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Rob Coté – addicted to snow play

"That crazy, liberating, wild feeling of gliding over the snow... there's nothing that compares. The same goes for the hot chocolate at the end of the day." - Khyber Rob At first we just nodded.
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"That crazy, liberating, wild feeling of gliding over the snow... there's nothing that compares. The same goes for the hot chocolate at the end of the day."

- Khyber Rob

 

At first we just nodded. You know, like two strangers acknowledging the common folly of their addiction. But we never stopped to chat. Maybe there'd be a polite hello from time to time. But nothing more. After all, I was a grey-haired old coot and he couldn't be far past 30. I was one of those two-plank guys and he was a gorilla-armed boarder. Besides, there was some snow to be slid on. Priorities.

Still, we kept running into each other. On epic powder days when the snow was falling faster than you could ride it. Deep in the forest, where others rarely tread. On stupid traverses and long, post-holing walks where each step up was an act of will.

Or even just hiding from the north wind behind a boulder high in the alpine and watching the sun dissolve into a sea of pink and gold at the end of the day. The nods turned to smiles of recognition. "Hey - so you know this place too..."

After a few stormy climbs together - faces rimed with icy sweat, bodies tilted against the wind at crazy angles - the young boarder and I got to talking a bit. And I couldn't help but be intrigued.

"My first snowsliding experience," explains Rob Coté, "was totally traditional." He smiles; just a hint of self-deprecation. "It was in my backyard, on a wooden toboggan with a rope and three people sitting down." Like most Canadian kids, he eventually decided to stand up and go it alone. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't safe. But it was damned exhilarating. "That's all it took," he says. "I was hooked on sliding."

Coté grew up in snowy Lennoxville, Quebec. The region - known as the Eastern Townships - is famous for its many skiing opportunities. But for young Rob, that wasn't yet in the cards. "From the toboggan," he recounts, "we graduated to all sorts of sliding implements - flying saucers, GT Racers, Krazy Karpets. We'd build courses with banked turns and jumps and all sorts of stuff..." He sighs. "But my parents didn't ski. And when you're a kid..."

He was 12 or 13, he says, when he first tried "snowboarding." "We took the trucks off our skateboards," he remembers, "rode them backwards on the snow and tried to see if we could jump 'em. We thought we were being pretty rad." The grin he throws my way is too infectious to ignore. So I laugh with him.

"Well, one day we decided to build this kicker in my backyard," he continues. "It was a one-lane track. So you couldn't afford too many mistakes. We tried and tried to make it over the jump - for days we tried - but we always came up short. Well, one frozen morning, I actually did make it." He pauses. "And I flew right into the neighbour's clothesline." Little kid grin. "That was a memorable crash..."

There was blood that day. "Not bad or anything," he says, "just on the edges of my mouth." But he says it did encourage his friends to change the angle of the jump a little.

Still, that wasn't his only brush with sliding disaster. "I've always been intrigued with speed," he says. "When I was really young, we'd build these banked-turn courses for our flying saucers. You had to be careful though. From the end of our backyard, the land dropped 10 or 15 feet down to this little creek." You can guess the rest. "One frozen day - I couldn't have been more than six or so - I got going too fast and flew off the course and smack into the creek." Another memorable crash?

"I guess I must have gotten pretty winded," he says. "Because my buddy went running into the house screaming: 'He can't breathe. He can't breathe.'" Rob lets the moment linger. "I can still remember the sight of my mother running out of the house with her coat flapping. It was pretty funny..."

He had his first taste of skiing in Grade 5. "It was a school trip," he explains. "And my girlfriend was going too. So I had to go. I remember lying in bed and trying to figure out the moves the night before. I was really nervous."

No worries though. He loved it. "Being on the mountain then wasn't the same as it is now," he says. "Skiing then was a leisurely pastime. It was a social event." Still, Coté wanted more. "So I pleaded with my parents: 'I've got to go skiing. That's what all the other kids are doing.'" Finally, he says, they relented. "I can still remember how excited I was going down to the store and picking up my first pair of skis. They were great."

Happy laughter. "You know, that first pair of skis - really doesn't matter what they are, as long as they LOOK good..."

A committed basketball player in high school, the young Cote could only devote a few days of winter to his new passion. But he took advantage of each day like it was his last. "Flying off rollers, screaming through the trees, half in control, half out of control. You know, I was learning how to ski," he says. And stops. Sighs. "I was really fortunate to have family friends who would let me tag along on their ski trips - Owl's Head one weekend, Jay Peak the next. I learned a lot about skiing in those years."

Meanwhile, snowboarding was becoming increasingly front-of-mind for Coté and his contemporaries. "Throughout the whole time in high school," he recounts, "we all had our own Black Snow Snowboards from Canadian Tire."

Say what? He smiles. "I betcha a whole lot of people who read this story will smile when they see the mention of 'Black Snow Snowboard'..." For those of us who missed this cultural phenomenon, Rob is happy to explain: "It was a piece of fibreglass, no edges, molded plastic bindings. Very, very basic." He lets the words float. Laughs. "We'd build jumps all over the place. The landings would eventually get too icy so we'd just shovel more snow onto them. After a while, we even went out looking for cliffs. In somebody's front yard even. People would freak. But most homeowners were cool about it..."

Eventually, they graduated to the ski hill. "I remember showing up at Mt Bellevue in downtown Sherbrooke with our Black Snows and no edges. But we got away with it for four or five runs before they kicked us out."

The problem? "They insisted we needed edges to be allowed to ride there." So Coté and his friends altered their boards to fit the rules. "We painted silver strips down either side of the boards," he explains. "And that worked great - at least until the paint wore off..."

Rob pursued his basketball goals into college. "I was a good student too," he says. "I had good grades." But the call of the mountains was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. By the winter of 1997, he was ready for a change. "I can still remember the day I made my mind up," he says. "I'm at Jay Peak, sitting in the trees and trying to figure out what to do with my life. It's dumping snow and I feel great. Really peaceful. I'm surrounded by nature, I'm involved in a great physical workout, and snowboarding is something that I seem to be getting better at every time I do it."

A long sigh. "That's the moment I decided to become a snowboard bum," he says. "I didn't know what I wanted to do in life yet. But I knew one thing: there was going to be a whole lot of big-mountain riding in my future."

He moved west and spent the next three-and-a-half years in Canmore. "That's where I made my first real snowboard friends," explains Cote. "You know, the kind of guys you ride with every day of the week. It was a really tight group." Up to that point, he says, riding had been more of a social activity for him. But moving to the Rocky Mountains raised his game. "We became really core riders. It kind of took over my life."

He'd probably still be in the Rockies if not for a random trip to the Coast. "I had friends in Squamish," recounts Coté. "So in the fall of 2001 I decided to head west for a visit." It was still October, but his friends insisted they take snowmobiles up to Brohm Ridge and check out the riding there. "I didn't even have snowboard boots," he says. "I was wearing an old pair of Sorels. And we'd grovelled a couple of reject boards."

He shakes his head. "But it didn't matter one bit," he says. "We were riding boot-top powder before Halloween. For me, it was like the opening of a whole new world..."

That spring he moved to Whistler. "Coming here opened my eyes to what you really can do in the mountains," he says. And smiles again. "I knew people did backcountry stuff. While in Banff, I'd heard about Rogers Pass and all the great touring there. I just didn't realize how accessible that kind of riding was."

He admits that his backcountry apprenticeship has been tough. "Once you get beyond the lifts," he says, "you quickly learn that the right gear can make the difference between life and death." He stops speaking. His tone becomes more serious. "Backcountry riding is true survival, you know. You either learn or you perish. Sure, you're playing in the snow and all, but there are still some big lessons to learn."

So why does he do it if it's so dangerous? "It all comes down to being in nature," he answers. "Whether you're touring in the alpine or dropping through the trees. It's a pretty peaceful feeling, you know, being surrounded by nature. It feels so good..."