Out West; Snowboarding, Westbeach and a New Canadian Dream

“My posse’s getting big and my posse’s getting bigger”

This is not a story about a company and it’s not really a story about a sport. Even though Westbeach has been kind enough to foot the bill for this endeavor, they also realized from the beginning that to tell this story, we couldn’t limit it to one team, one time, or one company. I thank them for that freedom, although it opened so many doors to so many stories, that inevitably some of them didn’t make it in.

This book is a look at people who for a part of their life, loved snowboarding more than anything else. There was a time when that’s all that seemed important for me too and luckily I was in the right place at that time. For me it was the late 80’s and early 90’s in Whistler, but I’ve met lots of people who had the same experiences in Banff and Big White, Blue Mountain and Mt. Tremblant and some of them are still having it today.

Sometimes on a midweek day in December when I’m riding in the middle of a storm I get back to that headspace and I know that what we did was right and the feeling hasn’t changed at all.

This is the story of people who were in the right place at the right time, whether that was in 1983 or 2009.

The New Style. from the Beastie Boys’ “Licensed to Ill” (1986)

View chapters from the book online here.