LAST WINTER, a few weeks after Travis Rice spotted this remarkable peak in British Columbia, all things aligned, and he and Austen Sweetin found themselves clearing four-and-a-half-minute runs down a literal dreamscape stacked with perfect—and immensely technical—lines of pillows. The opportunity was rare, to put it lightly. Travis and Austen were filming for the new Quiksilver team movie, Sequencer, and Chad Chomlack, one of our favorite photographers, was there to capture it all. The resulting photos are of the stop-you-in-your-tracks variety, and we couldn’t be more stoked on this cover. How did it go down? Travis lets us in on the behind-the-scenes of notching the first runs down Velvet Castle.
“I’m kind of always in exploration mode because so much of what I love to do—so much of what so many within snowboarding love to do—is look for terrain and conditions that provide a backdrop for creative interpretation. Frankly, for decades it’s been kind of a pursuit: The search for geological oddities combined with incredible snowpack and conditions. When all those variables come together in one place, which does not happen often, ha…I mean, when you imagine and fantasize about the most bonkers terrain with the right conditions, this spot is borderline fantasy. With the amount of time I spend in BC, this is for sure one of the most nuts locations I’ve ever come across up there. It’s one thing to find a spot like this and it’s another to produce the opportunity to take a crack at it.
I was actually on a scout flight in one of my favorite places on the planet to surprise my lady and ask for her hand. We flew into this particular valley and I saw that peak. I’ve scouted in this area before and I did not see this thing. I was taken aback. There are very few faces in the world that look like this.
And so we looked at it, we circled up, and saw an opposing peak that was named Charity and in front of it is this perfect, pyramid-topped mountain named Virtue. The pilot and the Selkirk Tangiers guide that were with me were kind of in on it, so we landed and Brook and I had a really beautiful moment up there. Afterwards, because I’m always taking scout photos, we looked some more at this thing to determine if it was actually rideable—if there was actually the ability to make it down to the bottom. Starting the next day, I worked on a roughly two-week timeline and figured out every which way possible to take a swing at this thing.
You never know if you’re going to get the conditions, and it’s obviously a face that you need a lot of confidence in stability in the snowpack to ride because there’s a ton of consequence. I’ve been spending my free time off The Tour shooting for a Quiksilver film this year and so I hit up my buddy Austen [Sweetin], who’s one of the most skilled individuals out there, to take a swing at it with me.
We went back up a couple weeks later and ended up getting a perfect window. It was only going to be possible to ride this thing if we hit a large number of consecutive green lights. That morning, one by one, the green lights turned on and we got to a point where we felt confident enough to drop in on it.
Inevitably, there are always a lot of moving parts setting up for a film shoot like this and the scale was pretty huge. Our barbie angle, alone, was several miles away. It’s just a huge face. It looked big from afar, but once we got onto it, we realized that it was quite a bit bigger than we thought. The top is super steep. It’s kind of like a free-fall wall. And then the bottom three-quarters is a super technical, steep, never-ending pillow run. I really love that type of riding, where it’s too complicated to really plan a run out. You can plan big chunks of it, as far as what general area you’re trying to get to, but you just have to find that in-the-moment type of riding where you’re on-sighting, doing what you can with the couple hundred feet you have in front of you. That type of riding is my favorite.
The runs that Sweetin and I rode down that thing—it was insane. Going fast, our time was over four minutes to do one run. It was about 3600 vertical feet. Two thirds of the way down, you’re like, Alright, that’s all I got, and then you have to dig for more. It takes everything you’ve got and then some, ha. It was super wild. For both of us, these were probably best lines of the winter.
After we got a couple runs on it and we finished, one of the lead guides who was with us asked me, “So what are you going to name it? No one’s ever ridden this thing to our knowledge.” I thought about it for a moment. The face was hard to get into, it was a bit like a fort or a castle. I ended up naming it Velvet Castle because of all the incredible pillowed features and how silky smooth the snow conditions were. And given where it was in proximity what had taken place a couple weeks before, Velvet Castle is also the middle and last name of my fiancé, so I named it as kind of a tribute for her.”
As told to Mary T. Walsh and seen in issue 20.1.
