Fly By
Sweat Equity in Southeast Alaska
First published in Volume 21, Issue 4 of The Snowboarder’s Journal
Ryland Bell is on the throttle, but we’re moving slow. Under a canopy of spruce and hemlock, the trail is frozen solid. It’s hard to keep a snow machine from overheating in these conditions. We’ve been at it since before sunrise, working our way across a frozen Chilkat River, then up a familiar ridgeline, switchbacking through the woods, trying to stay cool, despite the cold. It’s an early April morning and there’s snow up high—we just gotta get there. Ideally, before the helicopters arrive.
It’s not easy being a snowboarder in Haines, AK. Maybe that’s why so few actually live here. But this is how they get it done—early ups, daily driving and a lot of sweat equity. A lot of waiting out the weather too. There are no chairlifts around here, and heli days are hard to come by financially. With us today are local carpenter Adam Billings and Tahoe-based Chris Galvin, who’s been living above Ryland’s garage for a month or more during the past several years, learning the ropes. These are the Outliers—a few of them, at least. There’s a contingent down the Lynn Canal in Juneau, too, who have lift-accessed riding at the notoriously fickle and community-operated Eaglecrest Ski Area. For them, the real gems of the high country require considerable effort and rare conditions to reach as well.
Perhaps that’s why the Southeast AK snowboard community remains small in numbers but big in camaraderie—to live and ride here is no easy task. Visiting pros flock every spring to stack video parts, burn heli hours, then get out of town. To do it yourself is a different program, and one that requires patience and perseverance. But when it all aligns, the rewards are huge. That was on display last year in The Outliers, a DIY full-length film produced and edited by Juneau’s Mark Rainery. He cobbled it together mostly through iPhone, GoPro and drone clips, assisted by a full hard drive from Bell, with backing from local shops Boarderline Legacy and the Aurora Projekt alongside other local businesses and a bit of snowboard industry support. The piece was a hit—it passed 200,000 views on YouTube with an editing style that Ryland describes as “not all chopped up, something like an old Standard Films movie, showing the full line, just freeriding.”
That was the product of two years of footage and the duo didn’t really plan on dropping a follow-up so soon. But they kept filming, as they do, and “doing drone stuff,” as Ryland says, in his case.
This is what doing drone stuff looks like: We reach treeline about 7 a.m. and find six inches of fresh. Moving freely up a broad ridge, it turns into a foot. Soon we’re nearing glaciated terrain in an iconic zone that was until recently reserved for heli crews, busting through two feet of blower. The forecast says clouds are coming in the afternoon. Ryland, Adam and Chris set out to break trail up the backside of the zone, another high-output endeavor, getting the highway in so they can triple up to their lines. Another 15 minutes of bootpacking and they’re on it by 8 a.m., just as the thumping of rotors floats up the valley.
left to right
Ryland Bell keeping his snow machine cool as the sun rises above the Chilkat. Photo: Colin Wiseman
Adam Billings on the gas. Photo: Colin Wiseman
Ryland Bell composed and exposed on Tomb Raider. Photo: Will Wissman
Ryland puts up the drone—Chris drops first. They trade off filming duties and Ryland puts in his own tracks, then Adam, and repeat. As the heli laps an adjacent zone, we’ve got this one to ourselves, and by the time the clouds roll in, each rider has stacked three lines. Not bad for a morning’s work in the Chilkat, heli or not. They’ll offer me the option of my own camera-free line, but I’ll decline this time with weather incoming—that can wait for tomorrow, which is supposed to be clear all day. That’s all part of the program too. As Ryland says, “We’re all out here working together, and I’m just as fired up nowadays to get my friends a lap as I am to get one in myself—it’s not that ego-driven race to the goods like when you’re filming a part out of a heli. We’re all working together, having fun filming each other, and getting what we can. It’s nice that way.”
That’s not to say they don’t jump in a heli when they can. They just choose their moments. This year, that happened in late April. What had been a thin snow year turned fat with a two-week storm. Most of the itinerant folks had left town by then, me included. Graciously, it all lined up for the locals. Lucas Merle, a featured rider in The Outliers and guide for Haines-based heliboarding operation Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures (SEABA), had been compiling a hit list all spring. Then came deep stable snow, sunshine and room in the bird for a local crew. Rainery, Ryland, Galvin and Merle jumped at the opportunity.
“We weren’t sure we had enough footage for another film until that [heli session] happened,” Ryland says, “but Lucas had been out with [local bush plane pilot] Drake and had pictures of all these zones near town. With a two-day window, we were able to get on some big lines—stuff I’d wondered about for 20 years—these giant vertical walls down into deep valleys.”
It was Ryland Bell’s second or third time down this rowdy dogleg stack in one of the first classic heli zones his crew unlocked via snow machine. Photo: Colin Wiseman
You can get a lot done with a couple days in the heli and ample local knowledge to capitalize upon favorable conditions. “We’d been able to stack some stuff over the winter, but to have that session with SEABA line up, that made the film a reality for this year,” Rainery says. He was able to score a first descent on a big, fluted wall in perfect morning light to end the session—the kind of line that you could spend a lifetime waiting to ride.
Rainery went home with hard drives in hand, sifting through another winter of footage, piecing it all together. The edit for this second installment from the Southeast AK diehards will be much of the same, but also a little different, he says—a tighter roster, maybe a few more heli lines. All in all, it’s another labor of love, sharing a local’s perspective on snowboarding’s ground zero of freeride in the Chilkat Mountains.
“It was nice to get some recognition from the community down south for last year’s film, and have a lot of people watch it,” Rainery says. “We’re stoked that we can share what we enjoy, what we are surrounded by up here.”
The Outliers 2 is playing now on thesnowboardersjournal.com.