MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2018

20 MLCM FALL/WINTER 2018 words :: Feet Banks Ian McIntosh sounds pretty excited for the upcoming winter, especially considering how much of it he will spend walking uphill. “I’m heading into my fourth season of going fully foot-powered,” explains the 37-year-old Pemberton skier, who has spent most of his career zipping to peaks around the world via helicopter. “It’s a completely different experience when you hike up a big line,” McIntosh says. “You feel way more in tune with the mountains and the conditions and everything you are doing.With the heli, one minute you are drinking a coffee and the next thing you know you’re standing on top of something gnarly.” McIntosh adds that he gave up the free rides in part to reduce his carbon footprint. “I’m a huge advocate for protecting the environment,” he says. “So I have to practice what I preach. Other things I do have more of an impact, like minimizing the amount of meat I eat, but this is part of it too. And the other reason is that, over a decade into my ski career, I wanted to find new inspiration and challenges. What better way to challenge yourself than to abandon the ease of a heli and access those lines on foot? I think this reinvigorated everything in my career—for my sponsors, for those who chose to follow me, and for myself.” His career started young. Born and raised in the East Kootenays, McIntosh was skiing before his second birthday and touring in the backcounty with his parents at age eight. “My mom was a level three ski instructor and my dad had his guides ticket. My home mountain was Panorama but my mom’s family lived in Fernie and my older cousins there inspired the freeride side of me. They were crushing it on the local scene.” After finishing high school with the help of summer correspondence courses (“I skipped a lot of classes to ski”), McIntosh spent a season in Fernie, another at Kicking Horse and then moved to Whistler in 2001 after meeting some local shredders at a competition in New Zealand. “I lived inMatt Elliott’s closet and got a job at Summit tuning skis four days a week for four hours.Minimumwage," McIntosh recalls. “It was so rad. I didn’t have a care in the world, just working minimally and skiing every day.” And entering freeskiing competitions.The FreerideWorld Tour still included aWhistler stop in those days and McIntosh would sign up to ski against some of the best in the sport. “I’d do theWhistler comp and somehow scrounge up enough money to go to the stop in Snowbird, Utah,” he says. “And there were moments when I felt like, ‘hey, I can hang with these guys.’ Getting top five with [three-time world champion] Hugo Harrison was pretty good.” Harrison and co-competitor PY LeBlanc also shared some advice with the new kid on the scene. “They explained the need for me to turn it down a bit,” McIntosh recalls. “Because I would try and send it to the moon and explode and hurt myself. Those guys said if I wanted to get results I should try skiing at 80 per cent instead of 120.” It worked. In 2004 McIntosh stayed on his feet, showed consistency, and took second overall on the world tour. Sponsors began to take notice, filmers, photographers and magazines did too. In 2006 he was invited to Jackson,Wyoming to film with Teton Gravity Research, one of the top companies in the action sports industry. “I ended up with the opening segment of their movie that year and it was off to the races,” he says, adding that he didn’t care much about becoming a professional but “it just sounded like a good way to ski all the time.” “Let go of the ego and just go for it—doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.” Foot powered, one step at a time. Black Tusk. REUBEN KRABBE