The Never Summer team rider talks career choices, filming for his latest Midwest masterpiece, Pickpocket, and never having a true powder day. (Yes, you read that right.)

Mark Clavin: You got a half hour?

Sam Anderson: Half hour is perfect! [The remainder of this interview went much longer than a half hour and is edited so we could fit some of it on the pages. —Clavin]

You based out of Wisconsin?

Originally, yes. I was based out of Madison and filmed everything locally for most of my parts. Then, two years ago, I moved to Minneapolis with my girlfriend. But Alex Havey, who I have been making these projects with, stayed in Madison, so it’s made filming a little bit trickier, you know? We’re four hours apart, so we normally just try to find somewhere that’s in the middle or go to Michigan. This last year we filmed mostly in Canada, since the Midwest had probably the worst snow year I’ve ever seen. 

You are a full-time snowboarder and part-time mechanical engineer. You ever going to combine the two? 

I just got a job offer actually yesterday where I will be designing large construction equipment. It’s, like, a six-month contract engineering position for the summer, so I’m gonna be working until, like, November-ish. Haven’t really combined the two work-wise yet. I’ve seen Maggie Leone has her thing going on the engineering side, which is really sick, with the snowboard companies. I was offered a job from Milwaukee [Tool] to design hand tools, like screwdrivers, files and shit like that. Super-luxurious job, actually…but I turned it down to film, which was pretty hard at the time because the money was good. I do have a Milwaukee grinder to clean up spots, though. 

Why did you turn it down? 

I just wanted to give snowboarding a year and see if it could happen, because I know I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t. After Quicksand dropped and we got a ton of positive feedback and support from Never Summer, I saw the momentum and possibilities. It felt like, “OK, maybe I can do this for a career first.” Watching people like [Dan] Danimals [Liedahl], Kennedi Deck, Spencer Schubert, Emma Crosby, Justin Phipps, Reid Smith…people approaching snowboarding as an art and really caring how their video part looks just really inspired me.

Were you afraid to fall through that glass feature you hit in your new video, Pickpocket? 

Yes. I was kind of freaking out the night before. I had these reoccurring dreams of dropping in and the glass is shattering. But the one thing that made me feel better—like, the engineering brain in me—[is] I looked up the standards and codes in Madison for glass buildings, and they had, like, a load-bearing code of I think 300 or 400 pounds. So it made me feel a little bit better seeing the codes, but I was still like, “Even if I don’t break it, if I just spiderweb it or scrape it…that’s tens of thousands of dollars.” 

It’s a really nice office building, so it’s also on one of the busier roads in Madison. It took two ladders just to get to the top. We built it at, like, 2 a.m. and then went back at 5 a.m. so I could be standing up on the building before the sun rose and wait until Havey gave me the go-ahead when the light was good. I think it was negative 35 [degrees] that morning. You can see in the clip that my eyelashes are all frozen. Even with the codes, I was thinking, “Is this gonna break?”…The funny part is that I had to do it twice because the zoom froze and blew the shot on the first one.

What makes it worth it—to go through that with the potential for a high bust or potential for it going very wrong, very easily? 

It’s just kind of like a check of the box, you know? Havey and I grew up in the same area, and, whether at home or not, we see all these features. It feels a little bit like a video game, where you want to check off each one in a way. I’ve seen that building for something around 15, 20 years and have looked up at it like, “Yo, that would be crazy to drop in on.” So it’s kind of something I’ve always wanted to do since childhood. 

And this is your third two-year project? That is pretty rare, yeah? 

[Laughs.] Yes, and I am not doing another one! I want to do one-year projects. I know that is the normal, but we just never had the funding or time with all of us working. That was kind of the secret to balancing out our snowboarding with schoolwork and regular work…the parts just were spread out over two years instead of one. Might not have been the best for the “career,” but as far as making videos we are proud of, it worked out really well. Going forward, we will just figure out the best move to do it again, but hopefully in a shorter time.

Filming street all the time, when you finally get to just ride in powder for fun, is that basically a spa day?

Dude, this is gonna sound crazy, but I’ve, like, never really gotten a powder day. I think the best powder day I got was [when] I went to Brighton maybe 10 years ago or something, and that was after some of my Madison friends moved out there and we got, like, kind of a leftover day. It wasn’t, like, a true powder day. One of the most fun times I remember in the “powder” was just at my local resort, Tyrol [Basin], and we got, like, a foot of snow, and my parents were nice enough to track us out there…driving the 15 miles or whatever through the shitty roads.

Hopefully you get a powder day this winter! Last question: Who all is in the latest project? 

Colton Carroll, Conor Carroll, Bobby Stitt and myself. 

We will keep an eye out for it to drop.