Turns All Year: Snowboarding Through the Summer Months
Vices. For some, it’s caffeine; others, gambling; maybe you get grumpy if you don’t do your morning yoga. For me, it’s snowboarding. Take away the ride for too long and I’ll start to act irrational. By the time fall hits, I’m reduced to a jittery mess, counting down the days until the snow falls. But this year I found my fix where I never knew it existed: in the snowfields and glaciers of the North Cascade Mountains, right in my own backyard.
Blueberry Ridge
Blueberry Ridge sits just outside the boundaries of Mount Baker Ski Area. I had been there several times during the winter months, drawing big powder lines, but this time was different. The lifts hadn’t been running for months, and the parking lot was dry as a bone. Also, I had an equipment problem: a broken pull tab on a borrowed splitboard (a snowboard that splits to convert into two skis for the ascent). This meant the transition from two planks to one wasn’t going to be as smooth as advertised, and, despite my stream of obscenities, forcing the binding plate into place wasn’t happening. Taking a minute to regroup and sip a warm PBR tall boy amid the panorama of Mount Herman, Shuksan’s photogenic glaciers and the Canadian Coastal Range to the north, binding frustrations quickly slipped to the back of my mind. The alpine sun trumps all ill feelings in June.
This was my first experience splitboarding, which would serve as a trial run for a summer of big lines I’d draw in the high alpine passes and glaciated volcanoes all over the Pacific Northwest. With Mount Rainier and Mount Baker nestled a short drive from Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., respectively, the most glaciated mountain in the contiguous United States and the owner of the world record for snowfall in a single season is an easy day trip away. And the snow holds well past April. Even until it begins to fall again in October, there is plenty of coverage in the Pacific Northwest if you know where to look. Taking a short jaunt into the alpine wilderness, the mountainsides are adorned with wildflowers and mountain goats—and steep, sustained ribbons of shreddable snow. Accessed on foot, the process forces you to slow down and look at your surroundings, allowing for a more intimate experience where you see, smell, touch and feel the mountains.
I was out for a mellow Saturday excursion with Byron, a 30-year-old Californian turned Bellingham, Washington, resident with long blond hair who works for Arbor Sports, makers of environmentally sustainable snowboards and skateboards. Byron was sporting his usual laid-back attitude, smiling as we arrived at Mount Baker’s upper parking lot mid-morning. Carloads of Nikon-equipped tourists in Bermuda shorts stared at our snowboard gear while a lone telemarker and his dog, bound for a more ambitious tour to Bagley Lake on the back side of Table Mountain, passed by and stopped to chat with us before heading up.
Byron had a solid amount of splitboard experience from the previous winter and quickly broke trail through the softening snow, leaving me laboring behind. It turned out that I had my climbing skins on backward, meaning that I was trying to climb against the grain, a classic rookie mistake. Once the skins were turned around, the advantages of a splitboard—a fairly recent invention—were quickly apparent. As the late Craig Kelly explained in a 2003 interview with Frequency: The Snowboarder’s Journal, “you actually get to see the mountain on the way up … . A big part of being in the mountains, for me, is just observing and bringing in the scenery and the beauty of seeing the mountains. It’s way easier and relaxing to do it on a splitboard.”...
