With the exception of the photo annual, we don’t name our issues any way other than numerically. So, the issue that is out now, the first issue of the year—and of our fifth volume—is simply known as Issue 5.1. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to just use numbers than to boil 160 pages down into some convenient talking point. No, we couldn’t call it The Rookie Issue because that would be doing a disservice to the countless legends who grace the pages of our magazine.
Whether that’s backcountry steward Nick Russell’s new column about safety in the mountains, Mike Yoshida’s cover (and cover story) of Jared Elston on an epic trip with the homies, or Jess Kimura sitting for our new—extended—version of the Run-In section, the stars who appear between the covers are certainly plentiful.
And on the flip side of that, we aren’t able to say it’s pros only (The Big Shots Issue) because then we’d be dismissing the undeniable drive that makes amateur snowboarding—at times—the gnarliest thing out there. Noah Coville and Maisie Hill—in their respective areas of Street and Slopestyle—are showing that to make it these days you have to be willing to eat shit every now and again. Or look at our feature interview for this issue, a conversation with Quin Ellul and Jesse Jarrett about—among other things—the passion up and coming Canadian boarders need to maintain in order to feel seen in an industry that so often focuses on the Americans first.
We also have a new segment, The Profile, an in depth look at someone in our sport told narratively instead of through a traditional, Q and A style interview. And for the debut profile, we explored life behind the lens with the incomparable Mia Lambson as she was entering the final stages of her multi-year documentary about women’s snowboarding.
This is all just a roundabout way of saying this: what we have is hard to describe. We’re left with a hodgepodge—a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And maybe not everything in these pages is for you and that’s okay because, frankly, if everyone likes what you’re doing all the time, things are probably a bit boring. So, we just look at snowboarding as a whole, we look for what excites or motivates or inspires us, and then we share that with you. And since The Potporui Issue doesn’t really roll off the tongue, for now, we’ll just call it Issue 5.1.