9s or warping down mountains and he was hailed in places like FREEZE Magazine as the embodiment of things to come.

But, in reality, Hjorliefson is the embodiment of things that already came.

“In the Canadian Rockies, you’re surrounded by aesthetic stuff,” says Andrew Sheppard, a legend of the Canadian backcountry who mentored Hjorliefson through his teens. “But if you want to ski that stuff, you have to walk to it. Eric was always keen to go touring and score some lines.”

He grew up at the foot of the Canadian Rockies, in Canmore, with a recovering ski bum father who provided for the family as a stonemason. Hjorliefson was a promising racer until his junior year in high school, when what he thought was the agreed upon pact of get-your-training-done-and-you-can-go-skiing changed without his consent. “Suddenly,” he says, “when we were done training gates, it was off to play soccer or run wind sprints or whatever the hell racers are supposed to do.” And thus Team Canada lost one very skinny kid in a spandex suit.

Fortunately, one of his coaches who was friends with Sheppard recognized in the kid a kindred spirit, and Hjorliefson soon found himself chasing the former RAP film star through the Banff/Lake Louise backcountry. “I only had to give him a little bit of advice about the mountains, because he had this sixth sense,” says Sheppard. “He’s mountain smart, always aware of his slough and the snow pack, it came naturally to him.”

In the summer of 2002, Sheppard invited Hjorliefson to accompany him and an aspiring ski filmmaker named Dustin Lindgren to Las Lenas for a few weeks. The trip was mostly false starts and dick teases due to incessant weather, but early one morning toward the end of the trip, Hjorliefson and Lindgren wandered out of the bar into a sea of fading stars.

Behind them, Sheppard’s thirtieth birthday was raging in what we’ll call “far out” fashion. Needless to say, they weren’t seeing things through the same eyes as the day before. The entire world was blanketed in white, for miles snow crystals flashed like mirrors in the rising sun. The two didn’t think twice, just got their skinning gear and began the climb, 6,000 vertical feet to Cerro Torresillas.

The thing he remembers best from that morning is the towering rock spires that stand like sentinels on the ridge above Las Lenas. They disappeared as he and Lindgren dropped behind each snowy roll on the climb, only to reappear just that much closer, glowing orange in the morning light.

Fortunately, he doesn’t have to remember the rest, because Lindgren nailed the shot of him nailing the long, rolling spine that was the goal of the mission. It was the biggest line he’d skied to date, and he handled it perfectly—aside from the small avalanche of slough that he nearly skied into coming around the cliff at the bottom. Lindgren’s shot became the anchor of a “sponsor me” video that eventually got Oakley and Matchstick Productions fired up on his skiing.

“In hindsight, I should have aired that cliff,” Hjorliefson muses. He’s resting on his snowmobile—a beat-up but reliable old 670 that he affectionately calls “The Blue Lady”—in a zone south of Whistler called Chocolate Bowl. The tell-tale brrrrrap! of two-stroke ascents echoes off the walls of the surrounding mountains, but he has to keep reminding himself to enjoy the cloudless day.

It’s the first filmable weather in a week, and the previous evening was spent hustling to set up a day in the helicopter with the film crew that he’s supposed to work with when he’s in town. When that fell apart because a guide couldn’t be secured on short notice, the crew notified Hjorliefson that they were going to shoot a cheese wedge somewhere in the next zone over.

“Cheese wedges? That’s what spring’s for!” he exclaimed with frustration. He’s already missed the biggest film trip of the season due to a tweaked knee and can’t shake the feeling that his segment is sorely lacking some solid skiing. “It’s still winter. I’m going skiing tomorrow.”

And he does go skiing. Dan Treadway, who’s been showing him the region’s sled access the same way Sheppard showed him the local backcountry growing up, shuttles him to a ridge from which he boot packs up the largest peak in the zone. Forty-five minutes later, Hjorliefson’s warping down the gut of the peak, making all of ten turns over nearly 2,000 vertical feet. It’s as film-worthy as any off-axis spin and, adding insult to injury, the film crew stops by on their way back from the cheese wedge just as his considerable slough eases to a stop behind him like frozen lava.

The crew acknowledges the line, but not the hundreds just like it a quick shuttle away, just waiting to be skied, or the hours of sunlight left. They already have a few choice tricks in the can, so they yank their machines to life and continue down the drainage to their cars. Hjorliefson watches them go, shaking his head.

Hjorliefson’s second major film segment came last year, in MSP’s The Hit List, and was an expanded, improved version of the first. People started adding his name alongside Pep Fujas and Sage Cattibriga-Alosa to the list of athletes leading the synthesis of new freestyle and big mountain skiing. Hjorliefson loves to hit jumps—his formative years were spent watching PBP movies and lapping the terrain park just like any other skier his age. But his inner jibber didn’t survive the only major jib competition he ever attended.

It was just a few months after he returned from Las Lenas, and Rossignol, who was flowing him product, sent him to an X Games qualifier in Val Thoren, France. “I had been bugging them to give me budget to film that winter,” he says now, “and I think they wanted to see how I did as some sort of test.”

In an airport layover on the way, he bumped into a crowd of some of the best park and pipe skiers in the world. “You ever been to Europe?” they asked.

He hadn’t.

“You’re going to hate it,” they said. “The parks suck, the pipes suck, they speak weird languages. It sucks.”

It turned out, they were right. The pipe did suck. It was snowing so damn hard, the resort could barely cut the thing, and what was supposed to be his chance to prove he might be the next Tanner Hall turned into five days of waist-deep powder on the best lift-accessed terrain he’d ever seen. He found himself by himself, scoping lines from Val Thoren’s huge tram, taking hot laps through chutes and cliffs like the ones he had to climb to in Las Lenas. He didn’t see any of his fellow competitors.

He admits that his obsession with learning tricks waned after that. “Once every thirteen-year-old in the world started doing all the tricks I could do, I wasn’t as fired up about it,” he says now. “Suddenly, I’m the old guy and all these young guys are doing what I don’t want to anymore. I want to hit big jumps, but the terrain and my brain have to be just right. Because, if I went and got hurt in the park right now, I’d be devastated.”

Not that his decision to pursue what he calls an “old school mentality of a true mountain person” doesn’t carry the risk of devastation. In March, while competing in the K2 Back Nine Mini Golf Invitational—an event designed to separate the jibbers from the mountain men—Hjorliefson was easing over the second rock in a long, technically demanding pillow line on the final hole of the event when the pillow and all hell broke loose.

He tumbled forward with several thousand pounds of consolidated snow, dropping fifteen feet onto the next pad before the pouring slough forced him off the side, 25 feet down into an area full of rocks and trees. He was in the white room the whole time, hearing nothing but the snapping of trees all around him and, frankly, scared shitless for the first time in his ski career.

Once everything settled down and it became clear that he was miraculously okay, Hjorliefson did what any good pro skier would do: he played it off like no big thing. He credited his lucky touque, which was lost somewhere in the crash, with protecting him. So Ryan Oakden, another up-and-coming skier from somewhere east of the Whistler star-making machine, offered Hjorliefson his own lucky touque as a gesture of friendship.

Several weeks later, while blowing off steam one night in the Whistler village, Hjorliefson got a little drunk and managed to lose Oakden’s touque. But this time, he couldn’t play it off like no big thing. Not after he’d tweaked his knee and missed the big filming trip. Not after his good friend Marc-Andre Bellivue was paralyzed in a horrific crash in Bella Coola. Not after Doug Coombs was dead and McConkey blew his hip out and it generally dawned on him that he’s running with a fast, dangerous crowd as a poster boy for 4FRNT and Helly Hansen and one of a small group of young skiers making big mountain skiing more relevant than ever. This time, it actually occurred to him: he came very, very close to dying that day.

And then, in the middle of the bar, surrounded by his new peer group of pros and would be’s and wannabes, Hjorliefson started crying.

“You don’t want to let it affect you,” he says now. “You have to keep your confidence up and you want to think you’re invincible.”

Hjorliefson’s rattling down the road between Pemberton and Whistler in his beat-up blue truck that bears a striking resemblance to his beat-up blue snowmobile. He’s ferrying what amounts to his life’s possessions from Hugo Harrisson’s couch—where he was living—to a couch in the newly rented MSP condo—where he’ll live for a while yet. Home? Home is still in Canmore, 820 kilometers away.

“In a lot ways,” he continues, “filming and ski movies have contributed to the regression of skiing. We’ve lost that mentality of going out there on your own and planning every decision you make and managing your fate. A lot of skiers don’t have the drive to gain knowledge and experience and respect. They come in and they’re already at a top level, getting thrown into helicopters without ever understanding the mountains because they’re younger and that was never cool for them. I don’t think that’s how we should promote skiing.”

So this spring, while his peers assemble at various invite-only terrain park shoots to throw grabbed-up spins on flawless hits against stunning sunsets—exactly the kind of shots Hjorliefson’s first two segments are littered with—the future of skiing plans on ski touring to some lines in the Canadian Rockies that were a little too far away, a little too technical, when he was younger and chasing Sheppard around the region.

Back on Blackcomb, everything above tree line is completely socked in and the snow is old, wet, and heavy. It’s no time to go ski-starring down, say, Chainsaw Ridge.

“Want to hit my favorite run on the mountain?” Hjorliefson asks, enthusiasm still brimming. His slightly buck-toothed grin hovers between sincerity and mischief.

Um … maybe?

Turns out, Hjorliefson’s favorite run on Blackcomb isn’t one of the many on which you can easily kill yourself. It’s the Jersey Cream lift line—a double fall line bump run littered with hits and hips that allow for spraffies and cossacks to be done in full view of the quad above. He’s a pied piper and his small posse falls in behind him, creating a run-long parade of very good skiers utterly dorking out to the cheers of the up-loading crowd. They lap it several times until, on the fourth pass over, Hjorliefson realizes that complete strangers are giving the line a go. “I think we’ve started a trend!” he exclaims, delighted.

A few hundred yards away, the trendiest trendsetters in skiing are boosting huge airs and landing backwards in the Whistler Ski Invitational pipe competition. When they’re not competing, they’re seeking shelter from the weather and crappy snow, griping about the judging or boasting about their tricks or flirting with girls on their MySpace pages. They’re definitely not taking laps on the Jersey Cream lift line.

Hopefully, Hjorliefson is right.

DEK: Christian Hosoi was the most gifted spawn of the famed Dogtown skate scene, poster boy of the ’80s extreme sports revolution and a resilient pro and businessman who weathered skateboarding’s twists and turns. Now, after battling drug addiction and prison sentences, he’s back on his board and trying to regain hold of his legacy as the best skater ever.

The bounty hunters took another look at the photo of their target: a short, 29-year-old Asian-American with long, jet black hair, multiple piercings and the hollow gaze of a man who’d smoked crystal meth for breakfast. Surf, skateboard, and snowboard pros wandered the floor of the 1996 Action Sports Retailer trade show in San Diego, a blur of tattoos and brightly colored hair. The bounty hunters’ mark wouldn’t necessarily stand out in this freak show.

But Christian Hosoi was there. He approached the halfpipe and told the emcee to announce him as “Holmes”: Those who knew him would recognize the nickname immediately. Those who didn’t would recognize him—even without his trademark long black hair and piercings—the moment he dropped in. There was simply no other skater in the world who could milk the transitions of an average halfpipe like this one for so much air. As Hosoi soared over the show floor, the crowd screamed.

Later that day, the bounty hunters heard about Hosoi’s stunt and stormed back to the booth of his company, Focus Skateboards Unlimited. They demanded to know why Focus reps had told them that Hosoi wasn’t in the building. The reps shrugged and explained that Hosoi had shown up in time for the demo, then made a quick and clandestine exit.

The bench warrant issued for Hosoi after his failure to appear for a possession of drug paraphernalia conviction didn’t get served that day, but he knew his life in the public eye was over. Skateboarding was about to enter a new golden age, but the man who defined halfpipe skating for the better part of a decade, who helped create the very concept of extreme sports, was going underground. He’d stay there for nearly eight years, plumbing the depths of addiction before watching from behind bars as skateboarding left him behind.

Before Christian Hosoi was dodging bounty hunters, before he served five years in prisons in Hawaii and Nevada, he was known as the best pro skateboarder in the world. At age 10, the Los Angeles native was a prodigy whose father ran the Marina Skatepark—home to the original Dogtown heavies immortilized in the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys like Jay Adams, Tony Alva, and Shogo Kubo. “Straight up, those guys taught me how to skate,” says Hosoi. He’s sitting in the cafeteria at Quiksilver, the two billion-dollar, 800-pound gorilla of the action sports business in Huntington Beach, California. In a few days, Quik will announce a new sponsorship deal with Hosoi, and well-wishing employees keep coming up and welcoming him to the fold. He’s gracious and enthusiastic, but talking about the past puts a far-off look in his eye.

“The Dogtown guys were dinosaurs,” says Cesario “Block” Montano, a Venice photographer, filmmaker, and former pro skater who grew up with Hosoi. “They could do wheelers and little one-foot airs. That’s their glory, and it stopped. Christian took it to the next level.”

By the time he reached 10th grade, Hosoi was fully sponsored by skate giant Powell Peralta. Always a good student, when he suggested to his parents that school would be there a lot longer than his chance to be a pro skateboarder, they consented to his dropping out. Before long, he was traveling the world, competing in contests and performing demonstrations.

At age 17, he founded Hosoi Skates, enlisting his father to create artwork for the decks and his mother to consult on the business side. At its peak in the mid-’80s, the company was selling 10,000 boards a month, and Hosoi was making $300,000 annually. He was a fixture in the same Sunset Strip nightclub scene where youth culture icons like River Phoenix and the Red Hot Chili Peppers earned their bad-boy reputations. It was here that Hosoi—a regular pot-smoker since middle school—developed a taste for cocaine and speed.

By the end of the 80s, mainstream interest in skateboarding was at an all-time high. Converse sneakers featured Hosoi alongside Magic Johnson in their marketing and he toured the country performing on the Swatch Tour. With an innate gift for enormous air and a smooth, fluid style, Hosoi was the neon and ripped jeans-clad embodiment of the pop/sports collision that spawned the X Games, skate shoes, pop punk, and much of today’s standard-issue youth culture.

“Christian went the biggest,” says Tony Hawk, who was Hosoi’s only true rival in halfpipe skating for nearly a decade. “If you were into skating for the style and grace and air time, you were a fan of Christian’s.”

The economic recession that coincided with the Gulf War in 1990 rocked the skateboard business. Skate parks, beset by lawsuits, rising insurance costs and spiraling participation, closed. Skaters adapted the sport to an urban environment, riding  curbs and parking blocks, and hurtling over stairs. The business powerhouses at the time were slow to grasp the shift toward street skating, and small companies with a better understanding of the new generation sprang up to cash in.

Hosoi has never received credit for his contributions to street skating, but he was instrumental in adapting many of the halfpipe tricks to a street venue. “Whether it was a perfect ramp or a curb, I didn’t care,” he says. The industry did, however, and as ramps and halfpipes disappeared from their marketing, so did Hosoi. Still in his athletic prime, his endorsement deals shrank and his board brand cooled off. In a sport notorious for eating its young, that could have been the end of Hosoi’s story. But icons don’t fall prey to marketing trends, and Hosoi was on the verge of a radical reinvention that would take him to limits well beyond the ones he pushed on his skateboard.

By 1993, halfpipe and pool skating in LA was dead. While a new crop of street stars made their names in school yards across the city, Hosoi watched as, one by one, the crew he grew up skating with moved away or simply moved on. But in Orange County, two old-school skaters, Barrett “Chicken” Deck and Kelly Bellmar , were making a killing screening graphics on street boards. They used their newfound riches to build pools in their backyards, and heroes from the previous decade descended on the scene. “It was an underground revival in pools. Skateboarding was raging,” Hosoi says. After several months of commuting from LA to skate Chicken’s pool, he moved in.

Before Orange County was “The OC,” it was a sprawling, middle class suburban wasteland with great surf to the west and enough open space for freestyle motocross to the east. By the mid ’90s, an exploding snowboard industry injected the region with cash, and athletes turned themselves into action sports entrepreneurs seemingly overnight. The Crusty Demons of Dirt—freestyle moto’s vanguard—and companies like Black Flys Sunglasses set the tone for what would become a sort of white trash-chic: jacked pickup trucks on balloon tires, bottle blondes with balloon tits, and a 24/7 celebration of skaters, boarders, and surfers who risked life and limb for the cameras. “It was a melting pot of extreme sport athletes,” recalls Damian Sanders, one of the first snowboard pros who became the region’s biggest nightclub promoter. “All the surf, skate and motocross pros were doing their thing by day, and we’d all party together every night.” With his hand in several new skate brands and a pool to skate in his own backyard, Hosoi was in the thick of it.

As with any creative confluence of youth, talent, and success, drugs and alcohol coursed through the Orange County action sports community. In the rave scene Sanders helped create, ecstasy was the drug of choice; but for those who preferred a chemical enhancement to the adrenaline they chased all day long on their boards, it was crystal meth. Hosoi, an adrenaline junky since elementary school, took to meth like he took Chicken’s backyard pool. “It was almost thrilling,” he says now. “People would tell me they heard I was doing a lot of drugs and I’d ask them if I looked like I had been. They’d say no, and meanwhile I’d been up for three days, partying, skating, dealing with my business.”

“He was on a darker side, says Sanders. “They ran a whole different scene, it was a lot more hardcore in the drug use.” As demand for Hosoi’s skating dwindled,  it only got darker.

In 1995, Hosoi joined Hawk and several other pros on a trip to Japan, where halfpipe demonstrations could still draw large crowds and pay well. But Hosoi was more interested in the shabu—Japanese meth. “He wasn’t really skating during the demos,” says Hawk, who turned down offers from the promoters to extend the trip because he needed to get home to the X Games. “When the rest of us left, Christian stayed to party some more. We were concerned about him.” Hosoi didn’t come home for six months.

Prior to the Japan trip, Hosoi was pulled over for speeding and the cops found a meth pipe. It was this arrest that had bounty hunters looking for him at the trade show when he returned.

Having all but disappeared from the skate magazines and movies, Hosoi already considered himself an underground skater. In his increasingly fried brain, it made sense to go underground for real. “It was another thrill to be an outlaw,” he says. “And I totally romanticized it. People asked me what I was doing and I’d say, ‘Partying and running from the cops.’”

He stopped making public appearances altogether, and surrounded himself with a meth-fueled scene of skaters and surfers who fed the delusion that Hosoi was still pushing, still redefining what was possible. “We took it to the limit,” he says with an ominous laugh. “We were pushing the limit of how many drugs you could do and still go skate, go surf, go hang out and be seen in the places to be seen. It got out of control and we thought it was the coolest thing ever, because no one else could do that.”

Block, Hosoi’s old cohort from Venice, went down to Orange County to see for himself how bad it was. He found Hosoi grey-skinned and haggard, but then Hosoi dropped into the backyard pool and busted an enormous air over the deep-end hip, landing in a 50-50 grind on the shallow end coping. It was a rowdy line that no one else could have done. “Even fucked up on drugs and half as good as he should have been, he was still way better than everyone else,” says Block.

In 1999, Hosoi was busted a second time with a meth pipe. Block helped him post bail and went to be with him in court, but Hosoi once again failed to appear. After that, Block’s voicemail greeting said, “Anyone, leave your name and number. But if you’re Christian Hosoi, fuck you. You’re going to jail, bitch.”

Hosoi says that in all his years launching out of ramps he was never scared. Even during his outlaw period, fear never really entered his head. And though the Drug Enforcement Agency’s sworn affidavit claims he looked nervous as he waited for his bags at the Honolulu International Airport on January 27, 2000, Hosoi maintains that he wasn’t scared when the drug dog alerted agents to the pound and a half of crystal meth he was smuggling in his hip pack. When the agents told him he was looking at 10 to 20 years of jail time, he assumed they were lying.

But when he found himself in a federal holding cell, surrounded by a group of teenage murderers who were stoked to learn that a skateboarding legend was in their midst, Hosoi wasn’t just scared. He was terrified. “These guys are 19 years old, looking at life without parole,” he says. “And they’re telling me, ‘Yeah, you really are looking at that much time.’ That is looking fear in the eyes.”

Hosoi had flown to Hawaii hoping to lay low for long enough to get clean and deal with his mounting legal problems. But hurting for cash and irrational with addiction, he agreed to transport the drugs for a dealer he knew. With one silent signal from the DEA’s dog, he was dragged from the Orange County skateboard underground into the cold, harsh reality of a federal penitentiary. He pleaded guilty and began a long legal struggle to avoid the federal mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years.

Ironically, Hosoi’s celebrity, all but gone on the outside, played a pivotal role for him in prison. Though the inmate community was viciously segregated by race, every faction had members who skated, who owned Hosoi boards when they were young. Hosoi was afforded a status that only increased as he discovered Christianity and began regularly attending bible study. When he agreed to help the sheriffs—many of whom skated themselves as kids—with programs like Scared Straight, they returned the favor by sending letters to his judge claiming Hosoi was reformed and would be better off outside, where he could help more kids.

And they weren’t the only ones. Letters poured into the offices of Judge Alan Kay attesting to Hosoi’s influence as a pro skater and the good he had done before his addiction, as well as to his devotion to Christianity. “It was unlike anything I had ever seen,” says Hosoi’s attorney Myles Breiner, who ultimately succeeded in getting the sentence reduced to five years with time served. In June 2004, Hosoi was set free.

Hosoi’s release has been a cause for celebration in the skateboarding world, which seems to realize that it nearly lost one of its most gifted own. He has appeared at countless demos, greeted with adoration every time he’s introduced. “Even if you’re a kid,” says Hawk, “your parents or the older guys in the park are telling you who he is—that this guy is an innovator, one of the guys who started the evolution of skateboarding. He’s a legend.”

Hosoi has resettled in Orange County with his wife, who recovered from her own drug abuse alongside him. The two were married while Hosoi was in prison by the same judge who sentenced him. And though he occassionally bumps into some of the crowd that he used to run with, he simply invites them to the Christian ministry he’s building around skateboarding with a local church.

At the foot of the Huntington Beach pier, the emotional center of the Orange County action sports world, the Huntington Surf and Sport store stands as a teeming retail monument to the industry Hosoi helped build. In the storefront window, way larger than life, Quiksilver has a poster of Hosoi, taken a few months out of prison. In a backyard pool somewhere, he’s pulling a gnarly frontside layback smith grind, his eyes eerily serene even as the concrete coping splinters beneath his back truck. The image says nothing about the path Hosoi has taken to that moment, but it says everything any skater needs to know.

January

Where Guanacaste Peninsula, Costa Rica

Why There may be no better stretch of coast in the world to play surf explorer. Winter guarantees both regular swells from the North Pacific and dry conditions, so you and a rented four-wheel drive can gain access to all kinds of secret spots between the regions better-known breaks like Playa Grande or Playa Negra. Costa Rica may be decades removed from its era as a surf frontier, but the hundreds of Americans you’ll encounter crawling Guanacaste create a traveling surf report that assures you’ll know where the goods are, and how to find them – no small thing if you’re on a seven-day leash.

February

Where Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

Why The Gold Coast was Australia’s most popular surf destination long before 2001, when the happiest accident in the history of oceanfront development took place. A river-mouth dredging project just south of the famed surf spots created what’s said to be the world’s longest, most uniform sandbar, resulting in a wave that connects the region’s first three breaks, Snapper Rocks, Greenmount and Kirra, into one flawless right-hander called the Superbank, which peels for over a mile when conditions are right. Most Australian grommets (young surfers, who are better than you) head back to school from their summer vacations on Feb. 1, so you just might catch the Superbank when it’s not supercrowded.

March

Where Bali, Indonesia

Why Go to Bali in March, when vacation season in the Southern Hemisphere is over but the Indian Ocean isn’t churning out fearsome swells as it does later in the year. You’ll discover why it’s a self-contained starter kit for Indonesian surfing – everything from barrels howling across skin-slicing reef (Padang Padang) to gentle point breaks that make any surfer look like Andy Irons (Medewi). If the place gives you a hankering for the region’s more remote outposts, ferries to the original edge of the surfing world, Grajagan or G-Land, leave from the Balinese town of Gilamanuk.

April

Where Mentawai Islands, Indonesia

Why Twenty years ago, this chain of barrier islands running parallel to Sumatra’s southwest coast was frequented by only a handful of pioneers who preferred surf to society. Today, from May to September the Mentawais teem with chartered surf boats for two reasons: First, the reef breaks here produce some of the most perfect barreling waves in the world that time of year. Second, the only way to get to them remains by boat. Book for April, and you’re less likely to be competing with big-name pros and sold-out charters for the waves of a lifetime.

May

Where Tahiti

Why The South Pacific is the world’s largest wave machine, and Tahiti is ideally located on its receiving end. The monsoon season ends in April and coincides with an increase of storm activity in the latitude known by sailors and surfers as the Roaring 40′s. These storms light up Tahiti’s southern coast with famous breaks like Taapuna, Vairao and the undisputed Heaviest Wave in the World: Teahupoo. The World Championship Tour comes to the infamous break each May, giving enterprising spectators (the break is a 20-minute paddle from shore) a front-row seat as the world’s best tackle the sport’s beast.

June

Where Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa

Why The Southern Hemisphere summer sees thousands of vacationing South Africans pour into this otherwise sleepy beach town, but the crowds are long gone by the time the winter swells start in June, pumping out the seven different waves that make up J-Bay. The most famous of these, Supertubes, is considered by many to be the best right-hand breaking wave in the world, but it’s the magical days when all seven sections link up for one of the longest rides on the planet that give J-Bay its status as a legend. And unlike most legendary waves, it’s rarely crowded except for the dolphins.

July

Where Tavarua, Fiji

Why Arguably the world’s first luxury surf destination, the Tavarua Island Resort negotiated a lease with the government of Fiji in 1984 and has had exclusive access to two of the world’s best left-breaking waves since. Cloudbreak and Restaurants are both suited to skilled surfers. Cloudbreak in particular can punish the unwary when it gets over six feet. Waves here are usually created in the Tasman Sea, which is at its most consistent midsummer, allowing mere mortals the opportunity to catch picture-worthy waves between the monster swells that make Tavarua one of the favorite surf spots of Kelly Slater, the seven-time world champ.

August

Where Los Cabos, Mexico

Why With exposure to 200 degrees of swell and one of the most raucous surf towns in the world, the tip of the Baja Peninsula has given surfers their cake with a fork and napkin for decades. In August, South Pacific swells wrap themselves around Cabo and turn on famed high-performance waves like Zippers and mellow classics like Nine Palms. Meanwhile, tropical storms form off the coast of mainland Mexico, sending in solid southeast swells as well. And the whole time, Cabo San Lucas – the town that launched a thousand Corona-themed tank tops – goes off nightly (and daily).
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September

Where San Onofre State Beach, Calif.

Why Stretching for nearly two miles between San Diego and Orange Counties, San Onofre State Beach encompasses some of the most famous waves in the state. From Old Man’s, where California surf culture was born, to Trestles, where today’s high-performance tricks were perfected, San Onofre is a living monument to surf history that goes off when the surf is up. It’s consistent year-round, but catch this coastline – one of the last undeveloped pieces between Mexico and Los Angeles – when an eight-foot southwest swell peaks on an early fall morning, and you’ll understand why surfing is a way of life in California.

October

Where Donegal Bay, Ireland

Why People have been riding the Emerald Isle’s murky green waves since the 60′s, well before wet suit technology made it an appealing option. Today, Ireland’s northwest reef breaks are increasingly popular, thanks to a campaign on the part of Donegal Bay locals to promote one of their best waves, a barreling left known as the Peak, and prove that it is more valuable to tourism than a proposed marina. While there are dozens more breaks that the famously friendly residents are less likely to share with you, modern wet suits make your own exploration more palatable. And Ireland’s best swell season is the fall, when the water averages a balmy 57 degrees.

November

Where Northwest Puerto Rico

Why East Coast surfers looking to avoid a 12-hour jaunt to Hawaii have a much better option in Puerto Rico, where the northwest coastline often draws comparisons to its Pacific cousin because of the big, powerful swells churned out by both the North Atlantic and hurricanes in late fall. The most consistent waves in the Caribbean have sparked a thriving surf culture here, so the 80-degree waters are often crowded, although they tend to thin as you head north from the island’s surf center around Rincón. Either way, crowds are a small price to pay for surfing in board shorts at Thanksgiving.

December

Where The North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii

Why Two things happen on the North Shore of Oahu every December: a horde of famous surfers descend for the end of the World Championship Tour and the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, and what might be the most exposed stretch of coastline in the world gets hammered as the North Pacific swell season reaches its apex. Breaks like the feared Sunset Beach, the mighty Banzai Pipeline and the truly monstrous Waimea Bay come alive with 12- to 30-foot bombs that showcase (and occasionally crush) world title contenders and local legends from across the globe. December on the North Shore is a rite of passage for any surfer looking to prove him or herself on the sport’s biggest stage. For the rest of us, it’s one heck of a show.