Home / Skiing / A Skier Idiot. RIP Shane McConkey, Skiing’s Greatest Nut 1969-2009

A Skier Idiot. RIP Shane McConkey, Skiing’s Greatest Nut 1969-2009

It’s the call we’ve anticipated, yet somehow we never expected to get. A ski BASE jump gone bad and the friend-turned-living-legend lives no more. He is just legend now. Skiing has lost it’s greatest nut. Family, friends and fans across the world all mourn to an extent Shane would have been shocked to have known. And our hearts ache for his wife and daughter.

The unexpected loss of Shane McConkey triggered a flood of memories, so I can’t help but to write down a few of those and celebrate what Shane gave us…especially to me: He gave my sport of skiing its soul back. A happy, goofy, innovative, self-mocking, always-pushing-the-boundaries kind of soul. A soul that has rolled like that proverbial cartoon sized snowball continuing to gain size and momentum. A soul that my kids Logan and Cody have connected with. Thanks Shane, you saved my world. You saved skiing. For that, you are legend.

Shane McConkey, a.k.a. Pain McSchlonkey, a.k.a. Saucer-Boy a.k.a. Cliff Huckstable liked to introduce himself as a “professional idiot” and “cliff hucker”. Anyone who ever met Shane knew immediately that he was a guy so genuine and yet simultaneously so self-mocking that you couldn’t help but like him. A humble, yet a sardonic “claimer”. And if you lost him in a crowd at a party he was always the easiest to find. All you had to do was listen for the most raucous group of folks in a corner laughing like a pack of twelve-year-olds.

I was skiing with Keith Carlsen last weekend and as we spilled a little beer in the bar afterwards in Shane’s honor, a certain memory was triggered. Keith, then writer/editor for Powder Magazine said it best many years ago: “Shane is more than just a leader–he’s a ringleader.”

For most folks, Shane will be remembered for his amazing ski-BASE jumping exploits with the Red Bull Airforce. I was lucky, however, by way of being born a few days before Shane in 1969, and skiing in all the right places, with a small group of friends, to witness Shane’s greatest contribution: breathing life back into the ski industry. This is my attempt to fill in some of the backstory.

Go back to the 80’s, more specifically that nexus point when a bunch of ski-racers all graduated high-school circa 1988. I met Shane for the first time via Matt Francis who grew up racing with Shane at Squaw and in their GMVS vs. Burke days. After spending the first 18 years of my life in Crested Butte, I accidentally ended up at the University of Nevada, Reno and was suddenly a Tahoe skier thrown in with Green Mountain Valley Schoolers Matt Francis (now my attorney and best friend), Dylan Westfeldt (friends since ‘83), Brant Moles and Chuck List along with Tahoe natives Martin Gastanaga (in business together since 1995) and Johnny Albrecht (now my brother-in-law). Matt went to GMVS with Adam Comey, Jeremy Nobis, Brant Moles, Chris Paulding, Jason Webster, Chuck List, Daron Rhalves, etc. Shane went to Burke Academy with many more of my racing friends from Crested Butte and abroad. The point? One of the most wonderful things about skiing is that there’s only one degree of separation between us, and Shane connected many of us together.

By 1988, skiing was stale, pretentious and completely lacking innovation and fairly devoid of meaningful icons. It had rotted itself from its core. While Plake’s Mohawk was cool and Greg Stump was putting up a good fight, it certainly wasn’t saving the sport by any means. Along comes snowboarding’s culture of raw youth-driven energy and outlaw attitude and it quickly and efficiently laid waste to a generation of kids that couldn’t find any reason to make skiing a part of their identity nor derive any self-esteem from it. And secretly I couldn’t blame them. Skiing’s culture simply sucked.

Skiing was more serious about its furry jackets, Day-Glo Nevica’s, purple Zinka and handpainted one-piece Willy Bogner suits than pushing the boundaries of the sport and the culture within it. Snollerblades and  “Fire and Ice” represented the peak of modernity within the sport, and thus we all drifted off to college, to race and into the backcountry to skin. We were at the peak of a disenfranchised generation of skiers lost amidst decline of the skiing civilization as we knew it.

Skiing badly needed new heroes. New legends. New innovators. New equipment. New competitions. New filmmakers. And most importantly, it was desperate for a new culture.

All of that came wrapped up in Shane. And Shane came with stickers on his helmet that said, “FIS Sucks” and “Snowboard chicks dig skiers.” Brilliant. Post-modern had arrived.

Shane quit college in 1990, got off the bump-tour, and literally jumped into his Freeskiing career with a crotch-grab. To the near-nascent scene of core skiers “keeping it real”, it was a magical moment: Freeskiing was born and Shane was its ringleader. Having just had his pass pulled at Vail for throwing a backflip in a mogul comp and then streaking the course and getting banned for life, yes, banned for life. Shane began translating his knack for laid-out backflips and fearless straightlining in the Palisades at Squaw into the “extreme skiing” scene. Except he always was patient to correct the press and the community that this was “Freeskiing”, not “Extreme”. Extreme skiing lived somewhere in France and was practiced by technical mountaineers like Anselme Baud.

In 1996 Shane held a number of “secret” meetings with industry athletes and organizers. Freeskiing events were popping up all over the continent, each of them with different criteria and organization. He became passionate that an athlete governed association be created to organize this sport. As if he knew that it was inevitable that the Freeskiing revolution was about to attack the big mountains and hit the parks, Shane McConkey and Lhotse Merriam founded the International Freeskiers Association (IFSA) in 1996. The board members? The world’s best skiers. Simultaneously, Freeskiing athletes Dave “Swany” Swanwick , Adam Comey and Barb Hamblett started Mountain Sports International <http://www.mtsports.com/> to organize big mountain, skiercross, big air and halfpipe tours.

The Freeskiing tour was born. Shane, Comey, Barb and Lhotse jokingly dubbed it the “Professional Leisure Tour” and its Shane-led brand of irreverent-over-the-top-fun-and-sillyness stuck. He managed to win the World Tour more than once, amidst all of his office duties. But the whole idea was not without Shane infested shenanigans. The annual pilgrimage to Reno’s Monster Truck jam post Kirkwood NA Freeskiing Champs. The SaucerCross, naked hula-hooping, and “the Jerk” poaching the Xgames, in a thong, in Crested Butte. Watching South Park Season 1 in the back of Nobis’ Primetime van. Memories. The feeder market for skiing’s future athletes-slash-rockstar personalities came to fruition and Shane was squarely at the epicenter.

Former ski racers Brant Moles, Wendy Fisher, and Jeremy Nobis became Freeskiing Tour champs. Jeremy, in what was then perceived as giving the egalitarian US Ski Racing scene the finger, quit the US Ski Team post Lillehamer Olympics and taking a cue from Shane, took Freeskiing by storm as did Wendy Fisher. But it was the fat skis that Shane and everyone were competing on that led us all to dump our skinny skis in favor for those fat “parabolics”. Suddenly, innovation within skiing was reborn. And with those new fat skis came a entirely new stoke level. You needed these skis to win, to keep up, to ski the envelope that they were pushing. Shane terrorized industry designers to produce fatter and wider skis, until he finally devised a reverse camber concept in his invention the Volant Spatula and introduce the world to “rockered” skis that have gone from curiosity to being represented in pretty much every ski manufacturers line I saw at SIA/Vegas this year. Thanks Shane, powder skiing has never been so much fun.

While all this was going down, Steve Winter and Murray Wais  followed up their cult 15 minute film “Nachos and Fear” with “The Hedonist”, “The Tribe” and in then 1996, “Fetish” starring Shane and featuring many of our friends. We must’ve watched that film 100 times that year. “Fetish”, with some irony in there, marked the birth of the “ski porn” industry of filmmaking and the formal departure of the day-glo dominated days of Warren Miller. All of this silliness was now being documented in new media geared towards Freeskiers. “The Jerk” a.ka. Mark Epstein and Michael Jaquet started “Freeze Magazine”. Shane’s roomate Kent Kreitler and other Tahoe skiers and snowboarders started “Boards In Motion”. And thankfully Keith Carlsen and Steve Casimiro began to change the face of “Powder Magazine”. Shane’s racing friend Rob Bruce started sneaking Shane and freeskiing into MTV Sports. And as the internet rose, websites started to spread the word internationally, especially  via Michelle Quigley’s coverage on MountainZone.com.

And who was paying for all these shenanigans? RedBull. Ever-present and more core to the Freeskiing industry than any-other brand, RedBull landed in the US at Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s US Extreme Freeskiing Chapionships, a sponsorship through Gina Kroft, Shane McConkey and the rest of the Freeskiing junkshow. And Kirkwood right after that. Freeskiing’s brand is so wrapped up in Shane and Red Bull (or is it Red Bull’s brand is so wrapped up in Shane and skiing?) that every time I open up a can of Red Bull, well…I’m reminded of the Pro Leisure Tour.

Up in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska, at the edge of the skiing frontier, a revolution in powder skiing is taking place. In those huge, steep, lawless peaks, guys like Shane McConkey, Brant Moles, and others are laying down steep lines that are straighter, faster, more dynamic, and more graceful than any powder lines we’ve seen before. Using high-performance fat skis that float rather than dive, they’re riding skis like a snowboard, surfing on the snow, and more naturally following the rolls and contours and hollows of the terrain. Steve Casimiro, editor, Powder Magazine, issue 26.4, December 1997.

I think it was ‘98 when I ran into Shane one day at the base of KT. I was just arriving for a half-day and he needed to get to the airport and for whatever reason didn’t have ride so I let him borrow mine. I picked it up later at the Reno airport empty of gas with a half-eaten Big-Mac and an empty Red Bull in the passenger seat. Left on the dash was a partially used $5 book of McDonalds gift certificates and a unopened BBQ sauce. Classic Shane.

Shane seemed to be both omnipresent and omnipotent. And yet despite running into him over the last twenty years on various airplane flights (once on a flight to Salt Lake City I got a lucky sneak peak at the first draft of the game of G.N.A.R.), ski resorts, industry events, competitions, a ‘zillioin RedBull parties, and seemingly always at the Chammy, Shane was persistently in my life – in everyone’s lives — by way of the silly sick insane amazing funny stupid things he did for film.

Starting with Matchstick Produtions’ The Tribe, Pura Vida, Fetish, and Sick Sense, the progression of the off-the-hook skiing and Shane’s intense passion for BASE jumping stunts simultaneously documented and influenced the rise of skiing’s new soul via Shane’s comedy-laden talents. Which, of course, were best documented in 2001’s “There’s Something About McConkey”. Somehow…some way…Shane and the Matchstick crew would one-up their previous exploits. The ski-BASE jumping shots were always jaw dropping, yet every year he had bigger and more incredible big mountain lines and ski BASE jumps. Seeing him play the hapless schoolteacher in “Yearbook” filmed in classroom at my alma mater Gunnison High School  makes me chuckle every time.

Shane’s unique character coupled with his impish-yet-charismatic smile made him THE MAN. Nobody did better Beavis & Butthead impressions than Shane. And Saucer-Boy was characterization of an industry that went awry and Shane made us laugh at ourselves and our own self-absorption. Whether intentional or not, Shane’s “keepin’ it real” attitude and an endless array of pranks and improvised comedy routines firmly established within skiing’s new core culture a credo of never taking itself too seriously. As long as that sticks, skiing will remain healthy.

While Shane evolved into being that ringleader-slash-never-ending-one-man-comedy-routine within a core group of emerging industry leaders to the globe-trotting IMAX/HD, Living Legend, Huckdoll toy, of today, I had two kids. The LoganCody. And it’s been through their eyes, and before my very own, that Shane transformed from simply being a “friend” to “living legend”.

My kids were simply stoked anytime they saw Shane on film, and especially in person. They’ve drawn Shane-inspired pictures for school homework. They “play Shane” on the trampoline and in their little imaginations as they skitter down the slopes. And I believe Shane was just as stoked to see all these little kids so into skiing as they mobbed him at the Chammy or at a movie premiere. It’s that “stoked level” that we should all thank Shane for. Shane was stoked on skiing, and skiing was stoked on Shane.

Last year the kids and I rolled into the Chammy and there was Shane doing a live Sirius broadcast with Johnny Mosley. Before I knew it, Cody bolted for Shane and jumped on his lap and I’m pretty sure hit him firmly in the nuts. A standard respectful greeting for the living legend! Shane, without missing a beat in the interview, pulled Cody’s hat over his eyes and gave him a wedgie and shoved him over to me. After the broadcast, he made sure to push around the kids and shove snow down their pants to their glee. Never an ego. Always a kid-at-heart; that was Shane. And every ski-team parent I’ve met with Shane-adoring skiing kids will tell you the same story.

Two weeks ago, before the loss of Shane, I ripped around the mountain on a glorious powder day with my family. I shook my head and thought to myself about what an amazing turnaround skiing has made, how it’s more relevant in my life today than when I was 18. I marvel at how it’s made for me and my little 4th generation of skiers a never-ending scene of fun on the slopes. Logan, who’s nine now, got to fore-run a junior big-mountain comp earlier this winter (that Shane helped invent) and stomped it and was stoked. Thanks Shane. Cody’s just turned seven and is spinning 360’s in the terrain park and saying, “Did you see that Mom!? Did you see that!!!?”. Thanks Shane.

Because of my kids’ stoked factor, I’ve had no choice but to keep having fun. Armed now with good health insurance, I’m still trying to push my own boundaries, as small and as dwarfed by Shane’s as they may be. When I nailed a new trick on a box rail last weekend – the only near-40 year-old in the kiddies park mind you – I grinned ear-to-ear like my kids do…like Shane did…and gave him some silent props as I looked up and saw a pair of K2 Pontoons dangling off a rider on the chairlift. Now that I’m having more fun skiing than ever before, I can’t help but to wonder what kind of pranks Shane’s pulling and the boundaries he’s pushing in Heaven right now.

Thanks Shane, you made us all better silly skiers. For that you are legend. Rest in Peace.

 

 

Tidbits:

• If I got a date or name wrong, my apologies. I know I left a lot of folks out of the story. The 90’s are a blur now. Correct me in the comments.
• I had to cut a bunch of memories, stories and connections. Please fill in the blanks in the comments below.
• Huge thanks to Lhotse, Freeskiing’s authentic First Lady and PR Queen, for helping me fill in some blanks! Some of ‘them brain cells went missng xoxo
• There’s a memorial web site, ShaneMcConkey.org where you can make a donation to Shane’s family.
• Shane’s memorial service is Sunday April 5th, 2009 – 4:30pm, Squaw Valley, CA USA.

 

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