The Core: Jones has infused new energy into snowboarding by heading deep into the backcountry. Photo: Seth LightcapJeremy Jones laughs and jokes as he waits under a blazing sun for his final, somewhat unusual, snowboard run of the season. It’s July 3, and he is competing in Squaw Valley’s annual pond skimming contest. Jones lives in nearby Truckee, Calif., on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore and has participated in Squaw’s summertime splash-fest many times. The goofy event, which features wild costumes and embarrassing wipeouts, is a way for Jones to unwind with friends after a long season of traveling to the world’s most extreme snowboarding locations. Jones would have no problem clearing the pond, but this year he plans to tank. “I’m going to spray the crowd and take a dunk. I’m sweating and need a swim.”
It is a rare occasion when Jones can enjoy wiping out on his board. Jones is an eight-time Big Mountain Rider of the Year who has performed in more than 50 snowboard movies. His career highlight reel includes some of the sickest, most pucker-inducing descents ever filmed. His helicopter-assisted runs down 70-degree spines in Alaska elevated big mountain snowboarding to new heights. Now 36, an age when adrenaline athletes typically back off the throttle, Jones is charting a new, more eco-friendly course for his career.
Last winter, his movie “Deeper” reimagined the snowboard movie, a tired genre of plot-less action sequences and tedious park and pipe big airs spliced together with hero music. He did this by using no helicopters, instead relying on splitboards, crampons, ice axes, ropes, harnesses and a butt-load of ballsiness. Operating from remote base camps, Jones and his team climbed every peak they rode, from Antarctica to Alaska to the Alps. “Deeper” was widely praised for a documentary style that not only showcased some of Jones’ most daring descents, but also showed the risks, and drama, of getting up mountains on foot. Helicopters, after all, are ambulances when things go wrong.
Further
Jones is now halfway through filming his follow-up, “Further,” produced by Teton Gravity Research (Jones is the brother of TGR founders Todd and Steve Jones). A webisode and trailer were released this fall in advance of the film’s debut in late 2012 – view the trailer here. “Further” continues the adventure travel narrative, with Jones again eschewing choppers in favor of daring human-powered ascents. “With ‘Deeper’ I went deeper into the mountains than I ever had before. With ‘Further’ I’m going even further afield and ticking off destinations I’ve always wanted to hit.” 
Located above the Arctic Circle, Svalbard is home to the northernmost shred-able mountains in the world. Jones and his crew spent one month on the Norwegian island last spring, 700 miles from the North Pole, a trip that required an ass-numbing 17-hour trip across fjords, glaciers and desolate expanses of ice on beefy, tracked snow machines. Operating from a base camp on a glacier, Jones and his riding partner, Norwegian superstar Terje Haakonsen, assaulted the island’s 5,000-foot peaks. Jones describes the trip as “dream-like.” The sun never set. The weather was mild. His favorite memory is of a high-speed descent in rosy pink light at 2 a.m. “Every aspect all around us had good snow so everything was in play and you never had to go to bed.” Thankfully, Jones never had to face off with one of Svalbard’s greatest hazards: hungry polar bears. When venturing outside the protective fence around the base camp, Jones traveled with a heavily armed polar bear guide. “Polar bears can really shut down your scene up there. We were happy to not get hunted.”
Jones’ month-long trip to Japan’s high Alps, by contrast, was unexpectedly humbling. The “Further” team endured fierce winds and huge snowstorms while winter camping. “It was definitely not the typical tree-pow cruising that you see in a lot of films from Japan,” Jones says. “We were dealing with 5,000 feet of vertical climbing from the valley floor to the highest peaks, low temperatures, big winds and really tricky snow evaluation conditions. We couldn’t even get on some of the peaks because of the weather, and we got turned back a lot.” Despite the adverse conditions, Jones and his crew bagged incredible footage, including a blind roll-over from a cornice that rivals anything Jones has ridden in Alaska.
Working without helicopters is equally challenging for Jones’ cameramen, who must risk their lives climbing alongside him to get footage. Principal shooter Chris Edmands has worked on both “Deeper” and “Further” and calls Jones a machine. “It gets harder and harder to keep up with Jeremy. He is so fast and efficient on ascents.” In Svalbard, Edmands lugged a 10-foot metal arm to the summit of an adjacent mountain so he could mount his camera and capture a sweeping panoramic shot. On another occasion, Edmands summited a peak whose top 30 feet were nearly vertical glare ice and rocks. A skilled boarder, Edmands got the shot but then realized he had to snowboard down the no-fall zone after an alternate escape route proved to be even more sketchy. An ice axe in each hand, Edmands slowly scraped and picked his way down. “It was the most gripping 30 feet of snowboarding I’ve had. There was absolutely no room for error.”
Jones returned from his travels to enjoy one of Lake Tahoe’s snowiest springs in years. Married with two young children, Jones has lived in Tahoe for 16 years. Despite having the opportunity to board around the globe, he most looks forward to exploring his backyard in the Sierra Nevada. The much-derided “Sierra cement” is infinitely safer than Rocky Mountain blower powder, allowing him to explore far and wide on his splitboard, bivouacking in the snow and assaulting peaks that may have never been ridden or skied. “My splitboard is a tool to get deep into nature,” he says. “That sounds cheesy but it’s true. These days, I enjoy the up as much as the down.”
The Solution
Jones now does about 80 percent of his riding on a splitboard, and he is in the best shape of his life. For the uninitiated, splitboards separate lengthwise into two skis for ascending. Upon reaching the top, a rider clicks the two pieces back together, rotates the bindings and cruises downhill. “Splitboards are an awesome tool to penetrate deep into the mountains. They give snowboarders legs,” Jones says. In the past, snowboarders had to post-hole on snowshoes or use snowmobiles—as AT (alpine touring) and telemark skiers quietly and efficiently skinned into the backcountry to enjoy the wild powder.Jones rides a split called “The Solution” from Jones Snowboards. He founded the company in 2009 after growing frustrated with the lack of interest from all the major brands for a line of big mountain free ride boards. Jones Snowboards, first offered in 2010, has four boards, all featuring rocker for float, magne traction edges for bite and other design features tailored specifically for control and flotation in the unruly backcountry. Jones has grown tired of the snowboard industry’s near singular focus on park-centric, skateboard style riding that has turned off many long-time boarders—and converted some to skiers. Jones, an avid surfer, wants to bring the surf ethic back to boarding.
Skiing is a lifelong activity. Surfing is a lifelong activity. But skateboarding and park riding are injury-prone sports and thus a young person’s game. By pushing splitboarding and backcountry exploration, Jones not only wants to change the way boarders get up the hill; he also wants to help the sport grow up and offer more options for longtime riders “A lot of us riders are now in our late 30s and 40s, some in our 50s,” says Chad Perrin, sales manager for Jones Snowboards. “We grew up and matured with snowboarding and we don’t necessarily care about cool graphics and throwing tricks in the park. We [Jones Snowboards] provide a solution for those riders.”
For this coming winter, Jones has added women’s sizes to its board line and added split versions of its Flagship, Hovercraft (see page 23) and Mountain Twin boards. Splits comprise about 30 percent of sales of Jones Snowboards, a trend that the rest of the industry is watching. A growing number of companies are offering splitboards: Jones, Venture, Burton, Voile, Never Summer and Prior, to name a few, and sales were up about 50 percent last winter.
“That certainly indicates a trend, but the numbers are rather small so we will see if it really breaks out next season,” says Kelly Davis, research director for the trade group SnowSports Industries America. Davis expects to see splitboard sales rise another 20 percent to 50 percent in the 2011/2012 season.
“This is the way I saw rocker start, by the way.” Indeed, rocker, board sales were up 42 percent last winter, indicating riders are more concerned with powder than the park.
And Even Further
Back at Squaw, Jones prepares for his pond skimming run. He is last in line—appropriately so—and is preceded by a motley circus of competitors dressed in Borat-style banana hammock swimsuits and other ludicrous outfits. Trim, fit and handsome, and bearing a scar on his cheek from a big mountain wipeout, Jones shares a laugh with other competitors. Having down time away from cameras is increasingly important to Jones, whose head is already swimming with ideas for next season’s “Further” film locations. His team is eyeing an expedition to an even more remote Alaska range, and Jones wants to mount a larger expedition into his beloved California High Sierra. Thanks to the success of “Deeper,” which Jones partially financed out of pocket, “Further” was awarded a bigger budget. That means fans of “Deeper” will see even greater production value.But none of that business matters at this moment, as Jones focuses on the task at hand—splashing the raucous Squaw crowd. After clicking into his Hovercraft board (it floats on pow, so why not water!), he rockets downhill, hitting the pond at full tilt, goofy footed. He skims halfway across and then abruptly changes course, arcing a huge wakeboard turn that throws a wave of water into the front row. Jeremy Jones, one of the era’s most vital snowboarders, is down. Mission accomplished.
Paul Tolme is a journalist based in South Lake Tahoe, which, the former Ned resident says, “is like Colorado but with a big-ass beautiful lake and deeper snow.”
