This Is It

All photos by Nicolas Teichrob

Words by Ryland Bell

What I’m doing in Haines, Alaska, is sort of like what Jeff Clark did at Mavericks in California for 15 years: riding the most apex lines on the planet with nobody around. I can get all these full-freak psycho spines with my buddies on any clear day of the winter, so if I’m going even deeper for this massive, month-long glacier trip, I didn’t need a zone with a bunch of pretty cool lines. I just wanted to find that one line. And when I saw that face, I knew: This is it.

The line was 4,000 feet total, 3,200 feet of which were above the bergschrund—the biggest in that type of terrain I’d ever seen or ridden, by far.

Hiking an objective like that adds so much to the process. You get all these missing bits of information—“Is there a crust? What’s the snow texture like? How’s it feel underfoot?”—and get to see these different aspects of it from multiple angles: what it looks like from below, from the side, from right above. You’re constantly building off your previous experiences, so nowadays I have such a catalog to draw from that there’s not necessarily a ton of guesswork. I’ll see a feature and think, “OK, I’ve been on something similar, so when I get up there, it’ll probably look something like that.”

I used to be so technical about scoping the line, figuring it out and knowing every turn from the top to the bottom. I don’t know if it’s just that I’ve had so much experience with this type of terrain, but now I don’t have to do that. On the hike up, I’ll notice a few spots where I know I’ll need to focus to get around a rock or crux or whatever. But other than that, I simply react and go.

It’s one of the closest things there is to surfing because it’s so steep; when you get into that 60-degree range, the pull of gravity is very similar. It’s much more in the surfing mindset, of reacting to the wave as you ride down it, and very much a flow state, where I’m taking it as it comes and leaning into it, really enjoying it.

For those sorts of faces, you often have to chisel out a spot to drop from; it’s this whole process, really scary, but the snow was so rotten we couldn’t make it to the ridge proper. On top of that, we’d watched this layer of clouds and fog build up to the south of us all morning, and as we’re strapping in, we saw it cover camp—thick enough that the plane might not be able to land and take us home. I thought, “Damn, what a harsh mistress this is.”

But we were there, so we rode it. And it was hands down, unequivocally, the line of my life.

Watch Ryland’s entire journey in DIG: An Alaskan Snowboard Film, and get a glimpse of our new PowSlayer Freeride Kit in action.