The following article was originally printed in the October 2025 Issue of Slush. To get more articles and subscribe, click here.

It was around 60 degrees, but the sun was unencumbered, alone in the sky, and all anyone could feel was the heat. Eager fans lined up against the branded Uninvited Invitational fencing that ran up a good portion of the hill. Most were holding signs—BAD BITCHES ONLY, read one. GIRLS FUCKING RIP was plastered on another. The athletes drank water and tried to stay cool. Some were out boarding, but people were trying to pace themselves.

A phone alarm rang, and Mia Lambson reached into her pocket, seemingly unfazed by the interruption. She silenced her phone before pulling out a container of sunscreen. She explained the alarm, told me how it went off every 45 minutes as a reminder to reapply.

I had known Mia for some time, but only superficially—nothing more than a quick hello whenever our paths crossed. I knew nothing of her fastidiousness—or potential lack thereof.

“Are you this meticulous about everything in your life?” I asked, naively hoping for some quick answer, a career summary in a single soundbite.

Mia laughed. “I’m loose as fuck,” she said. “I just compensate by doing little things like this to keep my life in order.”

I met Mia again at her house a month later. It was mid-June in Salt Lake City, almost evening, but still the heat—like the heat during our first meeting in April—was unavoidable. Mia opened the door and ushered me through the living room, which looked both minimalistic and bespoke, contemporary and zen. Mazzy, the border collie–Australian shepherd mix she has with her husband, Trevor Brady, jumped on me, its tongue out in the excitement only reserved for dogs who meet strangers. I followed Mia into the kitchen, where two Modelos waited on the counter. She handed me one, and a moment later, I was following her again into the backyard.

On outdoor couches, we escaped most of the heat under a gazebo.

It was small talk at first, sipping beers and trying to ask each other how we were. But snowboarders are single-minded creatures, too often blinded by the thing we’ve given our lives to. And quickly our conversation evolved into what conversations in our neck of the woods always evolve into: snowboarding.

Mia grew up in Cedar City, Utah, a small, mostly Mormon enclave a bit north of Zion that, to the layman, could best be described as the middle of nowhere.

At 14, Mia got a job at Brian Head, a local mountain, but snowboarding for Mia at that time was not what it would become. It was her passion, but still, days are long, and boredom exists for anyone in a small town, regardless of the outlets they have.

“It’s a college town too, Southern Utah University is there,” Mia said. “So when I got into high school, I would go start partying with the college kids. And the boredom was insane. I started to go down a pretty crazy path. I had tried most drugs by the time I was 16. I was sneaking out every night to go to college parties. It was not on a good path; it was kind of self-destructive. But I still worked at Brian Head, and that was my fucking life.”

This is a common thread in much of snowboarding. And, upon analysis, the clichés begin to stack on each other. Snowboarding is counterculture, a place for the misfits. This may be one of snowboarding's most overused truisms, but it still bears repeating, if only because so many snowboarders have found their footing by first acknowledging they have no footing in the world they grew up in. Other sports—football, basketball, soccer—exist with an air of discipline surrounding them. The trope of the coach who offers structure in a player's life has been seen countless times over countless mediums. And if that exists in snowboarding, it has only come to light recently in the post-Shaun White world of seeing riding as a sport. But anything before the mid-2000s—and especially for women—snowboarders had to act as their own advocates for self-preservation. There were hardly people steering the ship for snowboarders; they had to independently figure out if the proverbial juice was worth the squeeze.

“I had to get on the employee bus every Saturday and Sunday morning at 6:00 AM, so sometimes I would literally throw up on the bus 'cause I'd be so hungover. But that was the one staple in my life. I have to go home tonight and I have to get my shit at least kind of together because I'm going to Brian Head tomorrow, and I have to go snowboard. I didn't have any direction, and I really didn't do well in school. I'm super ADHD, so I did great in art and creative writing, but everything else I didn't do well. It just gave me a north star that I don't think I would've had otherwise.”

It was in her teenage years, still working at Brian Head and snowboarding in whatever free time she had, that Mia discovered videos, and her thinking about snowboarding—about what it could be—changed.

“I started to see snowboard videos for the first time when I would go party with my snowboard friends, and they would put a movie on. They were really into Technine. I watched all the Technine videos,” Mia said. “They would get some videos at that little shop, and I would go, and they had this bargain bin of last year's films, and I would just dig some outta there. Eventually, I had a collection of like 10 or 15 movies. I would watch them on repeat. My mom literally started to make me watch them on mute because she was so sick of hearing the soundtrack.”

This era of riding—the Technine era, with stars like Lucas Magoon and Derek Denison, and videos like Cold War and One Love—was influential on Mia for a few reasons. It was how she connected with her peers; those were the videos they watched. She also just resonated with her. For some people, when they find a video they like, it’s hard to fully explain why. But for Mia, those videos instilled a deep love of the sport itself. It was a raw representation of what snowboarding and being a snowboarder were on and off the board. It was relatable, especially for someone like Mia, who was consistently the only woman—a token girl with the boys at her home resort. Those Technine—and Sandbox, and Standard—films rang true in a way some of the other “girl-specific” videos did not.

“The only video that I remember getting my hands on in high school with chicks in it was a Roxy video.They were holding hands and jumping in the snow and making snow angels. And I was just like, what the fuck is this? Like, this is not what I'm here for. And in the mags you would see a fraction, a small-ass fraction of the pages have a girl on it. And when it did, most of the time it was like a chick with a full face of makeup and goggles on her head holding her snowboard.”

It wasn’t a lack of representation, which might be a common misconception about the history of women’s snowboarding. People like Shannon Dunn and Tara Dakides (“She was Shaun White before Shaun White was Shaun White. There was a time where I would say she probably was the most famous snowboarder on the planet, male or female,” Mia said about Tara) were extremely talented boarders who progressed the sport in meaningful ways. So, the problem wasn’t representation, it was presentation. The problem was brands and magazines not knowing what to do with the female stars of the day and not knowing how to properly sell them to the viewing public. Brands and magazines simply weren’t sure how women fit into snowboarding at large.

By her senior year of high school, Mia had what few adolescents have—and something that probably would have surprised her just a few years earlier. She had a path she knew she wanted to take. Snowboarding had gripped her; she knew what she wanted to be doing.

“I knew in high school at some point that my life mission was gonna be filming snowboarding.” she said.

At 18, and needing a change, Mia moved up to Salt Lake City (the place she still calls home) and purchased her first camera, a Sony that took DV tapes. The move to Salt Lake, however, was more serendipitous than anything else. Mia knew there was snowboarding there, but she didn’t have a full understanding of what Salt Lake meant to the snowboard community as a whole.

“I was kind of viewing it [Salt Lake] as a place to go to get out of Cedar City, and then I'll figure out where I want to be,” Mia said. “I remember my first time at Brighton seeing JP and Jeremy in the lift line and tripping because nobody goes to fucking Brian Head. So, seeing a pro in the wild was like a big deal.”

Salt Lake City turned out to be a crash course, both in filming and in life. Between working as a concierge at the airport Hilton (“I didn't have a car and my job started at 5:00 AM so I would ride my bike. And I lived up in the avenue, so I'd ride my bike through downtown at 4:00 AM, get on a bus, and go out to the hotel”) and working part-time teaching snowboarding at Brighton for a free pass, Mia would film.

“It was so bad. It was so fucking bad. I had no idea,” Mia said, thinking back on her early days holding a camera. “I remember my boyfriend at the time telling me, looking at a clip I shot, and he's like, ‘Dude, you have to push record before I get on the rail and you have to wait to stop recording until I ride away.’”

But Mia knew she wanted to film snowboarding. There weren’t any thoughts of doing anything else. She had been hooked, smitten with snowboarding and the world it provided. Over time, she got better. The hecticness of living in a new place with new people evened out, and she started to find her footing. She began to make friends and form a community, becoming close with people like Alexa McCarty, Amanda Hankison, and Bode Merrill.

Mia kept working at the Brighton ski school, but all the while kept pestering Jared Winkler, now Vice President of Marketing at Brighton, for a job behind the lens. Eventually, Winkler relented.

“He was like, ‘All right, fine. You want a job? I'll give you a media coordinator job for $10 an hour,’” Mia said. “I took it super seriously, and I ended up honestly building out an entire media department.”

It was a case of right person, right time. Snowboard media was changing. Instagram, new then and still limiting videos to 15 seconds, had yet to dominate snowboarding. But still, Mia saw—either consciously or not—that the landscape was changing. She saw potential.

Mia created the Brighton Instagram account and grew it to around 17 or 18,000 followers in its first year—massive numbers at the time.

“Mia came in and immediately started making noise in the best way. She brought this raw, creative energy that clicked with the younger shredders and helped give Brighton a voice that actually felt real,” Jared Winkler told me. “She’s got that rare mix of style, hustle, and vision that’s hard to teach.”

Or maybe she was teaching herself, learning as she went, because through all this, her filming improved. There was no set video department at Brighton at the time, and no place in the small media budget to hire her either. So, she was classified under “park crew,” which meant she had a locker in the park crew locker room. Another moment of serendipity.

“All the park crew dudes rip and they're riding that shit all day.” Mia said. “So I made a lot of stuff with the Brighton park crew, and that was a low-pressure way to figure out how to film because they're just stoked to get clips. They didn’t really care if I fucked up the shot or if it’s not the right angle or whatever.”

This was before what Mia calls “Brighton’s golden age of media,” so it wasn’t just that Mia was the only woman on the hill with a camera. Most of the time, she was the only one with a camera, period. This, of course, didn’t stop the occasional boarder from chirping at her. “That’s a big camera for a girl,” she remembers someone saying in the lift line.

Eventually, Mia’s Brighton videos made it on Yobeat, an online snowboard platform at the time. Mia was behind the lens for these videos, but for women in front of the lens, the internet—specifically Yobeat with its notoriously brutal comment section—was not a kind place. It was hard to understand that at the time, at least on a macro level. Misogyny in snowboarding used to be brands being ignorant about the best way to market women riders, exclusion from trips, and off-color comments. But with the advent of the online video and subsequent comments sections, misogyny took a whole new form, shedding the naïveté it once hid behind and becoming vitriolic: cruelty for cruelty's sake.

“Anytime a girl posted anything, any video, anything with a girl, there would be at least 10 comments saying something like, ‘Oh, I didn't know there were rails in a kitchen,’” Mia said. “It was a joke. Any time any girl tried to do anything, everybody would laugh at it. People weren't taking it seriously. Nobody took it seriously. You would try your hardest, blood, sweat, and tears to do something, and people would literally roll their eyes and laugh. Like, you guys will always suck. You've always sucked. Why the fuck are you even here?”

This was a consequence of new media. Hatred barreled through like a flash flood, coming in quick, out of nowhere, and then disappearing only to leave something hurting in its path. Those who were affected remained affected, while those who weren’t went on living their lives. The internet dispersed things; it wasn’t a central medium, like a magazine, it was a bunch of different mediums, all spread around, each with its own comment section. It wasn’t dealt with on a macro level because, for years, little flakes of anger filtered through the platforms. It was only recently, in combing through old Yobeat comments, that Mia saw the scale of hate leveled against women.

Of course, old media still existed, though old may be a relative term here. Magazines still existed—they still do. And while they weren’t always perfect, there was an effort being made to elevate women in snowboarding with events like Miss Superpark from Snowboarder Magazine, which is where Mia met Pat Bridges.

Their meeting was an in, the beginning of a relationship, and a logical next step in Mia’s continuing rise in the space. At that point, Mia had established herself as a more than adequate staff filmer, someone who, while maybe not taking creative control of her own projects, could be reliably hired to film. And her pitch to Pat was simple: a video series where different crews came to Brighton and got clips. Snowboarder Magazine was for it, and this ushered in the aforementioned “golden age” at Brighton, even though Mia saw other things in her future.

“After that season, I kind of knew that I had milked Brighton for everything, and I wanted to move on. I wanted to be able to travel,” Mia said, and, as luck would have it, a job offer from the US Slopestyle team gave her that opportunity.

The team back then was full of up-and-comers who would later become heavy hitters in each of their respective fields: Red Gerard, Hailely Langland, Nik Baden, and Sage Kotsenburg were just a few on the roster. But it was coach Bill Enos (“a fucking G”) who hired Mia, not as a filmer for video review, but as someone to put his athletes in a more favorable light.

“This was like also back in the days when the contest kids had a bad rap. There was such a separation between the core snowboarders and the contest kids,” Mia said. “He was like, ‘I just want somebody to make videos to show that these kids are actually fucking cool and can rip.’”

It was a dream job, one that came with more creative freedom and the chance to travel the world. But it was short-lived. After only a few trips with the US Team, Enos retired, and his replacement saw Mia’s role in far more black-and-white terms: a staff filmer for footage review, which meant standing in the same spot for hours on end while the kids practiced on whatever jump they were hitting. “I was like, I’m out,” Mia said.

And serendipity, a theme thus far in Mia’s life, struck again. With the exit from the US Team came a phone call from Pat Bridges asking if she’d be on retainer for Snowboarder Magazine.

Mia was on retainer through the winter months, and her job, at first, mostly consisted of living from contest to contest.

 Mary Walsh, the Online-turned-Senior Editor of Snowboarder Magazine, told me about her time covering events with Mia. “We were like roommates for a few years because we would do the contest circuit together. We were the only two girls, so we would always room together. She was a confidant and a support system and quickly became an incredible friend of mine. Mia is equal parts super positive and collaborative. She is a no-ego, rising-tides-raise-everyone type of person.”

Working contests in those days was grueling; they were simply a bigger deal. Legacy contests like the US Open and Dew Tour still existed, and there was frankly more excitement around what we can look back on as traditional events: no leagues, no teams. On top of that, Snowboarder was a media powerhouse, one that does not exist today.

“Pat was a lot less chill in those days, and he ran a really tight ship,” Mia remembered. “He would literally send Mary and I out to X Games or the US Open or whatever, multiple-day events, and be like, okay, so we need an entire daily recap each day, and I need it by 6:00 AM Eastern time the next morning. I'm the only filmer. So I would shoot the event all fucking day, come home, edit all night, get done at like 3:00 AM, sleep for a few hours, shoot the next day, do the same thing again for like four days in a row. But it was okay because we had such a good time hanging out with each other that even though we were like under the gun, we loved what we were doing.”

If serendipity is a theme in Mia’s story, then embracing-the-suck is too. Or maybe it’s best categorized as sacrifice for the love of the game. From high school parties to Brian Head, then later from the Airport Hilton to Brighton, and finally running on empty to cover the contests, Mia has been driven by her deep love of snowboarding more than anything else. It has carried her through what were, no doubt, shitty times. As snowboarders, we all can relate to that, that feeling of being on a trip with negative energy left in the tank, wondering why the fuck we’re even here. But the answer is simple: we love to snowboard. It carries our community, and it carries us individually. It makes the shitty times seem less shitty in retrospect. But—although we may hate to admit it—snowboarding is not a cure-all.

After some time on the contests, Mia’s career continued to advance. She had done her time as a parks filmer, then a staff filmer, and she continued to look upwards. When Tyler Orton was tapped to film the Snowboarder movie, Beta, Mia was brought in, alongside Derek Weimer, as an additional filmer.

“It felt really good. I was manifesting the fuck out of it…It was sick, but It was really fucking hard,” Mia remembered. “Especially because we all had our crew, and I was put with the contest kids because I knew them from the contest scene before, but they were also really young. They had never filmed before. They didn't really understand the dedication that it fucking takes to make a video part, they were still figuring out how to switch from contest mode into filming mode.”

The contest kids were still doing contests and, while not openly relegated as such, were the lowest crew on the totem pole while filming that video. The stress of filming was compounded, at least in part, by her being the only woman on a crew full of guys, young guys at that.

“This was in a time before it was like cool to be a chick,” Mia said. “There were really no women filmers.”

After Beta, Mia was brought back down to a staff filmer, filming online segments for the website. She didn’t join the crew the following year for Everybody Everybody.

Speaking with Mary still, she described how difficult it was for a woman to be out there, or trying to be out there with the guys filming: “Being a woman writer or a woman photographer comes with a lot of challenges within snowboarding and male-dominated sports, in general, but being a woman videographer may be the most difficult of the three. It's always been really, really hard to get guys’ crews to want to go out with a girl photographer or filmer. There are exceptions, of course, and there continues to be positive, albeit often slow changes—and women have always worked to create their own opportunities. But generally, this is the case. Historically, most of the time you just weren't getting on the crew if you were a woman, unless you were tied to a brand or someone in a decision-making position really supported you.”

As an insider, Mia could see “the writing on the walls,” as she calls it, with Snowboarder Magazine. It was heading towards what it eventually became, and with her career there seemingly stalled out, Mia left.

Snowboarding is nothing if not volatile. It is an entire industry based around temperature and the formation of ice crystals miles above us in the sky. It is a hard life to dedicate yourself to. People need to want you; it is the only way a person can make a living in the space. And over time, Mia began to feel unwanted, almost cast aside. She began freelancing, both in and out of snowboarding. Work was not what she had hoped it would be, and her career seemed to be taking more hits than not.

“That season was the worst,” Mia said. She was hurt, rejected, and to make matters worse, snowboarding was unable to separate itself from the real world in a way it had once prided itself on. “COVID happened, and all my other freelance work that I had lined up for the season was gone. And then I quit snowboarding for a few years.”

“Spring of 2020 felt like rock bottom,” she continued. “I just felt like at that point I had been swimming upstream for so long, and I was just like, dude, why am I still fucking fighting for this? I'm not even making any money in this industry. Like, what the fuck am I doing? And so I sold all my camera gear, mostly just to pay my bills that spring. I thought that I was done with snowboarding, and I was like, alright, well, I know I have to do something that I love and care about. So what's something else? I've always loved interior design and decorating. My sister owns an interior design business, and I was like, well, I fucking love furniture. I'm really handy with power tools. I'm just gonna start refurbishing vintage furniture and home goods and sell that.”

The abandonment of snowboarding—as temporary as it may have been for Mia—is an unfortunately common trope in the business. Snowboarding is notoriously hard to make a living from. It is a world of small margins, late payments, and human assets. What is cool in snowboarding can turn on a dime, and those who don’t turn with it can often be left in the dust to fend for themselves. Even those with strong wills and a deep love for the sport can be demoralized. Mia is a prime example.

Mia rented a space and began working on her furniture. She spent a little over a year on that project, which she refers to as “a good pallet cleanser,” but one that also made her miss filming. In the spring of 2021, Mia began production assistant work on commercial shoots, still staying clear of the snowboard world. Shortly after, she landed a job on the set of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, first as a PA, then as an assistant camera operator.

“At that point, I still wasn't thinking I would ever be back in snowboarding. I figured I'd work on commercial production television,” Mia said. “I loved it as much as I hated it. I cried a lot. It's really fucking gnarly. If you fuck up one little thing, if you like, move somebody's tool, they will bite your head off. It's like a savage industry.”

Housewives gave Mia another crash course, similar to the one she received when she first moved to Salt Lake City. Working on the show gave her insight into a world of filming far different from the one she had previously known. Slowly, Mia’s mind began to drift back to snowboarding, but her intentions were to remain outside of the world she had abandoned. She missed it, sure, but she also felt like there was nothing left there for her.

“Truthfully, I felt embarrassed in the snowboard world,” Mia said. “I wanted to crawl in a hole and just disappear because I felt like I had failed and made an ass out of myself. Like, yes, there's been so many times that I've been given incredible opportunities and people have been so dope to me, but sprinkled into all of that the entire time was an undertone of having to fucking fight to be taken seriously, fight to not be made fun of as a girl with a camera, like being a poser. I just felt beaten the fuck down. I took it really personally.”

As much as she wanted to—or felt like she had to—avoid snowboarding, it’s difficult to completely abandon something you’ve given your life to. Even if you want to give it up, it’s hard to leave an old life behind. People come looking for you.

In November 2021, Marsha Hovey, the marketing director at Trollhaugen, and a friend of Mia’s, hit her up about filming the inaugural Take The Rake.

“She didn't really know that I had left filming snowboarding,” Mia explained. “And I went to Take The Rake and I fucking remembered why I liked this shit.”

Mia wanted back in, but fully on her terms. And, with her experience working for professional production crews, she felt it was time to finally open up an idea she had been kicking around for a while.

“I’ve been working on it in here since 2017,” Mia said, putting an index finger against her temple and laughing. The idea was a documentary about women’s snowboarding, something to serve as something of a postcard for where women stand in snowboarding today, and how much the sport has evolved. “It was like, right…there was like a shift and all of a sudden it was like, oh, Anna Gasser just did a triple cork. I've been hearing people, since the first day a dude did a triple, say that women will never fucking do that. We can't do it. Anna just did it. Hailey's doing double tens. Shit's actually starting to go off. The tone in the room changed; people are actually respecting women a little bit more. And I just saw this change in real time, and I saw the trajectory that women were on, it was speeding up…It was the start of that, and I was just like, dude, somebody needs to fucking document this.”

The documentary would also be about the history of the sport. It would be an honest telling, hopefully something that would bring justice to an overlooked segment of snowboarding. And it hadn’t just been overlooked by men of the era, but women too, Mia too.

“I started to think about women's snowboarding, more than I ever really had. I started to realize I didn't know shit about women's snowboarding before my time,” Mia said. “I'm a chick in snowboarding who's been obsessed with snowboarding for a decade, and I've never seen or heard of any of this [the history]. Somebody has to tell this story. And then I just realized that I'm the only one that can tell it because there's no other women filming snowboarding.”

This, of course, is changing. Snowboarding is continuing to grow, continuing to open its arms to new and diverse faces on both sides of the media curtain.

When I interviewed Mia, she had recently wrapped filming and was about to begin the editing process. I asked Mia if there was anything over the course of filming that surprised her. She told me there was a lack of bitterness in the video, none of the finger pointing that people—that I—would expect from a documentary about women in snowboarding.

On the people that may need to hear the message of the movie the most Mia said: “I don't wanna alienate them and close their ears by pointing fingers and being like, fuck you. fuck men.” Understanding fault is important, but dismissing people may have unintended consequences, since hostility usually breeds more hostility. Mia wanted to avoid this, especially considering how much snowboarding has changed in the last five years. Women are getting—at least starting to get—the recognition they deserve. There are all-women contests, and all-women crews that are moving the needle in our space in a way that wasn’t possible before.

I thought back to standing with Mia in the sponsor village at The Uninvited Invitational, the sun still strong above us. I held my phone close to her, hoping the recording would be audible through the sea of loud music and screaming fans around us. I could see in the course, there were women who were boarding, sure, but there were women on the deck too, some with cameras taking photos, others taking videos.

“This is the arrival,” Mia told me. “I watch this shit and I was on the verge of tears all day...seeing the crowd with their signs and being so enthusiastic, that fucking fuels me up and makes me remember why I’m doing this and why it’s important. And why it’s important to tell these stories and to show people what women are fucking capable of.”

“Why is it important?” I asked.

Mia took a moment, glanced around quickly, almost as if she were taking in the scene for the first time.

“Because when you show people what women and other minority groups are capable of, other people in those groups will see that and believe that they can do that too.”

Mia's film WAYWARD premieres at Woodward Park City on December 14th, get tickets here