The Enduring Lunacy of Travis Rice

Photo Cred Red Bull / Fourth Phase

There's a scene in 2004 Oscar contender Harold & Kumar go to White Castle where a bunch of cartooinshly punk-rock bullies are harassing the two heroes from the title. Kumar, who throughout the series drops several daggers, utters perhaps his most lethal. Or maybe it was just embarrassing for me because my buddies all immediately pointed at me and laughed the first time we saw it. "Hey asshole, why don't you leave that guy alone and go jerk off to some snowboarding videos or something." To a 16 year with a habit of watching a Mack Dawg movie with dinner every day in the summer, that hurt.

The habit wore off pretty significantly as girls and booze became more of a factor, but I still check in on them every once in a while for a summer fix. Which leads me to Travis Rice. This will be a (somewhat) quick blog because it's likely the 2 people still reading are already familiar with Travis Rice and don't need the story again. And even if you weren't, Wikipedia and YouTube have plenty of material on this maniac. But fuck it, a quick refresher and a couple video links can't hurt. We're still in a pandemic and some of us need a distraction after all.

It could be said that guys like Shaun White and Terje Hakonsen have more decorated careers and are responsible for popularizing the sport into what it is today. True as that may be, no one has pushed the the boundaries of what is possible from both a skill and production standpoint more than Travis Rice. It's hard to argue with the guy responsible for arguably three (3) of the top 4 or so snowboard films ever made. One of those is 2008's That's It That's All. TITA was probably the first time a snowboarding film went from something relatively niche and solely focused on action sequences to something more. Big-money, big audience, big production, story lines, personality, and a shit ton of helicopters. It helps to have Red Bull money. I'll post the link to the intro scene below, which doesn't feature much action, but you should watch anyway for the production and M83's "We Own the Sky". Unreal song.

Back to Travis Rice. First of all, you have to understand that snowboarders age in dog years. There are rare exceptions to the rule, but most begin professional competition careers around 15 and are done by 25. Travis Rice is 37 years old and still putting out video parts in the deep Alaskan Back-country like the one linked below. To explain the insanity of this is hard to put into words. Simply strapping in at the top of those peaks before he even drops in is incredibly dangerous, as one slip-up could send you over a cliff and to your death. I won't bore anyone with the scientifics of the descent, but just know it ain't like he's some wack job who lets it fly on a whim. OK, he is a whack job, but the point is that it's not uncommon for an 15 - 20 person crew to be on-site for weeks (or months) before conditions are "safe" enough to ride.

But even for a nerd like Travis Rice, who takes the science of his sport as seriously as the fun part (seriously, he named his 2016 movie "The Fourth Phase", after hydrology patterns of the earth and how they effect global snow conditions), a mistake can be made. There's a horrifying scene from that same movie of him being caught in an avalanche, being thrown 100 feet off a cliff, and somehow surviving to tell the tale. That video can be found below, but fair warning, it's pretty scary.

In addition to all this madness, Rice is re-launching something called The Natural Selection Tour in 2021, which is basically like the X-Games but instead of Lego Land-like features in comfortable park environments like Aspen, the competition will take place in the back country at 3 of the biggest and scariest mountains in the world. Don't be surprised if you see him competing.

Enough gushing? Got the picture? Good. T Rice is a man among boys, a pioneer, and off his goddam rocker - someone even Kumar could jerk off to. We'll see what he's got up his sleeve next.