All of this has created a bind not just for enthusiasts like the Halfpipe Guy but for Canada Snowboard (CS), the national snowboard body. Rich Hegarty, the Major Events and Communications Specialist with CS, calls the lack of pipes one of the biggest issues facing the sport and “completely out of [CS’s] control.” Hegarty says CS, which receives its nominal funding from the Canadian government, does “everything” it can to encourage building halfpipes but they remain “a huge cost that is 100% owned by the resort… but few can afford it.” For the foreseeable future, Winsport is the only available place for Canadian athletes to train, as CS has no funding model for infrastructure development on privately owned resorts. The team is even regularly forced to train in the U.S. or Europe when the pipe in Calgary isn’t running.
That has resulted in stark outcomes, as Hegarty says most of the “clear talents'' in Canada “choose not to chase pipe.” Despite winning seventeen Olympic medals, Canada has never won a halfpipe medal. Results for similar contests like the X Games are bleak, despite Canada’s slopestyle and big air dominance. That’s not to say there aren't talented Canadian pipe snowboarders, but the results haven’t been there. Hegarty places that blame squarely on the lack of pipes.
Several prominent Whistler area snowboarders understand Robinson’s frustration. K2 Snowboards pro and Airtime Podcast host Jody Wachniak says the closure is “unfortunate” and that pipe is “beginning to feel like a lost art form.” Burton pro Mikey Ciccarelli says the whole pipe situation in Whistler “makes [him] sad.” Dinosaurs Will Die pro Darrah Reid-McLean says she’ll “be extremely disappointed” if pipe doesn’t return to Whistler, adding she “respects Liam’s passion and enthusiasm.” D.O.P.E. Industries pro Brin Alexander and Burton pro Mark Sollors, each long time Whistler locals, highlight a bigger cultural loss. Sollors says pipe “is an important aspect of snowboarding history,” adding, “Whistler isn’t the only resort to discontinue their pipe. It’s becoming more and more rare all-over North America, and especially in Canada, to have a halfpipe to ride. It’s a shame.” Alexander says that in losing halfpipes, snowboarding is losing something more: “[Halfpipe] is the true forefront of snowboarding history, and it’s sad to see that dying.”
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Though snowboarding is only a half century old, its history has already been marked by a series of different eras, each with distinctive styles. Though slopestyle, freeriding, racing, and other disciplines all have had important influences on different riders and snowboarding as a whole, it’s inarguable that halfpipe has had a key influence on the development of both freestyle snowboarding, and snowboarding’s community. Several people, from pro snowboarders to unofficial historians, have argued that if it wasn’t for halfpipes, it’s likely snowboarding, and snowboarding in Whistler, would look much different today.
Tom Sims organized the first halfpipe contest in 1983, the Snowboard World Championships at Soda Springs, California, at a time when freestyle snowboarding was only a nascent idea. The sport was extremely young, the board technology crude, and many snowboarders were focusing simply on getting down the mountain. For example, snowboarding’s most historically significant event, the US Open, was first held at Stratton, Vermont in 1982, but was limited to racing for its first several years. Halfpipe became the first freestyle contest at the Open in 1988, and the racing was gone entirely three years later. For several years afterward, halfpipe was the marquee event at the Open and other contests around the United States, becoming a central focus in the development of freestyle snowboarding. Chris Gunnarson, a legendary snowboard park builder for decades, puts it plainly: “Sorry but not a lot of people care about racing anymore… Halfpipe was the first thing that started to replace or join racing.” With the most famous snowboarders in the world like Terry Kidwell (who won the first Open halfpipe in ’88) and Craig Kelly (winner in ’89 and ’90) making their mark in halfpipes, it was there that progression became focused.
Early snowboarding was heavily influenced by skateboarding, as many early adopters had been skateboarding for years by the time they first strapped in on snow. According to Dano Pendygrasse, a Whistler-based photographer who has chronicled snowboarding since the 1980s, early features on snow, like a one-hit pipe built by Kidwell and friends in 1979 known as the Tahoe City Pipe, showed that “you could do skateboard style freestyle tricks on snowboards.” By the 90s, when snowboarding was coalescing into more distinct disciplines like freeriding, racing, and freestyle, the development of many of its new tricks was centred in halfpipes. Pendygrasse says in Whistler the “drive to ride transition that was really strong from the go.” In the early years of Whistler snowboarding the tricks that were “the height of progression” at the time – McTwists and frontside 540s – were honed in pipes, and Pendygrasse says that often years passed before new tricks were brought to the backcountry.
But halfpipe’s importance extended beyond freestyle snowboarding’s development, right to the socioeconomics of Whistler and Blackcomb, which were once two separately owned ski resorts. Pendygrass says “I was here in ‘87 when [Blackcomb] first allowed snowboarding and Whistler still didn’t. Once Whistler opened there was a bit of a competition. They wanted to do something that would draw people and had quite a few gullies that provide opportunities to make sort of a natural halfpipe.” The first halfpipe Pendygrasse remembers, located under Little Red Chair (now known as Franz’s Chair), was hand dug but progressed fast. “It was basically a gully that had hits on both sides, masquerading as a halfpipe. Eventually, Whistler built their own transition tool. They were really ahead of the game.”
Pendygrasse says halfpipe quickly became a reciprocal benefit for riders and resorts. Resorts around southern British Columbia, having trouble competing with Whistler and Blackcomb, started halfpipe contests, attracting hundreds of snowboarders at a time. In the days before terrain parks, resorts would “take a chance on a halfpipe because the real estate it takes is relatively small… and say it’s up to you guys to maintain it.” Eventually, Blackcomb built a permanent halfpipe, and once that happened, halfpipe riding became the social hub of the mountain. Pendygrasse says, “all spring long that’s where you’d go. Conditions would be crappy, but everyone would go sit in the sun and ride halfpipe all day.”
With its gravity for both progression and community, halfpipe grew into snowboarding’s foremost event both abroad and in Whistler. For more than a decade, halfpipe was the main spectacle the US Open and the X Games, and eventually became the first freestyle event at the Olympics. In Whistler, a pipe contest called the Westbeach Classic became a central feature of the scene and a major driver of the town’s fame. The first Classic was a big air contest at Cypress Mountain in 1989, but soon became an annual pipe contest held in Whistler each spring for a decade before being renamed. Pendygrasse, who exhaustively catalogued the history of the event in his book “Out West: Snowboarding, Westbeach, and a New Canadian Dream,” says the Westbeach Classic was a watershed moment for Canadian snowboarding. Not only was it a major attraction bringing snowboarders from all over the B.C., but it marked one of the first times Transworld Snowboarding, at the time the sport’s foremost magazine, profiled snowboarding in the province.
The Classic was an enormous draw for Whistler each spring, and Pendygrasse says part of its appeal was one last kick at the can each season. For the resort, to which snowboarding was still new, the contest – which eventually developed into the Whistler Ski and Snowboard Festival [WSSF] featuring live music and a range of on-hill events – sold a lot of late-season tickets. For snowboarders, Canadian and Americans found their local hills had closed for the season, and were free to come to Whistler for an unofficial end-of-season-celebration. Lifetime local Brin Alexander says some of his formative memories of growing up in Whistler were at the Classic, most notably when American Keir Dillon, at the time one of the most famous snowboarders in the world, landed a now legendary shirtless McTwist in 2001 (which by then had rebranded as the Sims World Championship). Some people speculate that if it wasn’t the Classic attracting riders like Dillon, Whistler may have never gained the clout it now holds in the world of snowboarding. Pendygrasse says “there were contests on the East Coast and other places that had cachet, but nothing really [on the west coast] had the size or prominence of the Westbeach Classic.”
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As snowboarding grew, Whistler’s halfpipes moved around the resort, one low on the mountain that opened at night (Whistler’s only memory of night riding), one famously fun summer pipe on the Blackcomb glacier, and the main pipe in the Blackcomb park, all together holding fond memories for locals. Ride Snowboards pro Beau Bishop says despite having “never been a pipe guy,” he misses having them to ride. Brin Alexander says he grew up riding a Blackcomb pipe that “was a staple on the mountain. The WSSF pipe contest brought thousands up the mountain to the pipe,” a sentiment echoed by renowned pro Leanne Pelosi, who says she has “great memories'' of the WSSF pipe contests. Lifetime Southwest B.C. local and LibTech pro Chris Rasman says the pipes were a formative part of his youth: “Countless evenings hiking the night pipe in my late teens after working all day. Many runs through the pipe at the end of the park on sunny days, trying to boost a little higher than your friends and learn hand plants. Sweaty sessions hiking the same pipe in the spring, and then the contests in it. Lots of good memories.”
But over time, the situation has changed. The night pipe closed years ago, summer riding at Whistler is a shell of its former self (Whistler’s long-time summer snowboard camp, Camp of Champions, closed in 2017), and both of the current in-ground structures for winter riding sit lower on the mountain than pipes of years past. The night pipe is so low on the mountain that for much of the season people pass it by riding the gondola up to the snow. Combine that with increasingly unpredictable winters driven by climate change, the operation of a pipe at Whistler Blackcomb is complicated. Dano Pendygrasse posits the night pipe never had the same appeal as the older structures, and some people have speculated that unrealized investment in the low-elevation pipe has frightened management away.
But the issues don’t stop there. Mark Sollors, a two-decade Whistler local, says of the main Blackcomb halfpipe, “the groundwork isn’t even good anymore. It’s built on a run that’s too steep, with one wall receiving direct sunlight all day and the other sitting in the shade all day. If the resort wanted to have a world class halfpipe (like it used to have twenty years ago) they would have to invest in full new summer groundwork built on a different run. If they could include a pipe within the Backcomb Park lane leading to Catskinner Chair, it would be even better since most people lap that instead of doing mid station gondola laps.”
Catskinner is the main chair servicing Blackcomb’s park, and was built as one of the first upgrades Vail completed when they bought the resort. But the chair bypasses the pipe entirely, forcing pipe enthusiasts to hike, or take a lengthy detour that involves riding down to the gondola mid-station and hoping they find an open seat. Whether the resort decided on the pipe before or after the new chair is unknown, but given how new it is, it’s safe to say there’s little hope for a route adjustment. The Halfpipe Guy says the chair’s route was a “very heated topic” of discussion at the time, and thinks that in bypassing the pipe, the resort created more impetus to close it. It’s also part of why Robinson has a second demand: adding a rope-tow to a reopened pipe.
More simply than all that, maintaining pipes is not easy. Chris Gunnarson, an expert on such things, says a halfpipe is “the most resource intensive” part of a park. He says it takes one machine to cut the pipe, another to groom the flatbottom, and numerous people to rake by hand, and “considering the volume of snow, the required maintenance, and construction time,” it may not be worth it: “Dollar for dollar or acre by acre, [halfpipe] is more costly.” Even Winsport’s Director of Outside Operations, Mike Tanner, says their pipe “wouldn’t be worth running” without all of the contests and organised training it hosts.
Flynn Seddon adds a component of artificial snow is integral, a resource that the powder heavy resorts of B.C. may not have invested in; Silverstar Mountain Resort said prohibitive snowmaking costs were the primary reason for their pipe closure. Add in the effort it takes to groom natural snow, which in Whistler usually arrives fast and heavy throughout the season, Seddon says “it’s even more complicated.”
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But the decline of halfpipes may not be a supply-side issue alone. As halfpipe riding and the halfpipes grew, it seems fewer and fewer people are able to enjoy – or even just ride – halfpipes. The discipline has changed dramatically since Gian Simmen and Nicola Thost won the first Olympic medals at the 1998 Nagano Games, and halfpipes may have been killed by their own success. The tricks have become increasingly complicated; Ayumu Hirano of Japan landed halfpipe’s first triple cork in 2022 and dominant American Chloe Kim regularly lands 1080s and switch 900s. And the pipes have grown, with contest pipes usually reaching 22 feet. Even veteran riders often find themselves unable to reach the top of the pipe, and many find themselves bored watching halfpipe contests, with the riders spinning so fast that the details of their tricks are often unidentifiable to casual viewers.
With this, the atmosphere has changed. In his book on the Westbeach Classic, Dano Pendygrasse says that in the early days of halfpipe contests, overly competitive riders were labeled “jocks,” and winners regularly downplayed successes. Now it’s not uncommon to see a rider crying with joy when they win or smashing their gear when they don’t. To many, modern halfpipe now more closely resembles traditional Olympic sports like aerials skiing or gymnastics than it does other snowboard events like banked slaloms or rail jams, with levels of athleticism completely foreign to the average person. Meanwhile, halfpipe riders disappear from public in between events, and devote much more time to private training than to community building. Kim and three-time Olympic champion Shaun White, arguably the world’s two most famous snowboarders, are notably reclusive from snowboard culture and community, and now halfpipe seems to exist solely within their realm: as a venue for Olympic athletes.
