SILVERTON – The skiers are struggling a bit. The snow in the trees is punchy, collapsing beneath skis. It’s intimidating to carry the speed needed to float through the manky snow.
“One of my jobs as a guide is to help you become better skiers,” says snowboarder Kyle Mack, a Silverton Mountain guide who won Olympic Big Air silver in the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea. “That’s what we are doing right now. Becoming better skiers.”
The rogue ski hill at the end of the road was built by snowboarders. The single-lift, expert-only area features some of the steepest lift-served skiing in North America. Guides shepherd skiers for most of the season and helicopters ferry guided skiers deep into the San Juans. And nearly a third of those guides are on snowboards, an uncommonly high ratio for backcountry and guided operations.
Silverton Mountain is a siren song for snowboarders. Some of the best riders in the world work at the ski area. The yellow-jacketed guides have proved snowboards are a viable guiding tool, chipping away at decades of ski-only dominance in the insular guiding world.
“There’s a stereotype, almost, that snowboarders can’t do this sort of work of guiding and patrolling and avalanche control,” says Silverton Mountain guide Rob Roof, his Silverton-made Venture snowboard dangling from the double chair. “I feel like we’ve shown that it can be done.”
Silverton Mountain guides are a different breed. In the morning, before the guests arrive, they are out hunting avalanches, hurling explosives and traversing snow-loaded starting zones to reduce the threat of a big slide. Then they come and connect with a group of guests – most of them skiers – for a day spent dodging avalanches.
“Those are two very different mentalities – patrolling and guiding. It’s such a rare thing,” says Silverton Mountain guide Skylar Holgate, who joined the ski area 23 years ago and grew up snowboarding in the San Juans.
In the spring, Holgate heads north and guides helicopter skiers in Alaska. In the summer, he goes the other direction and runs a motorized backcountry skiing operation in Chile. He spends about 300 days a year riding far-flung powder and on his days off, he throttles a high-end Timbersled snow bike to the top of San Juan peaks and rides down steep gullies and couloirs that are challenging on skis.
Few people are more versed in navigating the San Juan’s notoriously treacherous snowpack.
The terrain at Silverton Mountain – the lines are typically straight down with few traverses – supports snowboarding, Holgate says. The founders of the ski area, snowboarders Aaron and Jenny Brill, saw the board-friendly lines in Velocity Basin when they arrived in the late 1990s and started assembling mining claims to build a one-of-a-kind ski area. The fact there are so many snowboard guides at Silverton Mountain, way more than just about any other backcountry or guided operation in the world, Holgate says, “is by design.”
“It was a rare thing Aaron had to create to make this place work,” Holgate says. “There are so many guides out there with all this experience with huge careers guiding all over the world but they have only seen a handful of avalanches. We create thousands of them every season. That really changes how you guide.”
Snowboarding guides must be observant of their clients and the terrain, always thinking about how to stay above flats and navigate to specific spots.
“We have to really pay attention to a lot of small things that skiers sometimes don’t need to think about because they can just sidestep up a slope a few steps,” Holgate says. “As a snowboarder, you have to really feel out your group and know what terrain you’re in, and always position yourself for a worst-case scenario.”
That’s something Mack is learning. The Olympian joined the Silverton Mountain guide crew two years ago.
“This place has taught me a lot about just what it means to be a guide and, really, about snowboarding,” says the 27-year-old who has transitioned from high-flying snowboard competitions to full-time guiding. “My snowboarding has taken a whole new turn here. This is one of the most dangerous snowpacks in the world and it’s taught me so much.”
Working with skiers is new for Mack. But it’s not been as challenging as he initially thought.
“Part of my job here is to push people out of their comfort zone, which is not hard to do at Silverton Mountain,” he says. “A lot of people come here and psych themselves out, and I have to help them build their confidence.”
In his second week at Silverton Mountain, Mack helped an overwhelmed skier down a steep run by sitting her on his snowboard and walking behind his tethered board.
“The technicality of the terrain here fits snowboarding. It’s steep, rocky and hard. Yes, it can be shitty, but once you have a great day in the San Juans, it makes all those shitty days worth it,” Mack says. “The San Juans have this crazy aura and the thrill of taking people on adventures in these gnarly places, there’s nothing like it.”
Fabio Grasso has been guiding at Silverton Mountain for 21 winters and heads the ski area’s complicated snow safety program, which entails throwing more explosives than any other ski area in Colorado and using helicopters for mitigation.
“Snowboarding has come a long way in the last two decades and is more widely accepted at both resorts and in guiding. Silverton Mountain has helped with that … and that all goes back to the Brills,” says the 46-year-old Grasso.
Grasso doesn’t necessarily see a challenge in guiding skiers.
“We are all out here for the same reason. It doesn’t really make a difference what’s on your feet,” he says, cradling his terrier-mutt Izzy after a February day guiding in firm conditions. “But I argue snowboards can be a more efficient tool, especially in breakable wind slab and crust. We don’t have two independent edges going all over the place. Like we say, we will wait for skiers all day.”
There’s a joke in the guiding realm that snowboarders who work for helicopter or backcountry outfits are DEI hires. That’s not the case at Silverton Mountain, where most runs are accessed by hikes that can stretch for a lung-searing hour or longer. The rubber-soled snowboard boots are certainly easier for hiking. And comfort.
“We are always in a good mood here because our feet are not killing us,” says Roof with a laugh. “But for real, there is a longevity factor for snowboarders who do not have the chronic foot issues that a lot of you skiers deal with.”
In 1999, Klem Branner was a graduate student studying engineering at Colorado State University and enamored with snowboarding. He was working part time for Donek Snowboards in Bennett, helping the owner of that company craft mostly hard-boot carving snowboards. By 2001 he and his wife, Lisa, were crafting their own snowboards with an aim toward durability and sustainability. They set up shop in Bayfield before moving Venture Snowboards to Silverton in 2006.
Venture offers four models of snowboards and even skis. All the snowboards can be made as splitboards, giving Venture a niche in the competitive snowboarding industry, which is dominated by the pioneering Burton.
The Branners make the maple cores for their snowboards in the bottom floor of their factory on the edge of the Town of Silverton. They print their own top sheets and use bio-based epoxy to glue U.S.-made bases. Sustainability and durability remain core principles at Venture.
The rowdy ski area up Cement Creek is a testing ground for Branner, who was among the first snowboard manufacturers to abandon the traditional camber profile that was once ubiquitous.
“I’ve taken a board, hot off the press, cut it out, ran it a bunch of times through the base grinder and rushed up to the mountain for a few runs,” says Klem Branner, showing off two floors of customized equipment on a sunny Silverton day. “It went well. That was when we were getting rid of camber, which changed everything with a much more fun and surfy ride.”
Just about all the guides at Silverton Mountain ride Venture boards or skis, with many of the topsheet designs reflecting a colorful rendering of Velocity Basin. The Branners have weathered nearly two decades of challenges running a manufacturing business in one of Colorado’s most remote mountain towns, but it’s been worth it, Branner says.
“This place, it’s so steep and snowy. There’s great backcountry access. We get to start skinning right from the road,” he says amid a showroom gleaming with freshly minted boards. “I mean, look at this view. Every day you come in here and look out the window and it’s like ‘Yeah, let’s make some snowboards.’”
