MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall / Winter 2017

52 MLCM FALL/WINTER 2017 Skiing. For all the antics and adventures, skiing remains Bushy’s lifelong passion. He learned at age two, chasing his sister and parents around the ski resorts of Alberta. “I love ski hills,” he says. “I took them for granted as a kid, but it’s so cool that, at a young age, you can ride this moving chair to the top of a mountain then go anywhere you want and ski as fast as you want with very little regulations. The vastness of the hill, the snow, it’s endless fun for a kid, for anyone.” By age 14, Bushy was competing at mogul events – any sport requiring a combination of speed and jumping skill suited him perfectly. At 17, he earned a spot at the Junior World Championships in Finland. “I know my mom didn’t have the money to send me to Finland of all places,” he says, “but she couldn’t handle not sending me. Somehow she got me there, I don’t know how she did it, but she did.” And he won – a gold medal and the chance to represent Canada on the World Cup. “I’ve never been so proud in my life. It almost makes me tear up now, I remember calling my parents from the hotel and telling her, ‘Thank you so much, I f*cking won!’” Of course, the International Federation du Ski (FIS) runs the World Cup, and their notoriously non-progressive attitude didn’t fit well with an 18-year-old from Alberta with the spirit of a bush pilot and a penchant for gangster rap (for the past 15 years Bushy has only kept two CDs in his truck: Bone Thugs n Harmony, and a back-up Bone Thugs n Harmony). “World Cup was not as cool as I thought it would be,” he says. “It was a se- rious level of competition that I didn’t see coming and I wasn’t allowed to do anything else in case I got hurt. It sucked. I wanted to hit jumps and ski pow. They weren’t into that. I left because of the rules: why am I allowed to do a backflip in the moguls but not a double back? It wasn’t for me.” The X-Games were more his style. “I crashed at my first X-Games, my run was mostly stuff I’d only ever landed once in my life,” he laughs. “But I got sponsors right away and was able to give my parents skis for the first time, that felt good.” One sponsorship in particular, Bushy attributes to his hometown of Balz- ac, Alberta. “The Oakley guy was Seb Paradis, super awesome dude. He lived in Montreal and I think he signed me just so that when people asked ‘Where’d you find this kid?’ he could laugh and say, ‘You’re not gonna believe… Ball-sack, Alberta!’ It was a real knee slapper for him, every time.” Many of those original sponsors continue to support Bushy, even as he winds down a professional ski career that spanned ten years, 15 ski films, a stint jumping roller-skis with Travis Pastrana’s Nitro Circus and a for- ay into reality television on an ABC network celebrity high-diving show called Splash . “That show was right after Sarah passed,” Bushy says. “I was saying ‘Yes’ to anything and I thought maybe no one would notice. It was on national TV though; the commercial was me and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I got made so much fun of, one day I came home to visit my sister and she was having a Splash -watching party with 45 people.” But he won the show, beating original Baywatch babe Nicole Eggert with a triple backflip in the grand finale. And those Splash paycheques eventually helped realize another lifelong dream – in 2016, Bushy bought a seven-acre patch of rainforest paradise in the Squamish Valley with no driveway, no plumbing, no electricity and no permanent structures. For a dude who loves chainsaws, oversized bonfires and hacking trails through the bush with an excavator, it was already the perfect home. “My sponsors are awesome. I get a different kind of exposure now, but they know I love skiing. I love gravity and going downhill, and what better way than on skis and in pow? I will do that the rest of my life, sponsor or no sponsor, one leg or robot legs.” – Bushy. BLAKE JOREGNSON.