The blaring watch alarm doesn’t sound like a dream, but I swear I only fell asleep five minutes ago. My eyelids feel like saggy cornices, dangerously heavy to open. I fumble to shut the watch up with my eyes closed, but a rustle outside my tent confirms the reality before I find the snooze button. Starry skies — we’re moving.
After grunted 2 a.m. greetings and hurried bowls of oatmeal, we slip into the night and onto our snowboards. We’re off for another look at the Samsonite Couloir, a 3,000 foot staircase that accesses a trophy spine wall. Jeremy Jones and Ryland Bell have already hit the wall once, but they had to spend a cold bivy on top to make it happen. The thought today is that the line can be climbed in four hours to catch the 7 a.m. primetime light window just right. Here’s hoping.
Our 3 a.m. run down the glacier to the base of the climb is rough and unforgiving. Everyone has tunnel vision riding the sea of crust by headlamp. Two thousand feet later we arrive at the glacial floor and regroup. Ryland and Josh Dirksen report hearing “noises, big noises”.
They weren’t lying. While changing over our splitboards to ski-mode, the sound of ice fall and spindrift avalanches is unescapable. The rumbles echo eeirly in the canyon and are amplified uncomfortably in our heads by the pitch dark. We can’t see anything.
No one is stoked about the sounds but without any fresh snow overnight we decide to at least take a peek at the couloir entrance, just for the sake of recon. With a clip and a couple rope flips, we get tied in and start climbing to the gaping jaws of the begschrund.
Few words are spoken as we arrive at the 10 foot wide horizontal black hole. The dull roar of a relentless waterfall of sluff and spindrift pouring down the chute says it all. It’s time to bail, and quickly. The angry inches that drifted onto the north faces overnight are in no mood to be messed with, at least not today. We obey and hurry back to camp. Time to make pancakes and reset the watch — 2 a.m., starry skies dependent.
- Seth Lightcap remembering a chilling morning deep in the Alaskan backcountry
By Nate Deschenes
It would be easy to think Jeremy Jones is insane, unfit for society on any level. To conclude that he’s reckless, that he doesn’t care for his own safety would also be a safe bet for any gamblin’ man. It’s within reason to think that he’s entirely computer generated, placed on fucked up mountain faces by high end movie producers, guided down by a joystick, maybe some smoke and mirrors. Judging by his snowboarding, these might seem like logical assumptions, but they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Though, 2 a.m. wake-up calls and suspiciously agile board control would suggest otherwise, Jones is perfectly sane. Fact is, Jeremy Jones appears to be more in tune with what he’s doing than anyone in snowboarding. Which is exactly why that morning in the Fairweather Range, they turned around, and folded their suspect hand of no-limit Alaskan hold ‘em for pancakes instead.
For the past 10-plus years, Jeremy Jones has been the one person in professional snowboarding’s freeride scene who is clearly immortal. Riding faces deemed unrideable, reaching speeds deemed unmaintainable and conquering situations deemed inescapable, he is the one freerider who continually blows minds with his fast and fluid style. His resume with Absinthe, Standard and TGR says it all.
“Jones is like a wizard. He can go down steep technical lines with racing slough and find his way and never get blinded,” says fellow big-mountain charger David Carrier-Porcheron. “Beyond that, Jeremy is the most knowledgeable rider I can think of.”
Before he put ranges from French Alps to the Alaskan Tordrillos beneath his feet, there was a fair share of mountains thought to be out of reach. Jeremy’s line selection and how he rode them ushered a new level of riding into the sport. Jones changed the game.
But by 2007, after so many years of raising the stakes, Jones was becoming maxed out. “I was beginning to ride some of the same spots, and for me snowboarding has always been about finding something new. It has always been about taking me to this different place, and that was starting to go away a little bit.”
That year Jeremy founded Protect our Winters, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving our winter climate. The wheels were beginning to turn. Instead of the full-blown mountain destroyer massacring lines year after year, we began to see the true Jeremy Jones, a person who was really about giving the utmost respect to the environment in which he thrives. POW’s mission is to educate and unite people and communities to use simple consumer decisions and conservation practices to make a difference. For something like snowboarding, where you take so much from the mountain, Jeremy reminded us that we need to work to preserve this gift if we are to continue enjoying its bounty.
So when the news came out in the winter of ‘08 that he was switching gears completely and forgoing the use of helicopters and snowmobiles, it wasn’t that big of a surprise. Crazy maybe, but nonetheless right on point with the direction he was headed.
If he truly believes he reached the pinnacle of all that was available within the limitations of a helicopter, who are we to argue? For years he has been setting goals for himself outside of the realms of the convenient, in this case “convenient” meaning “helicopters,” yet never really satisfying his inner drive because he found himself stuck, in this case “stuck” meaning “riding powder in Alaska.” If that sounds pretentious, it’s not. Like all influential individuals, Jones feels a duty to his passion and to himself that needs to be pursued above all else. This kind of thinking opens opportunities for the rest of us.
It was clear to me where I was getting my biggest high snowboarding,” he explains. “My highs were coming from hiking where I rode. The intimacy of being in the mountains was beginning to give me the most enjoyment, as opposed to before when I would go in super fast and hit these lines and then bounce out.”
If it was environmentally motivated at first, Jones soon found that his non- motorized efforts only complemented his rising feeling of connection to nature. With everything directing his energy towards these feelings, the Deeper film project was born.
Jeremy dropped the heli charters and snowmobile missions in exchange for something different. While some of us were hoping to see this modern-day mountain man accessing lines on the back of a polar bear, pelts hanging from his sealskin suit, Jones thought splitboarding a bit more rational. “It’s one of the only places in the sport that’s actually growing, rapidly. And it’s exciting to be a part of that,” Jones says of ski touring and snowboarding’s inbred cousin. Another by-product of this, he says is that is gives him the opportunity to “show people that world class freeriding can be done on foot with next to no money, making it super accessible and hopefully inspiring people who are out there looking for more. Because how feasible is a heli? Not that many people get to do that, but those same people looking for that challenge can do this.” Polar bears be damned.
With an unique environmental and social concept driving Deeper, Jeremy had to build the project in a whole new manner. First, came the conflicts of breaking away from a mold that had shaped his career to that point. “The challenge of it became really clear that in order to go the direction I wanted, I was going to have to do my own movie.” He continues, “By no means did I want to do that, I mean that’s a huge undertaking. But it was time. I needed to create my own world to go to these places.” At the same time, if the industry didn’t follow Jones admits, “I was fine with that. This is something I needed to do on a personal level.” In the end, it was an easy decision for those who understood the idea.
With the boat at full sail Jones then focused on locations that he considers epicenters of the sport, places where he hopes to influence others who are looking for this same challenge. “I picked some locations that are pretty darn popular just to show people what’s in their backyard. So we went to these meccas where I have been to a ton before, and that a ton of people that have ridden or have some connection with, and just went deeper.”
Trips to the Sierra Nevada, the Wasatch and Jones’ second home, Alaska, confirmed that even in the most popular spots on earth, there’s a wealth of terrain only recently beginning to get tapped, at least on a snowboard. Principal cinematographer Chris Edmands put it in perspective. “This kind of thing has been going on for hundreds of years. Yeah, maybe those before didn’t thrash spines like Jones and the other guys do, but if you are familiar at all with the mountains and you love to spend time in them, then maybe you can relate to going out and freezing your ass off, climbing up and riding down.” So while they are by no means pioneers, make no mistake that Jones and the Deeper crew will be the first to bring it to mainstream snowboarding.
To be fair, Jeremy didn’t keep it all in our collective backyards; an expedition to Antarctica brings the element of the unknown to Deeper, with Jones and Xavier de le Rue pushing themselves harder than ever before. “The snowboarding there was full-on! Let’s just put it this way: I wasn’t expecting what I found there. There’s no way that if only a year before I went to Antarctica I would have been able to ride this face, Mt. Francois, a trophy among trophies–so it did show a lot of what I learned the past season being immersed in the mountains.”
By the same token, who you ride with may be even more important than where you go, and not every snowboarder is up for trips like the ones Jones put together for the movie. From legends like Johan Olofsson and Tom Burt to young freeriders Lucas Debari and Ralph Backstrom, picking the right crew was essential for Jones. “Before Deeper, I would be working on multiple projects at a time and it’s hard jumping between different crews — it’s kind of dangerous too. It’s nice to have your team of guys where everyone knows what everyone else is all about.” While riders from Forrest Shearer to Ryland Bell say that there’s no one they’d would rather be in the mountains with, Jones gets the final say in who goes on the trips. “Put it this way,” he says with a hint of sarcasm, “you wont find me trying to talk someone into going on a trip. Either you get it or you don’t.”
With people like Seth Lightcap snapping photos and Edmands filming, Jones assembled a crew that understood the unique rewards of this sort of thing. “Every day we were jumping into a bunch of unknowns, on so many different levels,” Jones says. “The thing is, I still want to charge sick lines, so it takes a lot of work to make that happen going about it this way. If I was content just making a cruisy backcountry movie, this would be a lot chiller, but I want to continue to progress and do my finest snowboarding and have it be done on foot. And that is a lot of frickin’ work.”
But, Edmands insists, for the teams on each Deeper shoot, it was all worth it. “Either you are down for the cause or you’re not. There were so many trips we went on that didn’t make the film, but at the end of the day everyone would walk out of there and still consider it a success. I think paramount to anything else, he chose people who truly love to be in the mountains.”
With all of this has come the highest level of backcountry education and preparedness, because let’s remember, these aren’t groomers he’s riding, ski patrol isn’t out there, and there isn’t a cozy lodge waiting at the bottom. “By changing the rules, the game changes drastically, and in many ways intensifies dramatically. It’s very important moving forward to show people what were getting into, and bringing an educational value to it as well is just as important. Because this whole movement is sending a lot more people out there, and without education it’s a dangerous place.” Jones himself will be the first to admit that in the past two seasons he has backed down from more stuff than ever before, “I turned away from a lot of lines throughout this whole experience, which is really hard after you put in so much work.”
Jeremy speaks with a confidence and knowledge that you just don’t come across every day. He uses terms like “full on” and “frickin’ stoked” as though they are just as technical and precise terminology as the rest of his educated backcountry semantics. What he’s after is very clear, even if you don’t get exactly what he is talking about. One thing is certain though: Jeremy Jones is more wound up on snowboarding than he has been in a long time.
“The cool thing is that in the past two years I have learned more than maybe ever in snowboarding. So that alone keeps it exciting. It’s keeping me hungry. When it comes down to it you have to ask yourself, ‘What keeps you amping on the sport?’ And it’s so obvious that what I am doing now allows that.”
By immersing himself in the mountains he is set on conquering, Jones has spelled out without a hint of confusion that for him, the journey in itself is the reward. Yet one can surmise that there is a certain element of pride that drives Jeremy in his quest. By doing this on his own two feet, when what he calls “The Trophy Line” is still shedding slough as he races to the glacier below, the culmination of all that he has worked so patiently on pays double in cold, hard glory. Proving once more the theory that pancakes may very well be the secret to longevity.
