MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2018

70 MLCM FALL/WINTER 2018 A few months later, her slopestyle career all but over, Jessa landed a three- year work permit in the promised land of British Columbia. After relocating to Vancouver, she began to paint again, and noticed something different: back home, her work had mostly focused on figures in motion but those subjects no longer inspired her. “I was in such a negative state that looking to dancers and people literally bounding through life didn’t bring me joy,” she recalls. “It just further reminded me of what I had lost.” Riding her bike around her new city and sketching the mountain scenery, Jessa noticed her art shifting. And as her knee healed enough to start exploring the Coast Mountains, she found a new synergy between her passions. “I love playing outside, spending time in the mountains, and exploring,” Jessa explains. “It just took a move to BC to realize my athletic and adventurous side can work in tandem with my artistic pursuits.” For Jessa, a splitboard was the logical tool to push further into the mountains and still preserve her limbs. On her first day out, it all clicked–her friends set a skin track and she immediately drew a parallel between navigating the mountains via the path of least resistance, and a drawing exercise a professor had taught her in university: the single line. “Your skin track up the mountain becomes complete as you create your own line down the mountain back to your starting point,” she says. “I thought about our personal line through the mountains and the lines the landscape provides, and how the two are connected.” TOP Research and Development. ADRIAN M. MORIN. ABOVE The art of the ride.