MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall / Winter 2017

FALL/WINTER 2017 MLCM 47 “The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only peoplewhoreallyknowwhere it isaretheoneswhohavegoneover. The others – the living – are those who pushed their luck as far as theyfelttheycouldhandleit,andthenpulledback,orsloweddown, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In…” – Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels, 1966 Rory Bushfield knows that Edge, and he has a simple method for finding it: jump off stuff. Cliffs, cas- tles, a tanker ship in the Arctic Ocean, whatever–just get to the top, peer out into the empty space, and go. If you can’t find anything big to jump off, chuck on some skis and hit whatever you do have at speed. And if that still doesn’t work, go get yourself an airplane. “The first time I landed my plane on a glacier was last spring,” says, Rory, 34, and known simply as ‘Bushy’ to everyone but his immediate family. “It was me and Ian Mac, we landed on the Pemberton ice cap and got stuck immediately. Within five minutes, Ian wanted to go home, and I didn’t blame him–we were totally stuck, there was no way we were getting out. • • • Stuck, snowed in, out of food or caught in a storm – these sorts of impromptu adventures are standard operating procedure for Bushfield. His @bushywayne Instagram feed is a ticker tape of deep pow, empty beaches, lost waterfalls and high-flying shenanigans, often accompanied by lengthy narrative descriptions and even lengthier hashtags. And while he is visibly uncomfortable being labelled with circle-jerk marketing terms like “lifestyle model” or “social influencer,” the fact can’t be avoided that over the past five years, Bushy has parlayed a decade-long professional freesking career into some- thing the outdoor sports industry hasn’t really seen before. Bushy’s job is to just keep being Bushy, a high flying, hot spring soaking, surf seeking, river riding, pow smashing Internet hero that anyone can look to when they need reassurance that somewhere, someone is out there living life on their own terms and ready to, as Bushy so often types, #blowitifyougotit. SARAH BURKE AND #BLOWITIFYOUGOTIT Bushy and freeskiing legend and Olympic halfpipe team member Sarah Burke had been married less than a year when she passed away, suddenly and tragically after a crash. A few months later, Bushy was riding a chairlift with a friend and thinking about what the next step looks like when the rug is suddenly pulled out from under your life. The answer presented itself as a hashtag– #blowitifyougotit is Bushy’s one-phrase guidebook to finding what matters, and who. “Even now, five years later, lots of people still don’t get it,” he says, “I get messages: is it sex- ual? Is it about cocaine? No! It’s about taking the opportunities you are presented with. If you can do something, you should, because tomorrow might not allow you the chance to do this thing you can do right now. Sarah inspired it. She lived that way, so did I, but she really honed it in for me. Losing Sarah was super hard. It was hard for a long time and it still is. The way she lived was beautiful – always right there and giving it everything, every time. If she had an opportunity, she took it. After Sarah, I just started saying ‘yes’ to things. What else are you gonna do? Hold back? No way, Sarah would have went for it.” Many equate Bushy’s #blowitifyougotit attitude with recklessness and wonder if losing Sarah left him with a death wish. “No, I don’t think so,” he counters. “I understand why people wonder that, because they don’t see the calculation that goes into anything I do. That Edge that Hunter Thomp- son talks about, if you haven’t looked over it then it’s hard to understand, especially from a picture on the Internet, which is just one millisecond in time. For sure, I sometimes have close calls, we all do, but I’d rather go out up here in the mountains than in a hospital bed. I’ve seen that... No, I don’t have a death wish. I have a wish to see new things, new perspectives, and do new stuff as long as I can. To me that sounds more like a life wish.”