Jed Sky’s Enthusiastic Efforts
Most of us avoid rocks while snowboarding. We cherish our precious polyethylene bases and try to keep them on their natural sliding surface, snow. But there’s a young man out there that devoted time, put his body on the line, and lost more than a trace amount of base-material upon the granite, limestone and quartzite of Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons. His name is Jed Sky, and with his 2024 video release ROCKSTEADY, he left a veritable, if not literal, impression upon the Salt Lake City snowboard landscape.
In a city and state that’s seen it all and done it all as far as snowboarding is concerned, it takes an abstract mind to find value in a feature so prevalent, yet so inhospitable to the activity. Now Jed isn’t the first to wander from the steel to gander at the stone. The various rock clips sprinkled throughout videos of the past were instrumental in inspiring him to discover his own boardable boulders. For inspiration, Jed says he looked to “Parker Szumowski’s bean plant in Big Cottonwood Canyon for example, sort of the feel of jibbing a spot in the streets but located in a backcountry setting.”
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