The original JHSM Editor’s Note: Lance Pitman talks about Issue One
Snowboarding for me started as a way to continue my efforts in learning tricks. I had skateboarded for a few years and I was addicted to launch ramps. I learned how to do Judo airs, airwalks and frigid airs. I could get a method out there every now and then. I was an 8 year old child striving to get more air, to do bigger tricks.
That mode of thought continued through my junior high years and well into my high school years. I was an avid half pipe rider. I won a lot of contests as a kid. I went to snowboard camp and rode the pipe. I was so into half pipe riding that I wanted to leave Jackson Hole and go to the east coast where the half pipes were bigger and better. I wanted to compete and prove to the world that I had the skills to win.
I think about this now and look at myself now and I think; “Could that person really have been me? I am so far from that mode of thought now.”
When I was a senior in high school I got to snowboard every day of the second semester. After 1st period English class I would go to the mountain and ride. This was a very big winter and the powder was unreal. I thought every day and every second of my life in school was a powder day that I was missing. That’s just how good that winter was.
Throughout that winter and the next, which was even bigger (think 1996-1997) I learned about a new kind of snowboarding that was available to me but wasn’t evident for years. It had been looking past a park. It had been riding the mountain terrain that was all there, but I was just riding it to and up to jumps and spins.
My training on the snowboard team had helped me learn to ride my edges and to adapt to terrain as gravity was taking me down the mountain. Eventually I realized it wasn’t gravity. I learned to turn faster and to change edges. I learned to react to changing terrain. There is of course no real force on the mountain but the huge compulsion to realize that it is when a rider achieves a perfect balance between anticipation and adaptation that the mountain opens itself up completely.
The soul of snowboarding for me lies in the theory that life imitates art. I truly believe that the circumstances of ones life are adopted and portrayed in ones riding.
I anticipate a revived respect for mountain riding will lead to a re-focus on the soul of snowboarding. Snowboarders will experience what it is that separates snowboarding from skateboarding and surfing is the mountain experience and the spirit associated with it. The snowboarder is one with himself when he communes with the powers in the mountain.
The Jackson Hole snowboarder knows this. The Jackson Hole snowboarder has known this since day one. This is precisely what brought him or her here to begin with. And for those of us who were brought here by our parents…all we can say is thanx.
-Lance Pitman
Jackson Hole, Wyoming