MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

55 Coming into the weekend like... Phillips in 2009. GRANT GUNDERSON Phillips had accumulated enough funds to drop out and move to Whistler for the winter to ski every day, get disqualified from freeski comps, and get serious about skiing as much as possible. Which is exactly what he did. By 1999 however, very few (if any) professional freeskiers were being paid enough to live, even by ski bum standards. So, as he prepared to return to Seattle for a summer of work, Phillips ended up in Spicy Sports, a collection of Whistler shops that would sell off their rental and demo skis each spring. With his history of buying and selling, Phillips smelled opportunity—thanks in part to a new website he’d heard about called eBay. “At the end of the '90s eBay was really firing,” he recalls. “People were in bidding frenzies on these auctions and it was the only thing going—Amazon was still only selling books. Plus, the US exchange rate was crazy high. So I could buy 100 pairs of skis for 100 bucks each, but I’d get them for 65 bucks US. That worked in my favour and soon I was buying from everyone and selling them on the internet, or out of pop-up shops I’d set up in roadside parking lots. I had a UPS printer in my garage and my only other expense was a pager and a car worth about 2,000 bucks. No other bills.” Still skiing professionally all winter, Phillips began spending most of his off-snow time buying, cleaning, selling and sourcing used skis and snowboards. He says he found a certain sense of achievement in the practice, one that reminded him of his first days in the mountains. “Used gear is not the sexiest thing, but it’s rad, it gives people easier access to the sports