Snowboarding has always had its share of shiny heroes. Teeming below the surface of scurrying agents, studio lights and the flash-pop of podiums, though, there has also been a vital underground of Anti-Heroes. From Shawn Farmer’s fireside rap antics in Valdez to Travis Parker’s absurdist take on our sport, the collective influence of the Anti-Hero far outweighs the glorified poster boys who spin to win. Snowboarding might be best known by its heroes—with their Wheaties boxes and tricks named after them—yet it will always be judged by the veracity of its Anti-Heroes.

By Colin Whyte

Dust in Craven Mike Basich Tyler Lepore

Dustin Craven, stark stairs to Nowhere. Calgary, Alberta Photo: Jeff Patterson

“ the end, you have to live with what you like and what you have done.“

raised by wolvesWhether they admit it or not, anti-heroes like dustin Craven carry the torch for what snowboarding’s all about. Once raw, outlawed, and as anti-social as a big ol’ neck tattoo, snowboarding has been co-opted. What used to be a punk hairball caught in the throat of the skiing establishment has been washed down by Veuve-Clicquot and turned into a trend-spotting Petri dish. Images of pro riders are now routinely used as another way to sell juice and cigs and “Soul” is just a good name for the longboard in your line. Now what?

Enter Craven: 19; raw as the day he was born; one of the most creative snowboarders riding professionally today.

Dustin is as ragged as they come: No filter. No chaser. The Albertan says what he wants, does what he wants, and enjoys rolling his own, um...way: “In the end, you have to live with what you like and what you have done,” he says. Philosophical musings aside, when he’s around, you never know whether you should lock up your daughters (you should) or roll out the red carpet (he might burn it). But, along with his take-no-prisoners personality, Dustin has skills aplenty to guarantee fellow riders of cutting him a wide berth. Or it could be they’re just trying to get out of earshot.

After gaining ground the last couple of seasons and winning hardcore fans along with a few contests, including the ’06 Showcase Showdown, Craven was a safe bet to blow up—if he didn’t end up in jail, a ditch, or “over it.” On his propensity for being the last man out at night and yet still gracing the podium the next day, Craven says: “I do get hungover—I’m just not a pussy. So I buck up and get ‘er done.” This year, Craven beat out heavy international competition to take the Empire Shakedown in Quebec and spent much of the year filming for the Capita team video, First Kiss. It seems like every home page this winter showed Craven’s signature grill grimacing through some kind of bank robber mask on a podium, holding up the kind of oversized checks that aren’t normally given out to anti-heroes. In short, his mouth writes checks—but his ass can cash them, too.

Craven has that level of athletic ability where he could do anything. The shred community’s just lucky he chose riding over, say, football to go pro. Snowboarding’s not football—at least not yet—and without pirates like Craven around this is exactly the future we should be worried about: total jock-i-fication. The straight-A gettin’, coach havin’,

non-drinking, church-going riders have pushed the sport—particularly in the pipe—into a legit Olympic excursion. Bravo. God bless. It could be argued, however, that the culture of snowboarding has suffered by this growth of acceptance, by this emphasis on training and winning. Dustin—and anti-heroes everywhere—serve as canaries in the coal mine: If we all gas ourselves to death we can’t say they didn’t warn us.

Capita’s Blue Montgomery, who sponsored Craven at 13, understands what makes his team rider special: “When I was younger and a lot more impressionable, my snowboarding heroes were bad asses…They had strong personalities and left an impression everywhere they went. Skiers didn't like them, and moms didn't approve. Today it's just not like that. The most influential dudes are puppets for the corporate world. But Dustin is a throwback: he makes his own decisions, lives by his own rules. He's a bad, bad, man...and that's oh so good.”

“Dustin is a serious rider who bleeds talent,” says friend and fellow Rockies rogue, Andrew Hardingham. “But so many companies try to manufacture quiet riders that can produce results without making a peep… The noise I’m talking about [is] character and personality and Dustin has it…because he so often will say the very thing in his head. More often, he'll say it really loudly and in front of a camera...”

The talent his peers speak of is readily visible whether Craven’s in a fresh-cut pipe or getting creative with co-conspirators like Scott Shaw or TJ Schneider on some sweet jumps. His airs are big, he can do every handplant known to man, and his unique grabs sometimes make it seem like he’s from another planet. Or maybe he was just raised by wolves. Hardingham, voted Most Responsible for creating the little boy-wolf in question, said, “spend an hour with Dustin and his crew and you’ll love life. If you don't, you’re either lame or scared.”

“[Andrew] can be the meanest, most abusive piece of shit,” says Craven of his “mentor,” Hardingham. “But still he is a lot of the reason why I’m writing my book instead of reading along.”

It’s hard to imagine Craven ever “reading along” yet he admits that he followed the flock in school: “I would always be a sheep in the pack and always wanted to be just like whoever was the shit. But now I realize that you make cool what you want to.”

See? Only a kid raised by wolves would make a slip like calling a flock of sheep a “pack”…

Dustin once entered a pipe contest in Italy where he was the only non-Olympian on the roster. Of the 12 competitors, it was Craven who won the prize for highest air. Here: Riding, not training in Breckenridge, Colorado. Photo: dave lehl

Photo: Jeff P

atterson

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self-sufficient shredder

Take a guided tour through Mike’s mind at mikebasich.com

if the essence of an anti-hero involves doing your oWn thing, then Lake Tahoe’s Mike Basich is their patron saint. He’s been doing his own thing in our sport for a long, long time: pro rider for close to two decades; owner of his own outerwear company, 241, since ‘91; weirdo since birth. Want to talk commitment? While many pros are lucky to make it to Alaska once in their entire career, Basich has made the 70-hour drive to Valdez eight times—half of them solo in the camperized 4X4 van made famous in 91 Words for Snow.

So how many words do the Eskimos have for “hardcore” we wonder…All of those years spent riding hard, from Niseko to North Lake, have

given Basich a fluency in the mountains many riders never attain; he’s equal parts sled dog and mountain goat. And don’t think that because he’s 34 that he’s just pushing tail on pow turns. Mike is always up to something burly, whether it’s dropping 50-footers at Area 241 (his 40-acre alpine lab in the Sierras), or designing massive rainbow rails for one of his famous self-shot action photos. The guy can’t help it. If you’ve ever seen the poster of Mike dropping out of a helicopter from several stories up then you know he’s not afraid of much—except, perhaps, being predictable.

“You know,” he says, when asked how he views himself versus how others might view him, “ten years ago everyone in snowboarding was a freak—mostly ‘cause they did whatever the hell they felt like. We now have so many more people in the sport that followed the herd to sponsorship. It's not a bad thing, but [it] does make the sport a little stale. One of the best years I ever had in snowboarding was a year I didn't have a sponsor. It brought so many new things to me and really helped me figure out why I snowboard… This awesome sport brings so many opportunities to one’s life, you have to get rid of the walls and find your own blank space.”

At the heart of Mike’s blank space is a fierce DIY work ethic, applied to every single thing he does: Years of working with photographers—and often having his “input” taken the wrong way—led to his unique shots of himself riding using remote triggers. “Out of everything I’ve done in snowboarding, I think the photography side more than anything has really captured what I think snowboarding is,” he says. The question begged, of course, is: So What is Snowboarding to Mike Basich? Sitting with Mike in his small, remote cabin, his husky dog Summit pondering us from the open door, Basich, with a far-off look in his eye, explained:

“It’s a wide open space to me. I’m trying to capture the point of view of what it’s like to be the rider…for people who’ve maybe never ridden—or can’t ride at all. That’s been my main focus. Not trying to do something better or harder, but focusing on something…different. A wide open space to see whatever the hell happens.”

Add to his genre-bending photographic exploits the crazy hobbit house he built in the Sierra, essentially solo, and you’ll start to see that Basich clearly runs on stronger, stranger fuel than most. (So does his truck, which he converted to run on bio-fuel). “I spent 20 years traveling the world,” he says, laughing, “and I ended up building right across the street from where it all started: my first day riding in 1985 at Soda Springs.”

The cabin is small and about as custom as it gets. He has very few neighbors, they are well out of earshot, and one of them has 80 Iditarod sled dogs. Access in winter is by snowmobile only and is not for the faint of heart—although Basich rides the goat path with one hand, holding 50 pounds of Summit in his lap. The cabin’s floor plan is based on the golden ratio, an ancient approach to architecture and aesthetics thought to embody an almost divine perfection. Mike had a friend measure him with his arms outstretched, and calculated the building and its pentagonal floor plan based on his own mystical numbers. Sure enough, the place is cozy, and neither too big nor too small for one solidly-built dude and his dog. It looks like something Mike might have, um, cooked up on one of his long drives to AK—which he did.

“I went from 66 square feet living in the van to this cabin, which is close to 300 with the loft,” he says, going on to explain that owning a 4,000 square foot house in Salt Lake City just wasn’t for him due to all the maintenance and un-needed space. “I don’t need too much space to live—I spend too much of my time outside,” he says. Mike did the plasma-cut metal window trim himself, not to mention the rich wood work of the couch and bed, milled by hand from local wind-fallen trees. Stranger still, a hefty chunk of Sierra boulder comes through the floor organically and morphs into the woodstove: Caveman Chic.

“Doing something myself—no matter what it is—has been a life long passion, mostly for the feeling of independence. I like to know how the things I use in my life work. People think from time-to-time, ‘why bother making it when you can buy it for five bucks?’ My passion and interest isn’t about getting to the end of the road, it’s about how I got there.” Mike Basich is famous for his self-taken action shots. And riding

pow at night alone is the ultimate anti-hero move. Area 241.

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What’s with Anti-Heroes and beards anyways? Photo: Joel fraser

creative conspiracy

“I am not scheming on ways to be ‘totally far-out snowboard guy.“

Check out Tyler’s new bike shop at superchampionshop.com

tyler lePore is not the kind of Person you meet and go, “oh, you remind me of so-and-so.” No. You meet Tyler and know, intuitively, that you are dealing with the genuine article.

“It’s not like a conscious choice to stand out,” says Lepore. “It’s who I am. I’m not scheming on ways to be ‘totally far-out snowboard guy.’ I just enjoying having fun, thinking of projects and doing them.”

“Projects” here might include such things as visually challenging art installations involving 4000 photos for long-time sponsor Capita, or maybe Grego Voytek, a full-length, black-and-white ‘zine of himself—naked. Everyone likes going starkers once in a while but how many of us would then have the sack to distribute the evidence at SIA, snowboarding’s largest trade show in Vegas, as Tyler did a few years back? Even Sin City was taken aback staring down the barrel of 50-plus pages of nude dude scattered in among the Burton catalogs and Mambosock koozies.

“It was an amazing project to do and I am very glad it came to fruition and I carried through with it,” he said about the now-legendary Grego Voytek and its effect upon his reputation as a weird guy. “Some people called me a fag and others laughed and enjoyed its comical feel. The project was a way for me to engage with my peers…and make them all question how open-minded and freethinking our snowboard world is. For me it was a way to save my love of snowboarding personally, and to really let individuals know it’s OK…to not get it, to be puzzled or to think why?”

Challenging closed minds comes as naturally to Lepore, it seems, as challenging himself on the mountain. On a recent trip to the Washington backcountry with FSM and the Dakine pro team, keeping up to Tyler was job one. When not stuffing his face with homemade cornbread muffins, the lithe vegetarian was consistently dropping bombs, or scurrying up yet another ridge in knee-deep snow to get a shot. Despite his staunch counter-cultural views, oblique aesthetic leanings, and a beard like the Unabomber’s if he hadn’t got caught, Lepore is a consummate professional. Flat light, tricky landings, brutal run-ins—none of them are a problem for this 27 year-old who’s been pro since ‘95 and sponsored since he was a wee li’l weirdo of 13. "While most pro shreds concern themselves with looking up-to-speed on current trends,” says Dakine’s Randy Torcom, “Lepore concerns himself what this is really all about: snowboarding.”

“I have always ridden for companies I was proud to support,” Lepore says. “In doing this you tend to establish close friendships within the companies you work for. They get to know you more on a personal level

and, the better a company knows you, the better they will market you. It’s also about being able to say, ‘No. I’m not doing this. It’s not me,’ and spotting situations that are going to make you look like a total idiot before they happen.”

Looking like a total idiot is, of course, subjective. And clearly nobody knows this as well as Tyler: “People are all different. I don’t care what people think about me—it’s their prerogative,” he says. “I treat people with respect and try to put my best foot forward when meeting new people. If someone wants to call me a dick or a freak…well, you can’t win them all.”

Having grown up in snowboarding, lived extensively in central California, Lake Tahoe and B.C., and experienced the heady early nineties, Lepore has a highly-developed sense of context regarding the sport: “[When] shit was blowing up in the early ‘90s, there were true anti-heroes—and that was any dude on a snowboard. That was when shit was insane, because everyone hated you for shredding. You were just hated. It was the best time to snowboard.”

And while snowboarding is simultaneously sport, pastime, and job to Lepore, it’s not his only love. To him, life is all about inspiration: “I don’t look up to a specific individual. I just get inspired by what I take in…listening to music, Barcelona, my bike, coffee, Hundertwasser, etc.” Who better than architect-artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser to inspire Lepore? The Austrian-born renegade was known for his rejection of straight lines, insistence upon reconciliation between humans and nature, organic forms, and an individualism considered “fierce” even in über-weird euro art circles. Sound familiar?

Lepore’s other major inspiration these days is his new East Vancouver bike shop, Super Champion. The shop’s opening kind of forced Tyler into getting a cell phone after years of being notoriously tough to reach but he’s clearly stoked on the project: “It’s track only,” he says, exhibiting the pride and loyalty those brake-less, gear-less, purist machines inspire among the two-wheeled urban elite. “It’s [a place] where people interested in track cycling, and the culture of track cycling, can come and talk, have a coffee and interact.” The coffee’s never far away with Tyler.

When asked what the term “anti-hero” meant to him, Lepore suggested it might be obsolete: “An anti-hero is a person that would have no idea what an anti-hero is…a renegade of life. Marketing is such a strong force in our society nowadays, even the anti-hero is marketed as just that: a bad ass who takes no shit and follows his or her own path. An anti-hero is a way of life that cannot be bought, it is just how an individual is.” lepore @ north cascade heli, Washington.

Photo: stan evans

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