Stratton Matteson may be just 28 years of age, but he carries himself like an old soul. Soft spoken, calm and introspective, he’s aware of the bigger picture. He leads through action, driven by a strong internal compass and a commitment to being his truest self. Yet he balances that stance with humor and lightness. Often smiling, Stratton brings a grounded, refreshing combination of traits that can easily be lost in today’s attention economy.
Stratton lives by a simple mantra inspired by Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The son of environmentalists, he is most certainly an activist, but also open-minded and empathetic to viewpoints that don’t align with his own.
Born in Eugene, OR, Stratton moved to Richmond, VT, at age 7. After high school, he returned to Oregon and settled in Bend where he still lives today. There, Stratton built a reputation in snowboarding by spending five years accessing mountains exclusively via bicycle.
In the summer months, he runs a habitat restoration and landscaping business in Bend called Tangled Roots Restoration, for which he tows native plants in his bike trailer to work projects. In the winter, he switches to studded bike tires and commutes to the mountains with his splitboard, food and camping gear, escaping civilization for days on end—often solo and completely self-supported.
Although most of Stratton’s riding occurs within 100 miles of his home, he doesn’t find the methodology restrictive. He’s completed several multi-month, pedal-powered trips. In 2021, for example, he rode from Convict Lake in the Sierra Mountains along the Pacific Ring of Fire to Mount Baker in the North Cascades, climbing and riding 20 of the most prominent volcanoes along the way.
During that trip, I traveled with him for several weeks. I learned that, while Stratton’s heroics on a bike provide him with a platform to share his environmental message, people often overlook the fact that he is a truly phenomenal snowboarder. Stratton approaches the mountains with a combination of respect and confidence. His snowboarding is fast and powerful, yet effortless and precise, and conducted on a grand scale. He approaches snowboarding in a similar manner to his environmental stewardship—authentic and pure, with a humility more akin to an old-school climbing ethos than modernized and curated action sports media.
This style of top-to-bottom riding isn’t easy to capture. Most of the media that exists of Stratton snowboarding has either been self-documented or produced by a select few individuals who have tried to keep up with him. That’s a tall order—Stratton is known for getting in “one more lap” at sunset, long after the rest of the crew has crawled into their sleepings bags after an 8,000-vertical-foot day. It’s just how he’s programmed.
Stratton continues to learn and grow as he pursues a balanced approach to life and the mountains. It’s an approach that’s worth following, even if you can’t quite keep up. The following is a conversation about Stratton’s life and philosophy, edited for length and clarity.
Stratton catching a ride down the Cottonwood Couloir on Oregon’s Steens Mountain. Photo: Danny Kern
Stratton and his dad, George, summit the Camel’s Hump, the second highest mountain in Vermont, after a mid-winter bootpack in 2010. Photo: Matteson Family Archives
Uinta Mountains, UT, 2012. Stratton, his sister Summer, and their dad George Wuerthner on a road trip through the West. Earlier that summer, Stratton broke his leg at High Cascade Snowboard Camp. Many of his childhood summers were spent this way—traveling with George while he photographed and researched for his environmental advocacy work. Photo: Matteson Family Archives
After snapping the rear triangle on his bike during his Sierra to Baker Tour, Stratton detoured to a friend’s welding shop for a quick repair. He was back on the pedals within three hours. Photo: Colton Jacobs
The Snowboarder’s Journal: You learned to snowboard in Vermont?
Stratton Matteson: Yeah, we lived 3 miles from a little rope tow and 10 miles from Bolton Valley, which had night skiing, so I could ride five days per week. I learned to ski first, then switched to snowboarding at 10.
It might be too obvious, but was the name Stratton inspired by Vermont?
My mom’s family has been in Vermont since the 1700s—the Matteson family. Someone from the Stratton family married into the Matteson family so yeah, it was a family name. The mountain was named after the Stratton family—you see Stratton and Matteson stuff all over southern Vermont.
Do you have any siblings?
I have a sister, Summer, who’s three years older than me.
Does she live in Oregon now, too?
Everyone’s out here now. Me and my dad moved out here after I finished high school. My sister was already out here going to school, and then my mom moved out two to three years ago to be close to everyone.
Why’d you and your dad move?
We always wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest. When we lived in Vermont, we would spend every summer out West because my dad had a lot of work out here—we would travel around in his old VW bus.
I wanted to go to Mt. Hood and Mt. Bachelor to snowboard. I’d grown up influenced by the Vermont scene, riding park and rails, but my dad and I also hiked into the mountains together. We went up the Camel’s Hump and Tuckerman’s Ravine, he’d be on snowshoes, and I had my snowboard.
What was your dad doing when you were ripping around in his van?
My dad [George Wuerthner] is a photographer, writer and public speaker—an environmentalist. He was working at the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which is a group that [The North Face founder] Doug Tompkins started. Their main focus was writing these big coffee table books about different environmental issues, specifically ones that weren’t very well known yet. My dad did one called Wildfire that’s all about wildfire ecology and centuries of failed wildfire policy and forest management, and another one called Welfare Ranching, which is all about the subsidized destruction of the West—the subtitle is: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. It points to the fact that ranchers get to graze on public lands and it’s pretty unregulated, to the detriment of the landscape and wildlife. He’s since gone on to keep studying those issues and writing about them.
My mom [Malia Matteson] is also a writer and environmental activist. Most of my childhood she was working for nonprofits, including one called Forest Watch, which was a group based in Vermont and focused on conservation and preservation of public lands in the Northeast. She went on to work for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is focused on getting federal protection for threatened and endangered species. I’m very inspired by her and my dad. My mom eventually got burned out on all of it and she went back to school and works as a therapist, now.
Did they inspire you to stop driving and ride a bike, mostly?
My former partner, Madeline, was really into bike commuting and I started dabbling with it. We went for a ride in the desert, and I borrowed one of my dad’s old bikes—it was super tall with giant handlebars, hadn’t been maintained, and the handlebars shook. I didn’t like it—I had a really bad attitude on that ride [laughs]. A year or two later, though, we rode 150 miles to Eugene for a summer festival [in 2019]. I borrowed a different bike from my dad for that one—a Raleigh with skinny tires—and we rode some backroads made of ash and sand. It was a struggle at times, but it was eye-opening traveling at that slower pace.
Then, this fellow named Rob Greenfield was the one that really inspired me to commit 100 percent to only biking to go snowboarding for a year [at age 22]. He’s this activist who takes on different challenges to bring attention to certain issues. For instance, he grew all his food, medicine—everything he consumed—for a year. He was really into biking and rode across the country, consuming what he called “sustainable foods,” which were locally grown, organic or discarded. He was exploring alternative, sustainable ways of living by doing them.
I was seeing the effects of climate change and environmental degradation all around me, connecting how my own actions contribute to that. As a snowboarder, I saw how much the snowboard world glorifies highly resource-intensive ways of accessing the mountains—snowmobiling, heliboarding, etc. I’m not throwing shade on anyone for doing that, but personally, as a snowboarder trying to make it, I definitely felt pressure to buy a sled, a truck, to access the backcountry. I decided I didn’t want to do that.
None of us are perfect, and my goal was never perfection from an environmental standpoint, but I got a gravel bike and decided that I wanted to try to only bike to snowboard for a whole year—all of my recreation, anything I did, I wanted to bike instead of using a car. In July 2019, I went for my first bike to board mission up a local glacier in the Three Sisters Wilderness and it was awesome. Beyond the environmental impact, it was a super fulfilling way to travel and go snowboarding. You find a lot of gratification from putting in the energy to start at your house and climb literally the entire mountain. The year went really well, and I decided to keep doing it.
Stratton enters a granite hallway in the Sierra Nevada, circa 2021. Photo: Colton Jacobs
What did you learn that first year committing to bike-exclusive travel?
One thing I learned that first year, and really through the whole experience, was that the dark times and challenging moments are usually followed by really high moments and positive experiences—and those positive experiences are even more positive because you went through that struggle to get there. When I was wet and cold and really uncomfortable, it was only momentary. The high after going through that challenge usually led to a peak experience.
Had you been splitboarding for a long time before that first bike-to-board year?
My first season out here [in Bend] was 2014-2015, and that was the lowest snow year on record for the Cascades. Coming from Vermont, it still felt like a great season. I rode Bachelor a bunch that year and started getting into the backcountry with Destry [Serna] and a few other friends, Morgan [Lipscomb] and Juan [Peon-Baker]. They all had splitboards, but I was bootpacking—not just stuff off the resort, we were going up volcanoes. It was kind of the perfect year to bootpack because of the low snow. It was bare all the way up to a thousand feet below treeline and most of the winter was corn cycles, so it was easier to hike. I probably had 20 days in the backcountry that season.
The year after that, I got my first splitboard and went maybe 50/50, resort to splitboarding. The following year was more like 60/40. Then I had a bad knee injury at closing day on Mt. Bachelor. I guinea pigged an air off the cornice at the top during the Shorts & Shades gathering. It was really melted out, and I missed the landing by six inches, hit a rock, and fully dislocated and blew out my left knee. I was out for a year and a half recovering. I still don’t have the same range of motion on my left knee. I can do everything I want for the most part, but it’s not the same.
The day before that, I had splitboarded a line on Mount Jefferson. To that point, it was the best line I had ever ridden. When I was in the hospital, I was, like, “I really wish I just went splitboarding today.” I was already going in that direction. Once I got back on the board, I was 100-percent committed to splitboarding. Knock on wood, but since then I haven’t been injured, and that was seven or eight years ago. I got injured a lot when I was a kid, but now it feels like I’ve found a more sustainable path, physically.
You had a few sponsors at the time of your injury, and you still do. Was your goal to be a pro snowboarder?
It was the dream—I think it is for most young people who are really into snowboarding. Now, I want snowboarding to be a huge part of my life and I want to be really involved in it, but I don’t necessarily need to make a living off of it.
Getting to create media and art through snowboarding is a fun creative expression. Where I’m at now, I don’t even know what to call myself as far as a snowboarder. I’m a very passionate snowboarder. I have sponsors who support me. But I have my native plant landscaping business and that’s how I pay my bills. I have a level of snowboard sponsorship that helps me not lose money over the winter while also pursuing exactly what I want to be doing. I like having that balance. Sponsorship wasn’t really something I thought about when I shifted to biking to board, but I’ve still got support, and I’m thankful for that.
How did you get into creating your own media?
I had some experiences with some photographers and videographers who couldn’t keep up or reach the objective, so I thought, maybe we should do this ourselves. My friend Alex [Kollar] and I started taking things into our own hands. We wanted to document what we were actually doing—not some curated version of it, but the real adventure. We probably could have created higher production value if we spent more time trying to do that, but I guess we just wanted to go snowboarding the way we like to go snowboarding.
When Alex passed away [in a kayaking accident in October, 2021], I was like, “Do I want to sit in front of the computer and finish this project, or do I want to go outside and live the thing that I want to be doing?” It was a huge eye-opener, and a moment of realizing that you don’t know how long you have—the only thing you know is that you have this moment that you’re in right now. I want to live life to the fullest and live with integrity at that moment. Alex did a really good job of that. When he passed, that became even more true for me.
Alex is one of my best friends I’ve ever had, a super amazing, charismatic human, who had a ton of energy. He was this super bright positive light and was extremely fun to go out in the mountains with. We met through a mutual snowboard friend and we meshed really well. Within the first two months of knowing each other, we took a trip down to the eastern Sierra and lived out of my Subaru Outback for a month and a half together. We knew we got along well after that—we lived together, went on tons of adventures and got into filmmaking. I’m sure if he was around today, he would have finished creating some amazing stuff and taken [media production] to the next step.
Alex lost his brother when he was young to a car accident. That informed how he lived, he savored every moment. He had his brother’s initials on his wrist and a bunch of friends got his initials on our wrists. His said P-H-K, and now, we all have A-V-K. If I’m going through something challenging or if I’m going to snowboard a big line and I’m nervous, I can look down and carry his energy and his strength with me.
Six dry weeks without snowfall in California’s Sierra Nevada finally came to an end, bringing blower cold smoke to the southern stretch of the Sierra to Baker Tour. Photo: Colton Jacobs
A caravan of overlanders passes Stratton on his month-long bike-to-board trip through the Great Basin Ranges in April 2023. Photo: Danny Kern
Stratton returns to his bikepacking setup after a five-day splitboarding trip in Oregon’s Wallowa Range. Some would call it a trip within a trip, since the five-day shred mission took up only a fraction of his month-long bike to board tour through the Eastern Oregon mountains. Photo: Jason Hummel
Silver light on Mt. Superior, UT. Photo: Ian Provo
“The slow pace of being embodied through travel is a gratifying experience. It elongates that process and exposes you to interactions and situations that you might never encounter if you weren’t doing it in that style.”
You’ve been on some big adventures in the years since. How has biking to board informed your perspective on where to find adventure?
When I committed myself to only accessing the mountains via bike and via human powered means, my perspective changed and that was my reality. Everything I want to do is within that context. When you slow down and put more energy and time into getting to these places and climbing a mountain, it makes that whole process that much larger of an adventure and that much bigger of a journey. It turns what could be a 20-minute drive into a multiple hour endeavor where you’re exposed to the elements. When you want to start exploring beyond that and you want to go check out another mountain range on top of that, it’s a huge commitment.
But the slow pace of being embodied through travel is a gratifying experience. It elongates that process and exposes you to interactions and situations that you might never encounter if you weren’t doing it in that style. People really want to help you out. You also have a lot more time to think about why you’re out there, to build respect and reverence for the mountain, knowing that it’s an extremely dangerous place, a place that could kill you. It gives you more time to build communication with the mountain. The mountain’s going to communicate with you and if you’re taking the right approach, hopefully you will see those signs and listen when the mountain is saying no or inviting you in.
Can you tell me about the time your bike was stolen while you were out in the mountains?
I was on a five-day midwinter camp trip up onto one of the volcanoes in Oregon in amazing conditions—I had a great time. The weather was looking spectacular for another day. I was out of food, but I had another day of food back at my bike, which was 8 or 10 miles away. I cruised back there, dropped off my camp gear, got the food, then went back out and rode two lines in really wonderful conditions.
I was on a high, feeling grateful, and cruised back down to my bike, which was hidden off a snowed-in forest service road with a fallen log blocking the entrance, 30 or 40 miles from the nearest town. It was dark by the time I got there. I saw a blinking red light a quarter mile in the distance. It was my bike light and had been knocked off. I walked a little farther down the road and saw my sleeping pad and a couple other items randomly scattered about. So, I went over to where my bike was in the forest. And yeah, it was gone—the bike I’d been riding for the last five years. It was devastating. But I also had just had one of my best days ever. I was like, “Alright, I don’t want to let this completely paint or ruin this experience, even though this really sucks.”
It was such a freak thing. These people had driven up there, romped over the tree, and somehow found my bike hidden in the woods. Thankfully my friend Sadie was already heading up to meet me, so she was able to bring me home.
After all that happened, Sadie started posting on social media looking for leads to find my bike. The overwhelming support from the community was heartwarming—so many people shared it and reached out and wanted to help. Sadie started a GoFundMe and was able to raise enough funds to get my kit back up and running. It was February, peak winter, and it was amazing to see how supportive the whole snowboard community and the outdoor adventure world is in general.
Stratton strikes gold on a warm, sunny day at 13,000 ft during a 10-day splitboard trip through Wyoming’s Wind River Range in May 2025. Photo: Max Djenohan
Is bicycle still your only way of accessing the mountains?
I’ve slowed down on the biking. I still do it, but I bought an EV last year. Listening to my energy and my intuition, I needed more balance in my life. Biking to board was a huge time commitment, especially when you’re trying to snowboard 120 days per year. That means at least 150 days out each year when you account for the biking. It became taxing on my relationships, my life.
It was a hard decision, but I’m still going to approach snowboarding with a mindset of what my impact is from every trip to the mountains, and whether it’s worth it. My calculus is to ask, whatever I’m doing, how does it affect me, humanity and the planet? Whatever the action is, does it positively affect those things enough to outweigh the negative impacts?
I want to keep growing, keep an open mind, and keep learning. None of this stuff’s perfect and that’s not the message that I’m trying to promote. I’m trying to promote living with intention, reverence and reciprocity for the Earth.
On February 26, 2026, the world tragically lost Stratton Matteson after he was caught in an avalanche near Pemberton, BC. Filmed during a 10-day trip in Wyoming's Wind River Range, "SUCCESSION: A Tribute to Stratton Matteson," is a tribute to one of the most adventurous snowboarders there ever was, created by his close friend, Tyndall Wells. Rest in peace, Stratton. You are and always will be missed, and an inspiration. Video: Tyndall Wells