TRAVIS RICE

When the big-mountain freestyle revolution began, Travis Rice was its Paul Revere.

Legendary Info:

D.O.B.: 10/9/82
Home Mountain: Jackson Hole, WY
Stance: Goofy

As an unknown eighteen-year-old rookie out of Jackson Hole, Travis had a hunger to prove himself, which is what drove him alone to step to a backside rodeo on a narrow, 117-foot-long spine tabletop at Superpark 5. With a stomp heard round the world, Travis Rice had arrived. Now, eight years later, he continues to strive for bigger, steeper, faster, more technical challenges. Is he still hungry? The fact that he can never have enough on his plate answers that.

Leaving the Lower 48 behind, Travis traveled to the last frontier for the first time in 2001. Snowboarding and Alaska have never been the same. Off-piste patriarch and Rice’s Alaskan guide Tom Burt explains, “He has mountain soul and the skills to bring it all together.” Burt’s xx-chromosome counterpart Victoria Jealouse agrees, saying, “Travis is an all-around rider of the sickest sh*t.”

Yet being a big-mountain badass isn’t all there is to Travis Rice. Straight-up freestyle trickery is also one of his strong suits. Travis stuck a double-cork 1080 over the Pyramid Gap, won the infamous Air & Style with a double-backflip late backside 180, and put down more hammers on the 200-foot-plus Chad’s Gap than the fall of Communism. We also can’t forget that Travis was considered a legitimate candidate to make the 2006 Olympic halfpipe team. All this and more, including his recent part in More, is what led new-school ruler and overall nice guy Eddie Wall to claim Travis is the “gnarliest guy ever.”

With filming already underway on a follow-up to 2005’s Community Project, expect Travis to continue Shedding Light on his vision of progressive snowboarding for a long time to come.