Geof Harries

A couple of days ago I bought the newest issue of Snowboard Canada. This is the 20-year celebration of the magazine, which is a remarkable feat.

Although my taste in snowboard magazines has changed - nowadays I much prefer Frequency over SBC because I find the latter to be overly saturated with juvenile humour, drinking stories and fashion advice, rather than actual snowboarding - I still respect what the SBC guys have done and continue to do.

It's interesting for me to go back through their cover archives and consider all of the memories I have from my own 25 years in snowboarding. I look at each of those archived issues and remember where I was, what board I was riding, who my friends were and what was going on at the time. It makes me both happy and sad to think about how much I've seen, done and experienced in this sport during a quarter century (!).

All of these recent trips down memory lane got me thinking about my own photographic history. I don't have a lot of photos of me actually snowboarding, so the ones I do have, I treasure. Like the following from Rogers Pass, BC during the winter of 2003: a heelside turn in thigh deep powder.

It was during this period that I had a lot of changes going on in my life. We'd only been married for less than two years. I was in between jobs, having been laid off in December 2002. A few months later, Sharla and I were going to, unbeknownst to me at the time of this photo, be moving to new jobs here in Whitehorse, Yukon. I was also snowboarding with friends who spanned various periods of my young life; some of whom I would never again see in person.

For all of those reasons, this photo makes me smile. It causes me to think deeply of who I once was and in turn, who I've become. That trip was, and remains, a great series of personal memories for me, just like those SBC magazine covers.