Split Personalities
While Mt. Baker has long been a bastion of snowboarding, splitboards are altogether changing the ways powder hounds approach the sport.
Story: Brendan Herron
Photos: Morgan Stilp
The room is small, but well-lit.
Suddenly, a formidable roar fills the emptiness of the space, reverberating off the low ceilings. Johnny stands adjacent to the table saw, ready to slice the powerless figure below him in two. A respirator conceals his face — the smell can be pretty peculiar. He places weights on top of his victim to ensure his cut is straight as an arrow. Both pieces must be identical in size for when he decides to splice them together again.
Some traditionalists consider Johnny’s line of work gruesome and eccentric, but for a new age of enthusiasts, the splitboard he just created is truly a piece of art.
For years, snowboarders lived in the shadow of their alpine cousins. The technology adapting skis for backcountry excursions was simple and relatively cheap, granting thrill-seekers a new way of finding the freshest powder. However, Making snowboards backcountry-accessible was an entirely different proposition.
Whereas skis were already suited to both hike uphill and shred down it, snowboards were inherently limited. Those committed enough to venture into the backcountry were forced to do so on foot, drudging through feet of unpacked snow with their cumbersome board strapped to their back. In an attempt to solve this inconvenience, the first splitboard was invented in the early 1990s.
But in the past five years, snowboarders across the country have caught the splitboarding bug, and nowhere more so than in Bellingham. Johnny Lupo is arguably one of the biggest reasons why. He is one of about 20 technicians in the country that knows how to split snowboards and his unique service is helping to foster a new breed of backcountry riders.
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Originally from California, Lupo grew up surfing and boarding at park-focused resorts like Big Bear Mountain Resort and Mountain High. All it took was one trip to the Pacific Northwest for him to fall in love with the mountains and the snowboarding community.
In 2009, Lupo decided to move to Washington permanently, securing a job at Snowboard Connection, the well-respected shop in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood known to those within the industry as SnoCon. There he served as an understudy to a renowned technician and former World Cup ski race tuner, who was also the first person to introduce him to splitboarding.
“I was really fascinated and I wanted to learn everything that he had to offer me,” Lupo says. “As a result, I had to go out and splitboard and see what it was about.”
Here, he learned about the splitting process from start to finish and also honed his tuning expertise, yet his time at SnoCon came to a bittersweet end after five years. Mounting competition from e-commerce operations like Evo and a neighboring REI forced the mainstay shop to close in its 25th year of operation.
Lupo was one quarter away from completing his associate’s degree in business management when SnoCon closed, but the prospect of opening up his own shop suddenly seemed more tangible than ever. He sped up his business plans by two years, opting to put his tuition money towards a business instead. Bellingham was always his top destination since Mount Baker was — and still is — his favorite mountain.
“Every time I ride at Baker, I progress. The level of riding is so high,” he says. “You progress as a rider much quicker there than most other places I’ve been to.”
His plan was to focus on tuning, repair and building custom splits, as opposed to being a retail-heavy store. During his time at SnoCon, he observed firsthand the danger of retail shops having too much stock, only to be cursed with a substandard winter.
Boardworks Tech Shop opened its doors in 2014, the year of Mount Baker’s worst season on record. Nonetheless, Lupo was able to find a niche in the market, given his specialization in tuning and repairs.
“Nowadays, there are so many automated machines that do what I do, but you lose the personal touch and that sets us apart,” he says. “We still haven’t given up on the craft.”
In recent years, the rise in popularity of backcountry touring has been reflected in the number in splitboards Lupo builds. Freddy Kurzen, a student at Western, is just one of the many who have joined the scene, and had his board split by Lupo.
Like Lupo, Kurzen was a California-transplant drawn to the big mountain riding of the Pacific Northwest. After working for a year as a lift operator at Mount Baker, he decided to invest in gear that would allow him to duck the ski area boundary ropes. For first-time splitboarders, the transition can be tough.
“I consider myself a pretty good, confident snowboarder, but when it comes to skinning and hiking, there’s definitely a learning curve,” Kurzen says. “You’re very free, you’re at your own risk, but you’re also playing by your own rules.”
Less time is spent snowboarding, and more time is spent mapping routes, checking conditions, following forecasts, and doing shear tests of the snow. The harsh reality of backcountry touring, irrespective of whether you’re sliding down the hill on one plank or two, is the variability of the snow. Unlike the meticulously monitored slopes of a ski resort, backcountry terrain presents the risk of avalanches and other obstacles in remote locations far from cities, let alone emergency services.
Ian Ingoglia, another Western student and recent splitboard convert, says one of his biggest reasons for making the switch was having a riding partner who takes safety as seriously as he does. They now have an avalanche training course and year of backcountry riding under the belt, but are still aware of the ever-present danger.
“You can’t just go head-first into it,” he says. “You have to be kind of calculated.”
Nonetheless, he believes the logistical challenge is what ultimately makes the riding so rewarding.
“I knew I wanted to ride powder all the time, and I knew this was my key to it,” Ingoglia says.
It’s midnight. Droves of exhausted snowboarders have nestled their way into dive bars and craft breweries, seeking to drink the pain of the day away. On the other side of the bay, Johnny Lupo is once again confined to his unorthodox office.
Tonight, he’s splitting three boards — his personal record is 12 — but he estimates it will take at least a couple of hours to cut all of them. For each board, he creates a specifically measured plywood jig, speckled with holes drilled in line with the pre-existing board inserts. U-shaped steel handles, each strategically placed, protrude outwards. They’re designed to house bundles of electrical wires, but so far, it’s the best solution he has been able to conjure.
He makes measurements and draws lines, continually adjusting his point of view to make sure his dead center is the dead center.
“I have 30 different measurements on this board, and only two of them matter,” he says, referring to cuts down the center of the board and the center of the template. “It’s very much a check, re-check, check ten more time process.”
The jig is complete. As he walks to the front of the shop to open the door, his face disappears behind his respirator.
“It kind of looks all Dexter-y in here,” he says. “It’s kind of appropriate for the murdering of snowboards we’re about to do.”
The table saw roars and Johnny starts to laugh.
