MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

WINTER/SPRING 2019 MLCM 63 O n Brett Tippie’s kitchen table there’s an article clipped from the Kamloops Daily News with a headline that sums it up perfectly: “Age no obstacle for Tippie.” The story explains that despite being the oldest competitor at the Oronge Cup Continental Open snowboard event, Tippie won the second run in GS and took sixth overall. He also placed 25 th in boarder cross due to a “wipe out.” “Grey hairs seem far less scary than some of the stunts Tippie still attempts on snowboards and mountain bikes,” writes staff reporter Chad Douglas. The article is from 1999. The Kamloops Daily News has long since shut its doors and snowboard racing is more niche than ever, but Brett Tippie is still a sponsored snowboarder, mountain biker and one of the most in- demand media personalities in extreme sports. Today, he’s planning his 50 th birthday party. “I don’t want to age gracefully,” Tippie says. “I want to rage gracefully. I’m not 50 years old. I am level 50, and I’m proud—I made it. I’ve gone all in representing my country. I’ve been avalanched and walked nine hours with one arm and one leg. I’ve been addicted to drugs and fallen off cliffs. I’ve broken snowboards I built myself and destroyed too many bikes to count. And I am still here. If there is a nuclear holocaust tomorrow, all that’s gonna be left is the Rolling Stones, Cher, Sam Hill’s eyebrows, Richie Schley’s hair products and my mouth, still kicking.” • • • That mouth is notable as the exit point for Tippie’s jokes and his signature laugh—a raspy, staccato that explodes from his face like a flock of spooked birds. When he’s on (and he’s almost always on), Tippie laughs with his entire body—his shoulders pull up as if the outpouring of joy were a physical force erupting from the very essence of his guts. “I’m having stomach issues,” Tippie says as he greets me at his home in Deep Cove on a rainy January afternoon. Did you know that diarrhea is hereditary?” I did not. “Ya, it runs in your jeans,” he says. And then that laugh—infectious, consuming, and impossible to forget. “Watch out for my vibrator,” Tippie warns, gesturing to a pile of luggage and gear stacked at the door in preparation for a family ski trip. The orange, multipronged device is actually a high-powered electric muscle massager from Europe, an understandable appliance for someone who still boards or bikes over 300 days a year. Tippie waves it around, drops a couple more one-liners, and ushers me into his living room. Brett Tippie is a man built to perform. “I moved around a lot as a young kid,” he explains, taking a seat on a large couch, while wrangling his two young daughters. Tippie’s wife, Sarah, is out running last-minute errands for their trip. “I was in a new town every school year until grade four,” he says. “I was always the new kid, so I made friends by finding the local crazy guy and doing something crazier. If that guy jumped three garbage pails on his bike I’d jump four, then I was in.” At age nine, Tippie and his parents put down roots in Kamloops BC, a blue-collar city of about 100,000 built into the banks of a dry, desert-like valley where two rivers converge into a lake with a paper A three-decade career is incredibly rare in action sports. Brett Tippie has two of them. w o r d s : : F e e t B a n k s