MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

66 MLCM WINTER/SPRING 2019 Even with a sponsor, most of Tippie’s competitive snowboard career was self- funded. He planted trees all summer while rival snowboarders chased winter down to South America or New Zealand to train on snow. Tippie was forced to make do with what he had: a gravel pit in Barnhartvale, just outside of Kamloops. “I couldn’t afford to travel so I would go to these gravel pits and rip my board down them all summer,” Tippie explains. “I would get girls to drive me up and down. I called them the Vertical Kittens, Vert-Kits.” It wouldn’t be long before those Kamloops gravel pits would prove instrumental in launching the next phase of Tippie’s life: freeride mountain biking. “Kamloops is built into a hill,” he says. “It’s all different elevations and crazy clay formations—ribs and spires and ridges. Since we were kids we’d take shortcuts around town, freeriding down chutes and off drops, through the trees. It was how we got around. We called it ‘riding steeps’ and that’s what kick started my mountain biking career.” The story behind the birth of freeride mountain biking is well-documented (watch Darcy Turenne Hennesey’s film The Moment if you’re not up to speed), but the short version is that filmmakers Christian Begin and Bjorn Enga arrived in Kamloops in 1995 on Tippie’s recommendation to film his buddy (and ex-Canadian BMX champ) Richie Schley doing a 360 on a mountain bike for Pulp Traction , a Greg Stump mountain bike film, Tippie had rushed home from tree planting (leaving two girls in his tent that had been hoping for some romance, so the story goes) and poached the shoot, ushering the crew out to his gravel pits where he proceeded to shred, drop and rip everything in sight. By the time Begin and Enga’s Kranked film was released (2008), Tippie, Schley and another Kamloops shredder named Wade Simmons had become the first professional freeride mountain biking team as the sport exploded around the world. The Kamloops riders were called ‘Schley the Professional’, ‘Wade the Natural’ and ‘Tippie the Rock Star.’ “Being a rock star was awesome,” Tippie says. “We had a bunch of sponsors giving us money and plane tickets and everywhere we went people wanted to take us to their gnarliest trails to see if we could ride them. Which was exactly what we wanted to do.” The pressure of the spotlight fuelled Tippie’s drive to push his riding to new levels. Ten-foot cliffs became 18-footers, then 25. After years of doing crazy stunts for attention, acceptance, and the sheer fun of it all, Tippie was suddenly being paid to do it with awesome people in places he’d never dreamed of visiting. And while Tippie’s thick strength and durability prevented him from sustaining any serious injuries (even while rag-dolling at 80 km per hour or tumbling off cliffs) that Kamloops toughness also proved highly efficient for the other side of being an action sports hero—the party. Action, or ‘extreme’, sports have never been known for cultivating job security or career-exit strategies. The very essence of them lies in finding and appreciating the moment—that ‘life is short, ride hard’ mentality. And freeride, at the time, was so new there were no mentors, no veterans, and no one holding anyone accountable. For a smalltown kid in his late 20s used to tree planting for 15 cents a plug or pounding fence posts for 12 bucks an hour—suddenly riding a six-figure salary with fans in every part of the world proved a challenge. Canadian Olympic Team trial races. January 1998. Nakiska Mountain,Alberta, Canada JOHN GIBSON LEFT (CUTOUT) Filming for NewWorld Disorder in 2008 JOHN GIBSON; LEFT Squamish BC.2016.JOHN ENTWISTLE; BELOW Crankworx 2016. TIPPIE FAMILY