MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

46 Leanne Pelosi was a promising young snowboarder living in Calgary in the early 2000s. Leanne : I never used it to get laid. Maybe… but I don’t think I was using it for that. It was just an underground community of snowboarders connecting with each other. I used it to befriend the Skids crew, Kevin Sansalone and Jeff Keenan, but I’d met them before at the Camp of Champs— that was like another Tinder. Dano: I know people who met on snowboard.com and are nowmarried with kids. Colin Whyte is a writer and is the exact person Dano is talking about. Colin: I met my wife, Livi, on snowboard.com . A lot of my friends on there were friends with her, including Dano, and there weren’t that many of us on there who weren’t 15. A love of snowboarding is a deeper thing to have in common than some stupid band or celebrity and, in my view, people who’ve been riding since the earlier days of the sport tend to have something kindred-spirity about them (Mambosoks notwithstanding). Plus, she was hot and smart and a rad artist. It was a really great community for a minute there—especially for introverts like me and Livi. Leanne : My claim to fame is I actually turned pro from being on snowboard. com. I’d posted this video of my riding and one day I got a message from Bobby Meeks from K2 saying, “Do you want to ride for K2?” I didn’t believe it was the real Bobby Meeks but the next thing you know I got a package with two new snowboards and a K2 contract in between. I was in school at the time, but I dropped out and moved to Whistler and forgot about my future career in bioengineering. I found my roommates on snowboard.com too. Ming Kao was a young snowboarder and clothing designer living in Whistler with Leanne and Suzie Davis, another pro snowboarder. Ming : It was how we communicated. My roommates, Leanne and Suzie didn’t get along so we’d come home from riding and get on snowboard.com and talk to each other. I’d be talking to both of them at the same time and they’d be talking shit about each other, but we would literally all be sitting on the same couch talking to and about each other without saying a word. It was the first “zoning out” on social media. Dano: It allowed that second or third generation of snowboarders to connect in a more modern way than going to contests or tradeshows. Snowboarding culture has always been progressive. Early on, professionals in the snowboard industry found ways to utilize this new community of like-minded shredders to do more than share pics and stoke. Digital video was a game changer. Adam: Digital video at the time was hard to create—phones weren’t good enough so you had to use video cameras. We were ahead of our time for file sizes but we needed fast, durable hard drives because we were hosting everything ourselves. Eventually we used Amazon for hosting and moved to the cloud— cheaper and easier. Pete: I was a horrendous snowboarder but I understood media and how media translated into value for me with certain brands. Snowboard.com was a spot where you had 100 per cent control over how you were represented, we could shape our own brands. It was the beginning of content creation. Everyone had to create content to go on there—a bio, photos, videos, even shit-talking is generating content. That was a tipping point for snowboarding media, everyone’s voice could be heard. I started shooting and editing two-minute My claim to fame is I actually turned pro from being on snowboard.com. I found my roommates on snowboard.com too. –Leanne Pelosi Leanne Pelosi logs into some Alaskan pow. BEN GIRARDI