Column
Deep Thoughts with Josh
June 2026
Our days are stretching, a few precious minutes at a time, drawing out the twilight hours into a floating blue and gold. The air, cloaked in campfire smoke and infused by the briny sea, sits heavy on freshly-sunned skin. Sand...
“If it wasn’t for my friends knowing the signs and symptoms of a concussion, I would not be standing here today,” Kelsey Boyer says. “My brain was bleeding for two weeks, and my friends caught the signs and took me...
Absolute warriors. That’s what I’d call everyone who helped build, hone, and maintain the hand-dug course for this year’s Sesh Up X Brain Bowl Sessions event at Mt. Baker, WA. It rained, it snowed, then rained and snowed again....
A New Golden Age Much ink has been spilt, breath spent, and binary code… binary coded, regarding the supposed heyday of our beloved pastime. Collective wisdom puts this era in the late 90s and early 2000s. Budgets were phat, pros...
The Westcoast Triple Plank turned ten years old last weekend. I’m not sure that was ever Marie-France Roy and Alicia Gilmour’s goal when they started it. I’m not sure they ever had a plan for the future of the event....
After the first day of this year's Holy Bowly, a good friend asked, “If you had to narrow it down to one word, how would you describe it?” A week later, as we were driving out of Banff, AB, reminiscing...
I didn’t count during my last cold plunge. Leading up to that, I did; with gritted teeth, rushing through the numbers to achieve… what, exactly? The bones in my feet felt like they were breaking, my breath caught in my...
Did you watch the Super Bowl? Maybe just for Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show? Perhaps it was for the advertisements. Did those ads make you want to gamble? Or optimize your life with AI? So many AI ads. It almost felt...
East coasters aren’t known to be nice, but kind. A Sour Patch Kid type beat—first we’re sour, then we’re sweet. Homegrown in upstate New York myself, I can attest to the overall validity of this generalization. I’m reminded of this...
“The dream is to run finals in that perfect light,” Travis Rice said. “From 4 until 5:30[p.m.], in the west facing Selector venue, that light is so epic. And we’ve been chasing it…” It was the day after qualifiers at...
Everyone’s moving fast. The last few riders are shuffling through the makeshift A/V room as we prep to load the gondola and shuttle to Montana Bowl, the now established but ever-changing Natural Selection Snow venue in the Revelstoke Mountain Resort backcountry....
Research & Development has grown fast. In only its third year, the event led by Robin Van Gyn had $10,000 and two spots in the Natural Selection Tour on the line for 2026. It’s her way of paying it forward....