Photo: Jeff Curtes
Photo: Jeff Curtes

Switzerland’s Nicolas Müller is undoubtedly one of the most gifted riders to ever emerge in the storied history of pro snowboarding. A regular-footed magician with a knack for the impossible, Müller has brought startling displays of both trickery and flow to freestyle riding. The 30-year-old, forward-thinking vegetarian has helped define a next level visual aesthetic of the highest order while working with Absinthe.

He has produced a series of awe-inspiring video parts, all depicting his effortless riding style. Whether it’s playing mini-shred on the wind-lips outside of his home in Laax or ripping full-blown mega lines in the Alaskan wilderness, his full spectrum snowboarding is something rarely matched by his contemporaries. Yet, the ideals that he lives by may be his most inspiring legacy.

Abiding by his intuition and a deeper sense of self-knowledge than most people can comprehend, Nicolas Müller accesses a realm of pure magic, taking his snowboarding places not likely to be seen in past, present, or even future generations.

He has a style that changed my way of thinking about snowboarding.
– Kevin Pearce.

“Create! Create your own world. If you don’t say or even think about what you want, what you really want, then you can’t blame anyone for the world you are in because you didn’t make that important enough. I learned early on that, no matter the advice of anyone, the best person to listen to is yourself. At the time of making certain decisions, outwardly they might not seem to make sense, but inwardly, and in the long term, these choices are what will allow you to reach the dreams that you have inside yourself. These things you feel, this intuition, it has some kind of message within it. As I’m getting older I can say this has become very clear, just in seeing the impact certain decisions have had on my life.

“Out in the mountains, when I am on my snowboard something totally different guides me, which is quite difficult to explain. I just go with the flow. There is no other way to describe it. I follow what I am told to out there. Where this comes from I don’t know, but I do know how to listen to it. When it’s snowboarding time, it’s sacred time.” – Nicolas Müller