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A LONG RIDE HOME
A LONG RIDE HOME
At the height of his professional snowboarding career, Jason Robinson commits to living outside the box – by moving into one
BY TRISTAN SCOTT
AFTER GAINING RECOGNITION AS Snowboarder Magazine’s 2016 Big Moun- tain Rider of the Year, Jason Robinson celebrated the capstone in his career by settling into plush new digs – an alumi- num box.
For Robinson, a 31-year-old White sh native who divides his time squarely between riding epic big-mountain lines in Alaska and British Colum- bia, train-hopping his way to the National Hobo Convention in Iowa, traveling internationally, and starring in high-pro le lm edits that anchor some of the industry’s top-ranked productions, life inside the box isn’t much of a departure from the one he’s created outside of it.
The 8-by-16-foot repurposed storage container measures 116-square-feet inside. It sits on a trailer that Robinson tows behind his ’91 Dodge Ram, which is retro tted with a dual-fuel diesel line that runs on vegetable oil. A solar array a xed to the roof generates his electricity, and a shoebox-sized, hyper-e cient gas stove designed for a sailboat heats the interior.
To be sure, the new mobile abode is a step up from the tent he’d been living in on a friend’s farm in West Valley. Having not paid rent in two years, it a ords him the opportunity to travel at leisure, chasing snow and surf in classic dirt-bag style while mounting a professional snowboarding resume that is suddenly outpacing a magic bean- stalk in its rise to prominence.
“Sometimes to think outside the box, you have to move into one,” Robinson said on a recent Jan- uary morning, a couple weeks shy of his planned departure for an avalanche-safety seminar in Brit- ish Columbia.
Robinson’s journey out of and into the box has been a tumultuous one, and at one point he nearly gave up on his dream to snowboard profession- ally, joining the humdrum of the rat race until his younger brother and best friend, Aaron Robinson, shook him out of complacency.
It wasn’t until Aaron’s tragic death in a snow- boarding accident in 2011 that Jason would begin to transcend the malaise that might have derailed his dreams, but in life, and in death, his younger
JANUARY 27, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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