Splitboards, Sweat and Cheers: Racing the Eighth-Annual Dirksen Derby

Splitboarding is not usually this chaotic. It can certainly be scary or even dangerous, but this is a sunny day at Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort. The climb is just a few hundred feet, yet there are a few dozen fans cheering, as well as two-dozen competitors in various levels of fervor. It’s the eighth-annual Dirksen Derby Splitboard Race, a skin-up-to-banked-slalom-down suffer-sprint hosted by pro-rider Josh Dirksen to benefit local disabled snowboarder, Tyler Eklund.

The splitboard race is just one event in the overall Dirksen Derby—which includes many downhill-only divisions—and the races are just one part of a weekend of parties, movies, an art auction and even a Tai Chi for Snowboarders class. The proceeds all go to help out Eklund, a fun-loving local who was paralyzed from the shoulders down in a snowboarding crash in 2007 at USASA Nationals. He has been confined to a wheelchair ever since.

That’s where fellow Bachelor local Josh Dirksen came in. Dirksen flexed his industry connections and started the Derby to help with Eklund’s mounting expenses. The event started as a one-day race raising $1,000, and the splitboard race joined on two years later. “I just love to splitboard,” Dirksen says, “There was no format. It was just a shit show.” He’s not kidding. The early races featured simultaneous starts with up to 50 racers, and the event has grown into a weekend-long festival raising more than $110,000—enough to start up the Tyler Eklund Foundation, which helps others in situations similar to Eklund’s.

Nothing about the race experience is normal. I’m on a splitboard standing beside a woman running a stopwatch app on a smartphone at the gates of an icy, banked slalom course. The snowcapped peaks of the Central Oregon Cascades, likely devoid of the sort of humanity seen here, are also behind me and all too far away. The splitboarders on their flanks are the ones I’m more familiar with, but there’s a race to be run, so I snap back to the present.

I’m fighting with the bindings on my borrowed board and not ready when my number, lucky 13, is called. Three minutes click away before I’m able to start my trudge uphill. Slow and steady, I tell myself. Don’t burn out before the second uphill. My gaze is so focused on the snow in front of my boards that I miss the turn for the transition zone, having to come back downhill through some trees to the start gates. It’s a quick and painless transition to snowboard mode and a fast and loose weave through the tight, technical Red Course of the derby. Not so fast that I don’t get passed once, though.

At the bottom, another transition, followed by another climb. This is the transition where the DNFs dropped out. I don’t blame any of them. Looking back up that hill, and then down at my janky gear, I don’t have much of a mind to continue either. The glue on my skins sticks to everything but the undersides of my boards and my binding pins just won’t cooperate. A few painful minutes later, I’m back on the slog uphill.

On that final uphill, I have a friendly—if breathless—chat with one of the course volunteers and the pin on my right binding comes halfway out, causing me to trip and fall in a heap in full view of Jane Q Public. She probably wants to know why we are blatantly disregarding the resort’s uphill travel policy and skinning up a groomer that everyone else is riding down. I curse my borrowed gear and vow to have my setup built by next year. An oath I swore last year, as well.

The final transition zone, back at the top of the course and lined with stoked fans, is the most fun. I still have just enough breath to talk some good-natured trash to the few competitors left. They look like they’re still in the podium hunt, so I let them pass there, so they wouldn’t have to pass NASCAR-style on course. Before I slide into the Green Course with its smaller berms, fewer turns and tricky, slalom-style middle section I overhear some radio chatter between two volunteers.

“Was that the last guy?” the first says.

“Nope, the last guy’s about to drop in,” another replies.

Continuing the upward cycle of stoke and giving is what the event and this race are all about. Adam Haynes, multiple-time podium finisher at the Dirksen Derby—and trophy and poster artist for the event—agrees. “It’s more about rallying around the community than it is about racing splitboards,” he says. All it takes is a look at the smile on Tyler’s face or the crowd of people that gathers to cheer him on as he’s guided down a course to know it’s working.

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