Emery “Ez” Stoesser is used to making something from nothing.
Words :: Bob Covey
As a cattle and grain farmer on the rolling prairies in south central Alberta, Emery is forever eking the most out his land.
He’s the king of kijiji, the sultan of salvaging. And if something’s broken—be it a jet boat, tractor or snow blower—by gum, Ez will try to fix it. These days, Ez is a father, a husband, a farmer, a builder, an entrepreneur, an engaged citizen and a savant-level mechanical designer. But long before all of those things, he was a snowboarder.
“I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for 37 years,” he laughed, strapping into a set of bright pink and orange bindings that look like he assembled them in a barn (he did).
Ez is an OG of Alberta’s snowboard scene. He remembers racing against local Banff snowboard icons Jonaven Moore and Andrew Hardingham. He recalls competing in hand-dug half pipes with future Olympians Mike Michalchuk and Justin Lamoureux. And he remembers Alberta’s first superpipe, built in 1997 at Lake Louise by Rockies snowboarding pioneer, the late Greg Todds.
“It was the biggest thing we’d ever seen,” Ez recalled.
“I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for 37 years,” he laughed, strapping into a set of bright pink and orange bindings that look like he assembled them in a barn (he did).
Nearly 30 years later on that same mountain, a new generation of builders officially dropped the rope on Lake Louise’s 2026 terrain park. With its massive ramps, rails and features seemingly designed to send riders into orbit, the park at Lake Louise looks like something out of a simulation.
My riding, however, is based in reality, so even though January 29 was opening day of those cartoonish contours, I was more keen on scoping out the natural terrain that Lake Louise recently opened up. Luckily for me, Ez got distracted on the gondola talking cattle prices and fertilizer and didn’t notice the park below—otherwise he might have been leading me over a 40-foot booter I had no business being on.
Instead, I followed him through the tightest trees I’ve ever tried to squeeze a turn in. True to form, Emery was making something from nothing. Even though Lake Louise saw record snowfall earlier in the season, apart from the welcome skiff that fell during our late January visit, since those big December dumps the Rockies had been in a dry spell. But uncooperative weather is nothing new for my farming friend and after getting briefed by Lake Louise’s Emmett McPartlin on the new terrain accessible from the recently-installed Richardson’s Ridge quad chairlift—cruisy intermediate runs with plenty of glading potential—Ez was grinning like a kid at the waterslides.
“I see tree riding in our future,” he said, pointing to the forested slopes designated for selective thinning.
True to form, Emery was making something from nothing.
At present, despite hardly sleeping the night before (he was up every hour calming his dogs, taunted as they were by a pack of yipping coyotes), Emery was slashing and carving enthusiastically, milking turns out of every undulation that held a dusting of snow. When he found a pocket of pow in a thicket of spruce, he yelped with glee. Later, after hiking for 10 minutes above the Larch Chair on the resort’s backside, we discovered a secret stash of untracked lines.
“This is all I need,” he laughed, shredding dangerously close to me at high speed to make solid contact on a fist bump.
Despite growing up on the prairies, Emery’s stoke for the mountains came to him honestly: his parents met in a Banff camera shop and for a time in the 1960s, his Swiss-born dad ran the Lake Louise gondola—which stretched more than 2 km from the village to where today the Whitehorn Bistro provides an upscale dining experience. As we took in the unparalleled views of Mount Temple and the Bow River Valley, Emery pointed out the boulder-strewn former lift line of the Eagle Double Chair, which was decommissioned in 2004 when the Grizzly Gondola opened. From Larch, he craned towards the infamous Alphabet Gullies, where riders race for first tracks after a snowfall. And later he gestured knowingly at Hollywood Hit, the massive, photogenic jump that, through the pages of early snowboard magazines, helped put the Alberta Rockies on the map.
“The Lake is one of those places that has its own lore,” he said.
Emery’s memories of Lake Louise run deep. And his understanding of the resort’s evolution helped contextualize my own appreciation of a world-class facility that Alberta can call its own. However, after a day of watching Emery zig when everyone else zagged, and seeing him siphon every last drop of vertical into the joy of microcarving, what stuck with me was that getting the most out of snowboarding—much like life itself—is all about perspective.
“I love those little turns,” he said after tunnelling out of a tangle of soon-to-be-gladed trees. “Even if there’s no flow at all, that turn can still feel fantastic.”
Something out of nothing. Farmers can teach us a lot.
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