Look Back, Rise Up

To invoke a little Vermont vernacular, “the cream rises to the top.” It’s a dairy thing I’ve taken from that generational vocation to this one: skiing powder, writing stories, making magazines. In reportage, for instance, giving what you learn a little time at room temperature to separate out allows the important things to float, becoming the healthy bones of a piece.

As I look back over the 160 issues of Backcountry, 128 of which I’ve been a part of in ways large and small, I think of the cream that never rose, or that I somehow was too wrongheaded to see. Basically, all the stuff I missed. The list is long but at the very top is Shane McConkey.

Early on Backcountry Magazine was the outlier in ski media. We weren’t about glam shots of pro skiers on the “white boy world tour” as I’d often say. In fact, we had a policy of not publishing pictures of pros like McConkey, Morrison, Krietler and the other Teton Gravity Research and Matchstick bros. For a couple reasons that worked. 1) They weren’t touring, largely given the soft and feeble gear of the late ’90s. 2) We didn’t write about resort and heli lines.

This has, of course, all changed (see p. 86). Now nearly all hardcore skiers tour, from World Cup racers and Olympic mogul champs to X-Games winners and modern ski influencers. Shane? Before his death in 2009, he was hard at ski base jumping and crushing big lines on the most esoteric gear possible—from actual water skis to his wildly weird Volant Spatula and later, at K2, his Pontoon. His silliness combined with a true biomechanic, slay and slash, big-line inspired, surfy, funny genius informed some pretty outrageous concepts. His sponsors thought he was nuts. The rest of us? Well, to paraphrase the late ski guide and original fun hog Alan Bard, we couldn’t believe he just skied what he just skied on what he just skied.

Outside of anything involving a parachute, this is what I missed, not as a fanboy, but as an editor. Shane’s influence on ski culture and ski design made him just as much a part of our community as Andrew McLean or Lou Dawson, Hilaree Nelson or Kasha Rigby. But he was never celebrated here in life or death. I carry that.

Another thing I carry, at least a dozen times of year, are Shane’s skis, the original Pontoons. Mike Hattrup, Directeur Sportif of K2’s Backcountry and Telemark lines back then, sent me a pair in 2006. A touring ski they were definitely not, especially with the 14-spring Salomon Drivers I mounted on them. Shane may have devised them for big lines, but the Pontoons have become, to me, the ultimate Eastern sidecountry ski.

The Pontoon’s slight camber underfoot and snow blade sidecut knifes terrain like a racer through a slalom flush. You can bury the pintails in steep gullies—clown-shoe tips to the horizon line not down the fall line—turning skiing from fraught carving against stiff tails into a hovercraft descent. The shovels mow moose maple like a bastard, too.

So, it’s been since nearly the day I got them that I wanted, and, in fact expected, from the industry, a carbon fiber touring companion to the Pontoon. Yet, while it inspired so many great ski shapes, nothing comes close to this. The tails are too stiff, turning radius too long. The industry makes skis for focus groups not outliers like me. Or fun havers like Shane. Even the forward-thinking heads at K2, back when Shane worked up the Pontoon’s design, were skeptical about its commercial potential. “We made, maybe 1,000 pair that first year,” Hattrup remembers.

They sold out, and the Pontoon stayed in the line until 2023, with only minor changes over time. A carbon-fiber touring equivalent? That would be expensive to make, and chances are the bigs in Europe or the Rockies wouldn’t understand its application. A big/little line ski that’s as comfortable sideways at 40 miles per hour on an Alaskan spine as it is skiing a pucker hairpin in an Eastern riverbed isn’t on the dance card for most/any makers.

If I wanted the Pontoon’s backcountry equivalent, I’d have to build it myself. I called this dream ski the “How2oon.” I never thought it would materialize, but over the years, I’ve become friends with one Vin Faraci, athletic trainer at the local high school and owner of WhiteRoom Skis. On nights and weekends, he presses beautiful, wood-laminate resort ornaments out of a 10-by-20-foot shed in his yard in Hyde Park, Vermont.

Last fall at a soccer game Vin essentially said, it’s now or never. “Maybe you can get me some high-end carbon,” he wondered.

With the 7.8-ounce braided triaxial carbon fiber procured from Thomas Laakso at DPS, we got to work. Given the limits of Vin’s presses, we’d have to skinny the How2oon’s footprint down from 130 millimeters at the waist to 110; 160 millimeters at the tip to 140. The final footprint of the 182-centimeter How2oon would be 140/110/113/0 with 50 centimeters of tip rocker and 35 in the tail, 3 millimeters of camber, medium-plus flex and significant pintail taper to nothing. It’s still a meaty ski with a core of locally harvested white ash along with not locally sourced paulownia and poplar. At just over 4 pounds, it’s not light by today’s touring standards but 30% lighter than the original.

December 30th was a Monday in the midst of our annual company shut down, and warm rain was forecasted. A perfect day to do something meaningfully skiing while not actually skiing. A perfect day to press the perfect Eastern, above-treeline and tree-skiing, touring ski inspired by the wizard himself.

I mounted the How2oons with a pair of the lightest bindings I could find (Salomon MTNs, no brakes). As the glue set, I grabbed a beer out of the fridge and opened up Instagram. A former-Tahoe resident and friend shared a little celebration remembrance of Shane, as this day, the 30th of December, was his birthday. I got a cold chill.

A couple weeks later, after I’d tested the How2oon a few times both up and down, I called Hattrup to get a little more background on that original Pontoon he sent me nearly two decades ago. “That was no accident,” he said when I told him about Shane’s coincidental birthday pressing. Translation: Shane’s hand was somehow at work in the wild woods he once called home during his racing youth.

And so it goes. A weird and wonderful ski inspired by the original original guy. A one of a kind. A ski that rises to the top in any condition and a story to go with it. Thank you, Shane. Now I just need to ski them naked. —Adam Howard, Janitor, 2002-present

In Issue 161, The 30^th Anniversary Issue, we highlight three decades of people who’ve made this publication what it is, both in editorial and art, and the backcountry skiing community that’s developed alongside us. We remember late telemark big mountain skier Kasha Rigby, dive into the heli-skiing pioneers who drove the development of avalanche safety and recognize Paul Parker’s lifetime of contributions to the sport. And we report on efforts to make avalanche education more accessible, the apps offering better tour planning, and the Italian splitboarder dedicated to uniting his backcountry community.

Get the issue »