Bryan’s humble beginnings on the northern edge of the Los Angeles sprawl in a city called Moorpark nested him straight into the heart of the skate and surf capital of the contiguous 48 states. He was eleven years old when he caught a wave at Ventura Point for the first time. In those early days Bryan’s mom would drop him and his brother off at the beach in Ventura on her way to work. The boys would stash a candy bar in the sleeve of their wetsuits so they could surf all day without having to paddle in to refuel. The self-expression found in surfing and skating synthesized into passion early in Bryan’s life.
Bryan’s first experience snowboarding came a couple of years later at the age of 15, a bit east of the beach in Big Bear, California. He immediately fell in love with the feeling of surfing on snow. As a Christmas gift one year, his mom signed him up with LA Ski and Sun Tours, a company that took mostly college-age students from LA to ski and beach destinations around the country, which would later become Bryan’s first sponsor. On the bus, he visited resorts all over Utah and Colorado, as well as a little resort off the beaten path called Jackson Hole. Bryan remembers Jackson feeling different than the other places he had visited. There was something free and wild about it that stayed with him long after he returned to the Southern California sunshine.
In the early days of Bryan’s professional snowboarding career, he was one of the top progressive freestyle riders. He was the skater from SoCal that did creative butters, shifties, spins, and flips, lighting up the first-ever terrain parks at Bear Mountain with aerial wizardry. But Bryan wasn’t satisfied with his early success; he felt like there was more to explore, more to learn from snowboarding. That’s what began to set him apart – everyone loves tricks and technical acrobatic prowess, but Bryan had a simple passion for surfing the mountain that he couldn’t deny.
On a road trip from Mammoth to Tahoe one year with Volcom’s co-founder Richard Woolcott, rider Mike Parillo, and photographer Nick Adams, Bryan found himself glued to the window, his field of view packed to the brim with mountains. He had a feeling of insatiable curiosity urging him to suggest a random left turn into the Sierras just to see what was up there. The crew went along and that left turned into a month-long camp out where the crew explored and rode in an unfamiliar land known as “the backcountry”. Much of the footage from Volcom’s film The Garden would come from that trip. Within minutes of parking and trudging out into the snow, Bryan had unconsciously, yet unquestionably, found his life’s pursuit. Coming from a densely populated metropolis to the pristine, untouched mountains, the fluffy white pearly gates opened up wide and pulled Bryan deep into their grasp. His course was set from that point on. Exploring in the mountains would not be a hobby or just part of his job, it would become the embodiment of his truest self.
