National Geographic - 2014 Bucket List

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/trips/bucket-list/2014/fly-in-backcountry-skiing-alaska/

Jeremy Jones free-falls through a turn on a steep section of his line on "The Tooth" in Wrangell St. Elias National Park.

Photograph by Jeff Hawe

New Frontier: Fly-in Backcountry Skiing in Alaska

Jeremy Jones

Snowboarder

Alaska has 302 million acres of public land and a mere 730,000 residents to share it with. Those are pretty good odds, says Jones, which is why backcountry skiing in Alaska is a must-do for any avid snowboarder or skier.
“Get a plane drop somewhere in Alaska and set up a base camp for 10 to 20 days,” he says. “There are so many unridden mountains in Alaska, and a plane is a great way to get into them. You get dropped off on these high glaciers where first descents and dream lines are totally achievable for midlevel backcountry snowboarders.”
With such an abundance of mountains and snow, the problem, of course, is choosing where to go. Recently, Jones arranged to fly into the eastern part of the Alaska Range from Delta Junction, Alaska, near Fairbanks. But for those who prefer the safety of a guide service, he recommends Ultima Thule Lodge, located on an island of private land within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the country’s largest national park.
Between March and May, bush pilot Paul Claus flies guests and local guides to ski the giant bowls, couloirs, and glaciers of four converging mountain ranges. At the end of the day, everyone returns to the cozy log lodge for a homegrown meal and an evening drinking beers and gazing over the wide valley of the Chitina River.
“I’ve gone to a bunch of ranges, and in each range, you could spend a lifetime and ride a first ascent every day,” Jones says. “Alaska truly is skier and snowboarder paradise.”
Alaska Alpine Adventures guides backcountry ski trips in Lake Clark National Park and in the Chugach Range near Valdez, Alaska. Ultima Thule Lodge offers fly-in lodge-based ski trips in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

National Geographic Adventurer of the Year - Jeremy Jones

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventurers-of-the-year/2013/jeremy-jones/

 

 Snowboarder Jeremy Jones

A snowboarding pioneer risked his career to usher in a new era of exploration in the world’s wildest mountain ranges.

Vote for Jeremy Jones
“There is no longer anywhere in the world that I consider too hard to get to,” says big-mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones.
In 2012, for his latest film project, Further, produced by Teton Gravity Research, Jones navigated winds capable of knocking a rider from his feet, lived for days on end in subzero temperatures, and negotiated some of the most challenging avalanche terrain on the planet. At the ends of the Earth and far from rescue, making a mistake—taking a fall or getting caught in an avalanche—comes with the highest consequences.
The 37-year-old wanted to push backcountry snowboarding—or splitboarding, which uses a special snowboard that splits into ski-like parts used with climbing skins so a rider can ascend slopes—into a new era of exploration.
The wildest mountains were fair game, so he picked four of the remotest locations he could find—Japan’s Alps, Austria’s Karwendelgebirge Range, the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard just 600 miles from the North Pole, and Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias—and went to work. Further is the second film in his trilogy. It meant developing gear, integrating alpinism, and climbing to the top of each of the mountains he would ride.
Jones long ago became a legend in the snowboard and ski community for his powerful, improbable descents of Alaska’s mountains. Snowboarder magazine voted him Best Big Mountain Snowboarder of the Year nine times. Images of Jones arcing turns down thousand-foot snow spines inspired a generation of skiers and snowboarders in the '90s and early 2000s. In those days, both athletes and cameramen used helicopters to get in position. By the mid-2000s, Jones found himself craving more adventure, wanting to explore areas by foot where helicopter travel wasn’t feasible or allowed.
“I could shoot those movies with my eyes closed,” says the Truckee, California, resident. “To turn my back on that was difficult. I had to walk away from a scene that I had perfectly wired.”
In 2009, Jones took a twofold professional risk when he decided to make backcountry snowboarding his priority and founded Jones Snowboards with big-mountain and backcountry riders in mind. It meant foregoing helicopters and climbing mountains blanketed in deep snow before descending. That initial effort resulted in the 2010 film Deeper, which brought backcountry snowboarding to a broad audience.
Jones’s calculated bet paid off. Backcountry snowboarding has grown under his leadership. Garage innovators and large manufacturers, sensing the potential in the marketplace, have helped bring splitboarding to a tipping point, but Jones is the undeniable face of the movement.
“I’ve learned more about the mountains in the last four years than I did in the first 15 years of my career,” says Jones. “That’s been the exciting part—learning things on a daily basis. We are just getting started.”

—Fitz Cahall

THE INTERVIEW

Adventure: Four years ago, riding and filming big lines by helicopter was standard operating procedure. What led you to make such a public switch to splitboarding?
Jeremy Jones: I had a couple of years where all I wanted to do was a camping trip in Alaska. I would try and get the film company I was working with to do it. They would tell me why we couldn’t do it. I’d get to the end of the winter and say, I didn’t do the one thing I wanted to do this year. I realized that in order to do this I would need to create my own group of athletes and cameramen and make this happen on my own.
A: That must have been scary on a couple of different levels.
JJ: It was. I had accepted the fact that I might lose sponsors, that I would fall out of the media spotlight. I was no longer afraid of not getting paid to be a pro snowboarder. Deeper was really a film for myself. I thought this niche core group of people would like it, and I would fall out of the spotlight. That ended up not being the case.
A: With this latest project, Further, you explored Japan, Wrangell-St. Elias, Austria, Svalbard. These are pretty extreme, hard-to-get-to locations. How do you select where you go?
JJ: Terrain has always been my motivator. I see something unique and it really inspires me, and I really get tunnel vision for it. That ends up overtaking my life.
A: Of those locations you’ve traveled in the last two years, what proved to be the most difficult?
JJ: In Austria we were dealing with extreme cold. Minus 20 temps at night and minus 5 during the day. The mountains were massive. Getting to the top of those peaks was a huge endeavor. Japan, out of them all, had the hardest weather. We had people getting knocked off their feet due to wind. Reading the snowpack, dealing with how fast the weather was changing, and the cold coupled with the wind—the weather made that terrain super serious. Trying to deal with that level of terrain with that weather was really difficult.
A: In 2007, you founded Protect Our Winters, an organization that mobilizes the snow sports community to fight global warming. You’ve lobbied in Congress. You tried to integrate sustainable materials into your boards. Why was it important for you to stand up for this issue?
JJ: There is no such thing as a green snowboard. Or a green jacket. Nothing is zero waste or zero energy. We can’t all move into tree houses and eat nuts. That’s unrealistic. We can hang up our snowboards, but the biggest change that needs to happen, where we will see significant differences, needs to happen on Capitol Hill.
Of course, you need to drink out of reusable water bottles, and there are ways to continue to reduce your carbon footprint. We really need to know what elected officials stand for and be up to date on politics. Believe me, that was the last thing I wanted to be a part of. Globally we need to embrace that really it’s our elected officials who can have the big impact on the environment. We can’t sit back and not do something about it. We owe that to future generations.

National Geographic Interviews Jeremy Jones

http://ngadventure.typepad.com/blog/2011/12/snowboarder-jeremy-jones-protect-our-winters.html

Snowboarder Jeremy Jones on Protect Our Winters

"Jeremy Jones is an alien. He's just inhumanly good at snowboarding." So lives the legend of this pioneering big-mountain rider. We heard this comment this week from an Alaska-based ski/snowboarding operator, but the sentiment is one that rings throughout the snowboarding world.

Once a pro rider hitting a different big-mountain location every week, Jones's ethos have evolved over the years. Instead of heli-assisted first descents, he now prefers to go the old-fashioned way—on foot or splitboard. "The reality with going on foot is that it can take days to go do one run. It’s definitely a quality over quantity deal," he says. His film trilogy Deeper is aimed to show that you can do world-class freeriding without a helicopter. Further, part two due out September 2012, shows some of the best riders exploring the backcountry the slow way, which makes for a more a richer, more personal snowboarding film.

This falls right in line with Protect Our Winters (POW), a foundation Jones started in 2007 to unite the snow-sports industry and fans to fight climate change. With 30,000 members and some of our favorite athletes as ambassadors, Protect Our Winters is taking their message to the classroom and to Congress.

To kick off skiing and snowboarding season, we caught up with Jones to find out the latest on POW, what it's like to talk to Congress about climate change, and his favorite places to ride. —Mary Anne Potts

National Geographic "Extreme Expeditions" Features Jeremy Jones and "Deeper"

 http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/expedition-week/meet-the-extreme-expeditions-cast-crew/#/jeremy-jones_42542_600x450.jpg 

 

Extreme Expeditions

From snowboarding to caving, rock climbing to ice climbing, these six films from the Banff Mountain Film Festival highlight unique, adrenaline-charged expeditions by extreme explorers.

Meet the Filmmakers and Athletes from Extreme Expeditions

Jeremy Jones, Athlete

There are a number of words to describe Jeremy Jones: environmentalist, big mountain free rider, film star, husband, father and now entrepreneur and board designer. As the preeminent big-mountain free rider of today, visions of Jones about to drop from the peak of a knife ridgeline are ingrained in the minds of every snowboard film fan. Legend status is locked down for the 34-year-old as the eight-time Snowboarder Magazine “Big Mountain Rider of the Year,” winner of numerous big mountain and extreme contests, over two dozen awe inspiring video parts in the library including five in 2008 alone.

For the Squaw Valley-local’s new film project, Deeper, he’s traveling the globe from interior Alaska to Antarctica in search of new lines reached on his own steam. Both major ventures, Jones Snowboards and Deeper, relate in their principles back to Protect Our Winters, the non-profit Jones founded in 2007 dedicated to reversing the global warming crisis by uniting the winter sports community and focusing our collective efforts towards a common goal.


The Film: Deeper
Deeper tracks professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones and other top free riders as they travel to some of the best and most dangerous locations to snowboard.

For more information, visit http://www.tetongravity.com/deeper/