MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

44 Chantal Limoges was a snowboard fanatic living in Calgary who joined Snowboard.com in the early days and used it religiously right to the end. Chantal: There was a contest with an opportunity to win a trip to Whistler for the World Ski & Snowboard Festival. I entered every day because I was on Snowboard. comevery day. It was a serious addiction. I had just come back froma trip toWhistler during my university reading week and I got an email from [email protected] saying I won the trip! I couldn’t believe it. I snuck back to Whistler in between my final exams. Came home, wrote my last exam and moved to Whistler to live on my best friends couch for two weeks. I’ve been here ever since. Joe: Moderation was a big thing—a rival website could come bomb the site with dirty pics that a sponsor or someone might see and it’s hard to manage when you have a small team. At one point I ended up building a multi window video chat, there were four webcam windows and they were first come first serve. It was a moderator’s nightmare—we saw so many dicks on there. By April 2003, snowboard.com had over 438,000members and was on its third design overhaul. Kyle: And then it blew up. I used to have to delete thousands of profiles that were on there just for dating, lots of bikini pics. If they didn’t have any snowboarding content we would shuffle them over to a generic site. Pete Anderson was a professional snowboarder, writer, filmmaker, and a member of the legendary Wildcats crew. Pete: Like any user- generated platform it goes where the user wants it to go. If you wanted to post photos, you could. Connect with riders in California? Sure. If you were looking for a date… it was a well- stocked pond, let’s say that. There were definitely people on snowboard.com, men and women, looking for something more than snowboarding. We were all dumb, young and full of… enthusiasm. Rusty Ockenden is a professional snowboarder now, but in the heyday of snowboard.com he was just a kid who loved snowboarding. Rusty: It was a dating site. I was probably about 14 years old and I remember going on there to look for hot chicks. My buddy Donny Ellis was a pro rider and he lived with Adam from snowboard.com so he got me on there. I ended up crashing with them when I came to Whistler for the summer. I was just a kid who liked snowboarding. I’d put any snowboard pics up on my profile, not even pics of me just stuff I had found. It was way ahead of its time, if it had been about anything other than snowboarding those guys would probably all be billionaires now. There were definitely people on snowboard.com, men and women, looking for something more than snowboarding. We were all dumb, young and full of … enthusiasm. ABOVE Jon Cartwright. INSET Kevin Sansalone. RUSSELL DALBY