How to Build a Ski Mountain from Scratch…in 80-Degree Weather

The 150-foot tall slope takes shape, next to the Rose Bowl stadium. (Image: Alison Piasecki)

The Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, California is a dusty depression, where shrubs and cacti hold hillsides together and highway bridges cross overhead. Like elsewhere in Los Angeles, the water that does flow down the streambed is confined to a concrete ditch; most of the year, only a thin, slimy ribbon trickles down its center. As its namesake implies, it’s a dry, desert-like area, more Sahara than Steamboat. And yet, as the Arroyo broadens to reveal the Rose Bowl, a 16-storey tower of snow appears like a mirage.

This is the Air + Style snowboard ramp, the marquee feature of an ambitious weekend festival that seeks to merge big-air snowboarding with indie and rock music festival – X-Games meets Coachella, all nestled among the Crafstmen houses of Pasadena.

“It doesn’t snow much down here,” says superstar athlete / guitarist / business mogul Shaun White, who has brought Air + Style to the U.S. for the first time, “so I say you gotta bring the mountain to the people.”

That undertaking fell to Chris Gunnarson, who, through his company Snow Park Technologies, has worked with White for years. “We grew up together,” he explains, as he and White reminisce about Gunnarson’s half-pipe architecture at Big Bear Ski Area in the late ‘90s, “and we’ve traveled the world together. Shaun has really had the foresight to push the level of performance advancement, and it’s changed the sport.” Perhaps most famously, Gunnarson helped design and build Project X, the infamous private half-pipe sequestered deep within the Colorado Rockies.

But over the course of the last two weeks, crews have been hard at work on a 16-story, 150-foot tall scaffold whose plywood profile traces a massive jump. It’s among the highest several buildings in the city for the next few days, and athletes can expect a 75-foot airborne journey. When the competition begins on Saturday, one and a half million pounds of ice will have been sliced into snow to coat the track. “To make the jump a fluid thing is very difficult,” says White, noting that a too-sharp transition from ramp to lip can cause big problems as you set up for a triple flip jump. Gunnarson champions the power of a solid base layer on the ramp, hoping that the insulating power of snow will keep it from becoming a waterfall in the Rose Bowl’s 80-degree February weather.

It’s an incongruous site, but in many ways White embraces the artifice. For a detail-oriented competitor, constructing a jump from scratch is the ultimate manifestation of consistent, predictable conditions, void of pesky geomorphological nuance. “It’s actually more inviting to try tricks when the snow is soft,” White explains. “It’s partially a mental thing – you’re warm, you’re feeling good, ready to go.”

White will not be competing in the big air event – his band Bad Things will be appropriately time-slotted in the music festival, which also includes Kendrick Lamar, Steve Aoki, and Edward Sharpe – but he indulges in a mental run-through of what he’d be thinking before dropping in. “I would basically make sure there’s someone behind the scenes making the board fast,” he says, and he’d get snow texture intel from guys like Gunnarson, “the inside scoop on what’s going on.”

“You can tell that Shaun is a strategist,” Gunnarson interjects, stating the obvious. White is bringing the same strategic mind that’s garnered two Olympic and 15 X Games gold medals to this latest business venture. Now that the summer X-Games have ditched LA for Texas, White saw an opening. He’s also eager to incorporate more of what he characterizes as a European approach to snow sports, where cultural elements like music and artistry are more intimately linked with skiing and snowboarding. The opportunity to grow the fan base for two of his many pursuits – music fans who may get hooked on snowboarding, and vice versa – is also not lost on White.

“So in keeping with the European tradition that started Air + Style about 20 years ago,” says White, “I thought, let’s have a big snowboarding event, and we’ll have a big show and party afterward.” Of course, it wouldn’t be LA – or White – if it also wasn’t bigger, more extreme, and flashier than ever. “We’ve never done it to this extent before,” he explains, “and it’s going to be killer.”