“Towards the end of my first winter, I rented a snowmobile on Togwotee and rode up to the wilderness boundary. “I moved from California to Jackson, Wyoming in 1995,” Byran revealed about his Jackson beginnings. It was Bryan and a handful of other Jackson Hole snowboarders that first explored the area around Togwotee Pass on snowboards in the late nineties, building jumps and riding lines that would help define a new era of the sport. One of the first things he told me was “Togwotee means from here you can go anywhere.” This idea felt truer than ever that morning. This land has been an integral part of his journey as a snowboarder. He had spent over twenty years dancing with the wilderness border on Togwotee Pass. This trip was his vision, his brainchild. Photo: Ming Poon The Dream Teamīryan arrived at the TGR headquarters first that morning and he had a wide shining grin exploding from his gray speckled beard. Because I wasn’t raised in the shadow of some great mountain range, I have always felt less deserving of these experiences. My late start in the snow world had led to a deep insecurity about my ski touring (confession: I am a skier) and career. ![]() A serendipitous five years later and there I was prepping for the trip of a lifetime outside of TGR’s office in Wilson. This passion for snow led me to Jackson Hole and an unpaid internship with Teton Gravity Research. ![]() Solitude in the wilderness is a great teacher, the land is powerfully humbling. They baptized me in the cult of winter and I was given a crash course on how to travel safely in the mountains, ski and snowboard film history, and the art of chasing a deep storm. I attended college in Vermont and became close with a group of friends who followed a religion I was unfamiliar with. Not surprisingly, in hindsight, the scouts never came calling and my hockey career was eventually relegated to late night beer leagues with fellow washed-up skaters. I had dreams of grandeur, and I thought the Boston Bruins, NHL, and Stanley Cup were my future. It was my religion, and the rundown, sweat-smelling rinks of New England were my church, a bastion where I could lose myself in the game. Growing up, I spent more time playing hockey than anything else. But on a dark morning last winter I was on the precipice of doing exactly that: a great adventure into the wilderness with some of the biggest heroes in snowboarding. If you had told me ten years ago that I would go on a ten-day splitboard mission through one of the most remote regions of the continental United States with Bryan Iguchi, Jeremy Jones, and Travis Rice, I would have laughed and called it fiction. ![]() Jeremy Jones, Travis Rice, and Byran Iguchi on a foot-powered mission deep into the Wyoming wild.
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