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• TOM BURT’S interview by ARI MARCOPOULOS

  When and who turned you on to snowboarding?

  I have to blame Bob Klein back in the mid 70’s

  What is the most challenging thing you have done in snowboarding and or climbing?

  Logistically Mount Pumori in Nepal. The combination of altitude, snow conditions lots of blue ice and the climbing style; traditional fixed rope climbing not alpine style. On top of that there were other people on the climb who were there for different reasons, The whole trip is really a story within itself.

  Sum up the different countries you have ridden in ?

  The U.S. all over, Canada, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Japan, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Iran, Kenya, Alaska(should be its own country)

  You lived your whole life in Tahoe?

  I am fourth generation Tahoe it’s written in my DNA. The real reason is I have not yet found a better place to live for my lifestyle in all my travels but I hope to travel more, especially after the recent elections I might have to find a different place to live.

  Do you fear this whole global warming thing?

  We are like bacteria making wine. They keep putting out their waste alcohol until they kill themselves. We will keep putting out waste until we kill us. So yes I fear it.

  Do you sense a change between when you were a kid and now?

  Snowboarding is now a sport to the eyes of the world. Also there are more and scarier drugs out there.

  On a more up note tell me about any day:”What was a good day?”

  I’ll tell you a good day. A good day was 2 feet of fresh powder at slide mountain, the first day I ever RODE a chairlift in my life with a snowboard with Terry Kidwell, Bob Klein. Riding all day with nobody else on the mountain. The only scary part was the goddamn super long CHAIR ramps. Here I am on a Sims board that I bought of Bob Klein with fins hanging out really deep and you had to ride HARD PACK for about a 100 yards before you hit the pow and the fins WERE just screwing with me and Terry and Bob WOULD be just smoking along and I was just getting sucked down the fall line because of the fins till I hit the pow. THEN I looked over on the chairlift and I realized that Terry and Bob had their fins BLOCKED up, so that they basically didn’t have fins. I was like no wonder they can fuckin turn. Went home that day to Reno at school and took a wooden ruler and shaved it with a knife so I could block MY fins up, it’s still in there up on my ceiling in my house. The next day I went out there without fins and I could actually turn on the hard pack it was like a dream come true.

  You mention the word scary when you talked about the ramps. What does fear come in?

  Fear comes in because I’m scared all the time. Nah, fear is just an emotion that for some reason is controllable in my brain. When I’m afraid I become more hypersensitive and aware. The more afraid that I am the more aware that I am, the more in control that I am.

  The only way I can explain it is if you’re sitting in a room watching television, the television becomes you’re main focus everything else in the room although your brain is aware of it sort of fades away, But when I’m afraid I see all of the everything else, the stain in the carpet, the stereo, basically everything in the room. It puts me in a hyper-aware state. It feels like I have tons of time to do things so that I can react to snow or whatever, the more intense the more time I have even though you might only have a split second, it feels like I have all day.

  So fear is good?

  For me fear doesn’t take me to a bad place, some people will react different, it seizes them up and they can’t function when they’re afraid. So for some people it’s not good.

  I pretty much realized it when I jumped out of a plane and the parachute didn’t open.

  It just came out like a mess and I was just falling thru the sky. I had plenty of time to get rid of my chute, it didn’t work to well, my rip away system did not work, I had to mess around with it in the middle of the air. But it all worked out in the end. If you do seize up in a moment like that you splat.

  I meant to say having no fear is stupid.

  Not being afraid often put you in a position where you have no or very little control

  over what is happening. When you play out IN nature especially in the snow, nature always has a good chance of slapping you down. You can’t always be in control no matter what you think but having no fear is a scary thing.

  In that context I want to ask you about the day you did Cordova Peak?

  Well, Cordova Peak was a good day. I mean kind of. It started OFF with a mishap on a run, which was the big huge bowling ball rollover run, which I think, was called “Holy Shit”.

  We were UP there with Doug Coombs, Hatchett, Victoria, “Tex”, and Aaron Chang. Texan aired off this cliff and went a little bigger then he thought, it was like 80 foot plus and landed right on this bergschrund, jacked his back. We pretty much should have flown him out but Tex he’s a tough mother so he sat in the helicopter and we did like 6 runs on different slopes while he was sitting in the heli flying with the pilot or hanging with Mike at the barbecue angles, After those 6 runs we decided to fly by Cordova Peak because we’re right in the zone and had looked at it about 4 days earlier. We flew over there and sat down and looked at it, we didn’t like it still, it was sketchy there was blue and black ice over this cliff band, hanging glaciers, the upper snowfield looked like it was going to pull out. So Doug Coombs and I were sitting there and thought we can land on the shoulder and ski this other face of Cordova, so WE flew over there and landed and skied this face and the snow was good. We also had a look from a different angle at the face we did not decide to do. When we got to the bottom, Doug and I looked at each other and he said what do you think? I said I think we can do it, Doug felt the same way so right there we called in the heli and said we’re going to do it and Mike Hatchett was a bit perplexed.

  The heli came and dropped us off and we skied it. It just happened even though moments earlier we weren’t going to do it. Doug and I just felt it was possible at that moment, so it went down.

  For argument’s sake let’s say you went down in 3 minutes or less, and this is a question I ask often did time expand or did it feel like 3 minutes?

  Time expands in that run for me because I was so afraid of different sections of the slope because there is so many consequences of death on it. The upper snowface sliding over the cliff, the black and blue ice over the chute and the cliffs, the hanging glacier, the bergschrund, all the slough sliding, so there’s a lot going on. Like I said time slows down when I’m scared so 3 minutes was like a day. I can describe every turn. Just the moment on the spine above the cliffs felt like 3 minutes.

  What are some of the things you remember about it as far as sounds or what you were thinking off?

  The first section was this triangle where there was this big gaping crevasse that could swallow you. It was open the wrong way, often with bergschrunds the lower lip will be lower so if you fall you go over it but this one was the opposite the lower lip was higher, it stuck up like a catcher’s mitt so if you fall, you’ll go into the hole.

  I skied towards the catcher’s mitt because if you go the other way, you’re really exposed over it if it breaks out. We were afraid of it heating up, so I did a few turns towards the mitt which was really sketchy because you’re looking straight into jaws, like a big shark with its mouth wide open and the slough got really big really fast and I wasn’t going as wide open as I normally ski because of the cliff band and the ice. I thought screw this the slough is mocking already so I just pulled off and let it go. There was no other noise there then the snow juts pummeling over the cliff. Then I skied the main spine over the cliffs an again slough is going now on both sides. I came down the spine and there’s ice on both sides, black on my right, blue on my left. Then snow runnels with ice in between them going across which I called the ice shelf, which is right above the cliff band. So it was black ice, snow runnel, black ice etc. Then you traverse across the shelf underneath this huge hanging glacier, which is sketchy because if anything breaks off you’re done.

  Then you’re basically into a big chute, glacier to the left with ice holes, catcher mitts that can eat you alive and then just slough management and a little more wide open which is nice and a huge bergschrund at the bottom which I kind of went around because I didn’t feel like dealing with it so much, so I went for a smaller spot going out skiers right. In the meanwhile the slough is so big it’s coming pummeling down the hill with lots of noise

  It seemed you had a lot of speed in that last chute, almost like a relief.

  Well once I was underneath the hanging glacier, I don’t really want to be under there so I put on the afterburners. It was more wide open and I was passed the crux for myself of the different dangers so I let it go. It just took me 10 minutes to talk about 3.

  Is there a difference between filming and just rolling into stuff as you’re riding, often in filming one is expected to do the big stuff and maybe because of that there’s more fear involved?

  It’s relative to the run it has nothing to do with the filming as far as fear goes. A good example is I was at Squaw doing a little line, I came down and caught a toe edge on a rock and it sent me in a really steep tight spot I reacted by throwing myself into a heel turn, when you get rocked and you’re balanced you change edges and it allows you to escape a lot of times so I changed edges but I hit my heel turn a lot harder then I wanted and I’m in a tight spot so it send me right towards this rock sticking out, it’s only s split second but it felt like I had all day. So here I am hooked into this heel turn heading right at this rock that is sticking out. I look at the rock , I looking at my edge, I realize in my brain I’m not going to be able to switch back to my toes. At that point you decide what you’re going to do, so I bail out the front by doing a front flip over the rock land back on my board and just keep riding. All of it happened so fast but in my brain I was able to slow it down to make the decisions.

  You seem to have fun on very different levels?

  Yeah, it’s just fun to do a turn, it can be a turn on hardpack or perfect powder.

  I like to ride the pipe, I’m not much of a rail guy but it’s still fun and challenging to do.

  I appreciate all the talent that’s out there, what people do on terrain, kickers, and rails. It’s incredible to watch and I’ve learned a lot from watching other people and try to add that to my repertoire of snowboarding

  What’s your favorite trick in the halfpipe?

  Probably my favorite trick all these years is still a lien air. I don’t mind a backside air, a regular old grasser is pretty fun too. But a lien air is pretty much fun to do for me.

  Isn’t there a trick named after you?

  Oh yeah the T-Bone(laughing)

  That’s right, how did that thing come into play?

  Oh it’s just a trick and I was of the only guys that could do it. It’s kind of like you have to do a twister, but people changed names now it’s a shifty. It was a twister before it was a shifty. Just like a helicopter became a 360.

  Anyway a T-Bone is a twister and you grab your heel edge with your front hand behind your back foot, you have to twist a long way to get that grab.

  Like a back-scratcher

  Kind of like a back-scratcher it’s kind of a ski thing I think. It’s my ski background coming into the snowboard world. If I could do a moonwalk, which in skiing was a daffy, you know where you do 3 or 4 of them. That’s what we used to do we used to moonwalk of these kickers, but you could never do that on a snowboard because you can’t split your legs. I was kind of bummed.

  So a moonwalk is a bunch of Daffies right? Like how many was the most you ever pulled?

  I think four.

  FOUR???

  We had some pretty big kickers as kids. We weren’t too afraid. We had this one called the elevator which HAD a really good NATURAL transition (they didn’t build jumps for us back then) with a long flat ramp at the top of the tranny of this nose and it just shot you straight up and the landing just fell away but it was really steep, so you had a great landing and you were just hovering up in the air so you were just stuck much like when you’re hitting a quarterpipe and you’re just keep going up up up and then you top out and then you come down,down,down except the landing went a ways. So you really came down twice as far as you went up so you had lots of time in the air.

  You’re claiming so hard that my stomach hurts from laughing.

  Basically when we were in high school, here’s a claim for you Bob Porter and I were known as the guys not to go skiing with

  Because you were doing 4 daffies of the elevator…..

  People didn’t like to go skiing with us because we drag them around to all these shitty jumps, big windlips.

  I’m curious about Alan Armbruster, I heard he went to prison.

  He probably still is. He used to go out with my sister a long time ago. He was just talent, that guy had more talent then Terry Kidwell basically. I used to have a skateramp in my backyard when I was 12, Bob Klein and I think maybe Terry skated there and Allan used to come skate it and we called him the cat, because when he skated he did like Andrecht handplants, no pads and even if he’d screw up, no matter what he always landed back on his feet. It was amazing. The same with his snowboard he’d go off a jump and get jacked by the lip or something and he’d do this fucked-up maneuvers in the air get his board back underneath him and no matter what he would always land on his board and ride away. We were like how the hell did you do that? He was amazing, but he got involved with drugs and ended up going to jail.

  They call Haakon the sprocking cat

  He’s a talent too. It’s just touch. We gave that kid a ping-pong paddle in Alaska next thing you know he’s kicking everybody’s ass and he never played ping-pong before.

  The only way you’re gonna beat him is if you pull a Tonya Harding.

  What are some of the other activities you enjoy?

  My daughters and my wife, surfing, kite boarding, rock climbing, beach volleyball, skiing water and snow, fishing, skateboarding, and teaching anything. All the other good stuff one can enjoy in life.

  How do you think having a child changed your life?

  I think having a child changes your life, Most people don’t realize how much you have to give to other people or that you need to give to other people. When you have a child all you do is give to your child, so if you’re a giving person then having a child is not such a big change in your life, but if you’re a selfish person then it becomes a huge change, because all of a sudden there is someone that is completely dependent on you. For myself it did not turn out to be that big of a change. I try to give to people because I think it’s important so giving to my daughter is pretty natural for me and that’s a great thing.

  I know you’re a great historian I would like you to mention a few people throughout the history of snowboarding and say some word about them?

  O.K. I’ll try.

  Bob Klein, thanks for my first board.

  Terry Kidwell thanks for being so far ahead

  Alan Armbruster for being the cat and always landing on his feet

  Jim Zellers for being a great rider, partner, climber, motivator.

  Damian Sanders for more air with more style.

  Bonnie Zellers for always charging.

  Andy Coughlin(SPELLING?), the Hayes Brothers, Mark Hindgardner, and the rest of the East Coast crew who rode ice in the early years.

  Jose Fernandez for being the first European to kick our asses.

  Craig Kelly for style and love of riding.

  Dan Donnely for being Hollywood.

  Shawn Palmer for being a natural athlete.

  Shawn Farmer for calling bullshit where it was DO and riding bumps.

  Andy Hetzel for being an exterminator.

  Steve Link for making boards.

  Noah Salasnek for the eye candy style.

  Terje Haakonsen for natural talent and the vision to use it.

  Temple Cummings for liking to ride.

  Dave Hatchett for the heelside Hatchetress.

  Mike Hatchett for believing my style worked.

  Tom Hsieh for starting the first snowboard magazine.

  Ken Achenbach(SPELLING) for always showing up in odd places

  Evan Feen for never changing.

  Keith Kimmel for the slash

  Victoria Jealouse for never growing up.

  Tex for taking cold showers in Vars, France and still charging.

  The Howett family for the Baker Banked Slalom.

  Thane for riding with one leg.

  Kelly Jo for the pool game.

  Jeff Gerell for the external highback and ruining my advantage.

  Dave Seoane for all the shits.

  Shaun White for skating also.

  Danny Kass for spinning with style but wanting to snowboard also.

  Demetre(SPELLING< FIRST NAME), Tom sims, Jake Carpenter, Chuck Barfoot, Chris Sanders, Mike Olson for persuing this stupid useless sport.

  I’m sure I forgot a lot of people including all photographers and filmers who made me look so good and all the riders around the world that I have had the pleasure to meet and learn from. You all know who you are. I would like to thank everyone who made this happen FOR ME.

  Mountaineering: What nobody told you.

  By Tom Burt

  This is the deal with going mountaineering. First you don’t shower or change clothes for weeks on end while working like a dog to climb a mountain. All that time living in a tent just big enough to always be touching, rubbing against, or bumping your partner. Sleeping on snow, which melts and freezes into an unlevel bed of ice. Now let the weather go bad. So there you are sitting in your sleeping bags in your own stink and your partner’s stink rubbing against you for days on end. The only thing you hear beside the weather is every noise your partner makes; chewing food, breathing, farting, coughing, turning over, scratching or any noise at all. They drive you nuts sooner or later. Then of course you have to deal with someone peeing in a bottle right next to your head, getting dressed more or less on top of you to go out and take a crap. Cooking in the tent adds more smells and spills and it takes up space. My biggest suggestion from experience is : Don’t do this in an experimental tent that does not breathe and fills up with all the vapors, smells, spills, water, and whatever. It was like living in a stink swamp sealed in a plastic bag.

  I know that Jim Zellers can put up with a lot for he had to put up with stinky me more than once. Thanks Jim.

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