No snowboarding series is complete without a mention of Alaska and the endless mountains that cover the vast landscape. Our next stop take us to this remote region to interview a legend among splitboarders. Not only is Jamie a highly educated individual he is a highly regarded splitboard mountaineer with descents all over the world under his belt. I was fortunate to meet up with Jamie and talk about his past experiences and one of many loves in his life, splitboarding.
Name: Jaime Van LanenPrimary Location, Home Mountain, or Home Range: Currently the Alaska Range, Interior Alaska, yet I consider the Sierras and the Rockies my home(s)
Age: 35
Primary Solid Board: For the Chugach I ride a Winterstick Tom Burt Pro 172
Primary Split Board: Currently I am on a Venture 165
Preferred Binding System: Spark R&D
Boot: Burton Driver X
Also I use a Scarpa mountaineering boot which I hybridized into a snowboard mountaineering boot by cutting the uppers, ankle and tongue, off a snowboard boot and riveting them onto the Scarpa boots. This provides the ankle support and feel of snowboard boot while allowing more technical climbing capability for rock and ice. I don’t use these boots often but they definitely come in handy for certain routes.
How Long Have You Been Snowboarding Semi-Professionally? 2010-2011 will be my 25th year of snowboarding. From 1993-2002 I was a sponsored rider. I briefly picked it back up again for a few seasons in 2006 and have since retired. It’s definitely worthy to get free gear but often times games must be played that thwart my integrity and I would just as well scrounge for gear and feel truly free as opposed to feeling locked down due to a responsibility to business interests.
How Long Have You Been Splitboarding? I bought a Voile kit and split my first board in 2000, so 10 years now.
What Compelled You to Begin Splitboarding? I remember the carefree early days of my snowboarding lifestyle. It was the late eighties – early nineties. Lift tickets, food, fuel, and gear were relatively cheap. Ski resort development corporations had not taken ownership of the majority of the locally operated snow sliding areas. Snowboarders were still rebels, still unique, and had not been bought out by the pop-culture consumerism that seems to control much of our self-perception in the 21st century. We had something to fight for. We brought our skateboarding, our punk rock, and our suburban angst to the forests, the snow, the small mountain villages and unleashed ourselves into the freedom and release of wildness. We opened it all up. We had never felt so good. Snowboarding was real freedom and it felt like for once we were truly living. When we came of age we moved to the mountains that had come to sustain our bodies and minds.As the years went by the ski towns, once refuges for those who desired a simple peace and an active relationship with the mountains, slowly became co-opted and gentrified by the forces of globalism. One of several consequences of this phenomena was a loss of that original wholeness I felt as a snowboarder: a loss of the feeling that I was doing something that mattered, that I was doing one of the greatest things in the world by strapping my two feet to my board and blazing down a snowy mountain bouncing off of rocks, cornices, stumps, logs, and windlips. Of course it took many years to realize the true extent of that loss. It took becoming involved with “the industry”, playing the “I’m cool” sponsorship game, and putting on lots of fake smiles to get somewhere with people who I knew were destroying the essence of our sport. In the early years of the new millennium, the sense of loss, the alienation I felt as part of the scene, became almost unbearable. What had happened? It seemed that hardly anyone cared about the mountains anymore, about the wild places where we were pursuing our dreams. With the obsession over image, cliquey urbanism, and spin-rotations, we could have all just as well been snowboarding indoors at the mall or a dance club and we would have never even noticed the difference. In rebellion I nearly quit snowboarding, but I found a much greater option, an option that would give me the space to come back to myself and my spirit, to come back to the land, to feel the wildness which originally generated my intense love for snowboarding. That option was the backcountry.
I have always been a hiker. I had always been a backcountry snowboarder.I can remember being in 9th or 10th grade trying to coax my friends to climb above the chairlift to get powder and longer runs. Another time during high school I got busted for going “out of bounds” at Breckenridge, a visit to the Sheriff’s office and all. I discovered backcountry during those years and spent lots of time hiking off of the passes in Colorado. I moved to California and got really into in-bounds hiking at Squaw Valley and exploring the world beyond the boundaries at Alpine Meadows. Soon enough the age of powder day hoards, tracked out ski areas within 2 hours of opening, and overall congestion and hype was upon us (this situation seems to have escalated to extreme proportions in our current era). Additionally the corporatization of the ski industry produced, what for me, was an overall unhealthy atmosphere at ski resorts; higher prices for everything, ‘the scene’ (which I was never ‘cool’ enough for), and competitive attitudes. I had had enough.
I had been hiking and ducking ropes out of bounds since I first learned how to turn, but this time it was different. I was on a spiritual mission to revive my stoke in the thing which drove and shaped my life ever since I was eleven years old. I climbed and climbed, made a splitboard and skinned and skinned. I reinforced my steep powder addiction through a pursuit of ski mountaineering. This practiced allowed me to develop a deep and present relationship with the mountains I spent my time climbing and riding. I spent several years lurking on HWY. 395, riding dozens of classics in the Range of Light. I climbed Cascade Volcanoes. I snowboarded over twenty of Colorado’s 14ers. I worked on the “Chuting Gallery” in the Wasatch and got Cowboy in the Tetons….and the story went on. It has been an amazing journey. Splitboarding for me has become life.
Most Memorable Glacier Travel:Uphill: Last winter we were trying to reach a hut on Canwell Glacier in Alaska and it turned dark right as we reached a very cracked up section of glacier that we had to cross to reach the hut. Route finding was quite difficult because even though we had headlamps you could not see the crevasses until they were right under your feet. It was a dark and mysterious maze. The next morning when we could see our skin tracks traversing the glacier I could not believe we survived the route we had negotiated without one of us falling into a hole. Fun times.
Downhill: In Chamonix I snowboarded into a giant crevasse (on purpose) and rode it like a couloir, there was powder in the bottom and big ice walls. It was surreal. Also I was riding with this wild Frenchman and we reached a point where the ridable portion of a glacier abruptly ended at a hundred or so foot headwall of blue glacier ice. The wall of ice was perfectly flat like a ramp and angled at about 45 degrees and ended in a perfect transition back onto soft snow. I thought we were stuck and would need to hike out. The Frenchman just pointed it, straight lining the entire sheet of ice like it was a tight chute. I was blown away, but had no real choice but to follow. It was the smoothest and most aesthetic straight line I have ever done.
Where has Split Boarding taken you? I have split in Alaska (from the southern coast all the way into the arctic), Alberta, Argentina, British Columbia, California, Chile, Colorado, France, Idaho, Italy, Japan, Montana, Nevada, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and Yukon Territory.
Gnarliest or most Extensive Approach for a Single Line:
Day Trip: Skillet Glacier, Mt. Moran, Wyoming
6 mile approach, 6,000 vertical foot ascent, 6,000 vertical foot descent (whoo-hoo), 6 mile skin back to the trailhead. Next time I would camp!
Multi-Day: The Cross Couloir, Mt. of the Holy Cross, Colorado
37 miles round trip over 3 nights and 4 days for a winter ascent and descent of this amazing line. It’s a haul!
I should also mention that some recent bushwacking approaches in the Alaska Range have been as challenging as these trips in terms of effort, willpower, and patients.
Ideal Backcountry Day: Scoring something big and classic on stable, high-quality snow, in good weather, with good friends. There is no other way I’d rather spend my day.
Lifetime Goal or Objective, a Line You’ve Been Eyeing for a While, or What Would Be your Dream Trip?
I have been lucky to have ridden some ultra classic lines across the globe. For right now I am going to say riding the Ford-Stettner route on the Grand Teton would be my next goal. It’s steep and technical and Wyoming is in my blood. If I could choose one more route to do I think I’d go with that.
Downhill: In Chamonix I snowboarded into a giant crevasse (on purpose) and rode it like a couloir, there was powder in the bottom and big ice walls. It was surreal. Also I was riding with this wild Frenchman and we reached a point where the ridable portion of a glacier abruptly ended at a hundred or so foot headwall of blue glacier ice. The wall of ice was perfectly flat like a ramp and angled at about 45 degrees and ended in a perfect transition back onto soft snow. I thought we were stuck and would need to hike out. The Frenchman just pointed it, straight lining the entire sheet of ice like it was a tight chute. I was blown away, but had no real choice but to follow. It was the smoothest and most aesthetic straight line I have ever done.
Where has Split Boarding taken you? I have split in Alaska (from the southern coast all the way into the arctic), Alberta, Argentina, British Columbia, California, Chile, Colorado, France, Idaho, Italy, Japan, Montana, Nevada, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and Yukon Territory.
Gnarliest or most Extensive Approach for a Single Line:
Day Trip: Skillet Glacier, Mt. Moran, Wyoming
6 mile approach, 6,000 vertical foot ascent, 6,000 vertical foot descent (whoo-hoo), 6 mile skin back to the trailhead. Next time I would camp!
Multi-Day: The Cross Couloir, Mt. of the Holy Cross, Colorado
37 miles round trip over 3 nights and 4 days for a winter ascent and descent of this amazing line. It’s a haul!
I should also mention that some recent bushwacking approaches in the Alaska Range have been as challenging as these trips in terms of effort, willpower, and patients.
Ideal Backcountry Day: Scoring something big and classic on stable, high-quality snow, in good weather, with good friends. There is no other way I’d rather spend my day.
Lifetime Goal or Objective, a Line You’ve Been Eyeing for a While, or What Would Be your Dream Trip?
I have been lucky to have ridden some ultra classic lines across the globe. For right now I am going to say riding the Ford-Stettner route on the Grand Teton would be my next goal. It’s steep and technical and Wyoming is in my blood. If I could choose one more route to do I think I’d go with that.
Favorite Backcountry Meal: Where possible; campfire grilled wild harvested meat of any type. Lately its been bear and caribou. Whisperlite; Tasty Bites mixed with Macaroni and Cheese is a delicacy; just try it!Favorite Piece of Gear (and Why): My Black Diamond Whippet ice/axe pole. It’s a tool that can get you through all types of situations. Whether it’s slipping on steep hard snow while skinning, climbing couloirs, hard snow, dry tooling, scraping ice off your board, or lifting your heel-evators with ease. I even recently used it as stabilizer for shooting a caribou with a 30-06. I have had the same Whippet for almost ten years and it’s been a true brother.
Favorite Place You’ve Travelled (and Why): Japan; amazing snow, huge mountains with big alpine lines and legendary tree skiing, hot springs, excellent food, and fun women. It’s the goods.
Sponsors: Recently I have received some help from Wagner Custom and Winterstick, Venture, Spark R&D, and Flylow, so big props to them.
Print/ Movie Appearances :
| -Segment in “Return to Schralptown” released fall 2007 -Tahoe Quarterly Magazine Spring 2003 two page action photo pg. #84-85 -Couloir Magazine March 2002, Editorial action photo pg. #66 -Nelson (5.10) Outerwear ran a one-page full color ad. in Transworld Snowboarding Magazine August 1999 pg. #37 -Nelson (5.10) Outerwear ran a one-page full color ad. in Transworld Snowboarding Business Magazine March 2000 pg. # 143 -Ski Lake Tahoe Resort Guide 99-2000 opening page action photo published -Ski Lake Tahoe 2001 Travel Planner two action photos published -2000-2001 Ski Reno/Tahoe Brochure front cover action photo -Tahoe Truckee Weekly Magazine March 2001 front cover action photo -Option Snowboards ran a one-page full color ad. in Plow Snowboarding Magazine, Volume #2, Issue #2 -Featured on ESPN Television for the American Pro Snowboard Series -Segment on cable access show Snowboard Euphoria -Segment in GTV Productions 1998 feature film Nimble
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Local Causes You’re Passionate About: Locavorism and local resourism in general. Building socio-ecological resilience in a Peak-Energy world. Promoting human wildness and mentoring youth to become hunters, gatherers, and land stewards. Teaching and practicing Permaculture.
Other Stuff You Do (music, volunteerism, art, school, etc.): I have played in four different punk/metal/hardcore bands, two of which were nationally touring acts (see www.myspace.com/ecotypic). I am a practitioner of primitive skills and I create tools and artwork from wild resources which I harvest. I am an anthropologist currently employed working with Alaska natives on managing and stewarding wild resources utilized for subsistence.
Website/Blog: Email me at [email protected]
Here is part 1 of a 4 part series Jaime did deep in the Alaska Range
