Lone Ragers -- Mt. Baker's Hardcore Ride Mountain Surfing's Highest Wave

AMY HOWAT IS ALL alone.

Perched atop Shuksan Arm, the frozen remnant of a glacial conniption fit thrown long ago by Mother Nature, she is a glass float on an ocean of deadly ice, craggy rock and sheer cliffs.

Last week, Howat was pondering Russian history and dreaming of a lazy summer road trip through Montana. Now she is adjusting a strap connecting a fiberglass board to her feet and staring down, through amber goggles, at 500 vertical feet of powdered-sugar snow.

Her body still heaves from the knee-burning march up the slope, right past a ski-area boundary sign that warns of extreme avalanche danger and promises: "You or your heirs will be charged for any rescue."

For 20 deep breaths, she stares, drawing an imaginary line downward. These massive, snowy knolls in the shadow of Mount Baker are known as The Hemispheres, but today they are the front steps to Amy's world, and she is about to demonstrate why.

With one deft hop, she is gone and the mountain is on the defensive. The board, which seconds before clung defiantly crosswise to the steep slope, soars straight downhill, darting beneath the surface like a dolphin headed for deep water. Gaining speed, Howat shifts her weight, rises slightly from her cat crouch and rides the board through a perfect arched turn. And another. And another.

This is an unparalleled ride, the closest thing in winter sport to pure flight. No sweating, no straining. No sound. Only flow. A long, effortless swoop that leaves The Hemispheres with a perfect S-turn tattoo and Amy Howat entranced.

Seven years ago, that ride and that feeling launched a pastime now sweeping the globe - and fogging the goggles of many cantankerous skiers. Variations on the boarding theme can be found from Squaw Valley to Mount Fuji. Yet nowhere in the world is it performed with the subtle eloquence displayed in Washington's North Cascades.

Shuksan Arm and the surrounding Mount Baker ski area have emerged as a national snowboard Mecca - the Holy Land of rip and shred. Its deep glades and steep cliffs form the spiritual center of an unlikely sport that began when surfers and skateboarders looked mountainward and wondered why not.

"Everyone, once in their life, should get into some Shuksan powder on a clear day," says Howat, a former world champion rider whose board has carved peaks around the globe. "When I'm away from it for a while, I really start to crave it."

She began riding here in 1985, a young teen tagging behind a slapstick group of older guys who called themselves the Mount Baker Hardcore. While snow surfing was still a concept in most places, members of that group were turning it into a Northwest athletic art form.

Many of the world's top current riders cut their teeth on Shuksan Arm, including Craig Kelly, snowboarding's Michael Jordan. All of them remain bound to its slopes by a tie best described as spiritual. This is a mountain to be lived for and died upon, and the line between is as thin as one errant lean in a steep, rocky chute.

None of that is a concern at this moment for Howat. On a powder day, nothing is. As her board floats to a silent halt, her eyes carry a knowing peace that surely is snowboarding's past, and perhaps its future.

ITS PRESENT IS marching up Shuksan Arm at this moment. He is a young British Columbian named Chris Whitmee, and he's looking for big, fat air.

"What's up here?" he asks Howat, whom he obviously doesn't know. "Any good cliffs?"

Howat, who grew up on this mountain, rolls her eyes and growls. "Do you guys know where you're going? You'd better hook up with somebody up here who does. I'm not kidding. You can seriously die up here."

She knows that every year, somewhere, yawning cliffs and ravenous avalanches consume snowboarders far more skilled than these guys. Puzzled, the two dudes stare back the way they've come, which they deduce leads to a grueling walk. They wait for the pushy girl to gather her bruise-purple Nitro board and head back up the mountain before deciding: They'll take her advice.

Not without a parting shot. "Who does she think she is?" Whitmee asks before heading back to safety. "Amy Howat or something?"

He cannot grasp the irony tucked into that question. Howat, whose father, Duncan, runs the ski area and is inarguably one of the sport's earliest and best friends, was among the nation's first snowboard stars. At the ripe old age of 16, Amy was high priestess of the steepest and deepest, paving the way for a sport she says "appealed to the anarchist tendencies of every kid in America." Now she is 20, rides only for the adrenaline surge - and is sounding to the twin Canadian punks like a nagging Aunt Beulah.

In a single generation, Northwest snowboarding has been transformed. It began as a solitary, one-with-nature experience. Early snowboards, modified surfboards with pointed noses and tailfins, had no metal edges and could not turn on packed snow.

Baker's pioneers, riders such as Carter Turk, Eric Janko, Jeff Fulton and Eric Swanson, took to the steeps not just because they were considered an aberration and not yet allowed on chairlifts: Steep powder was their only medium. To snowboarders, flatness is badness. Early snowboards were treacherous on hard-packed snow or ice. And with both feet attached to a single plane, a boarder must flop, drunken-frog style, across flat spots skiers merely skate over. Early riders were out of skiers' sight, out of skiers' mind.

Today's metal-edged boards provide solid control. This should be good news to slope-stingy skiers, who joke that boarders invariably introduce themselves with a three-word salutation: "Whoa! Sorry, dude."

But sharp edges cut both ways. New boards can perform hair-raising stunts on crowded, groomed slopes. And they tend to attract wild drivers - "skateboard rats" for whom snowboarding is more dress-down social statement than far-out physical experience. Grunge on ice.

"Every punk who ever hung out at a 7-Eleven is now up at the mountain," one longtime Washington skier says. "That's too bad."

Baker original Turk, 27, has a twist of punk himself (it has on occasion prompted him to lie on a skateboard and roll down Mount Baker Highway at 55 mph) and would like to disagree. But sometimes he can't.

"A lot of the new guys don't have any respect for skiers at all," he says, fiddling with a board at his Bellingham snowboard shop amidst product stickers for brand names like Butt Fur. "For us, it was different. We were under the microscope for a long, long time. We had to kind of set the standard and look acceptable."

Not that skateboard types are bad people, he says. "But they're used to riding ramps in someone's back yard and not having to deal with the public. That's kind of a problem."

It is a problem for reasons other than those apparent. While most Baker pioneers resent the turn their sport has taken, many now profit directly from the industry, which to a large extent relies on this renegade, punk image.

Turk tunes and rents boards at his shop, Carter's Carving Edge, and is part of a venture that has made "Mount Baker Hardcore" a registered trademark found on T-shirts and videos sold as far away as Japan. Marcella Dobis, another world-class rider of Amy Howat's era, runs the Mount Baker Snowboard Shop in Glacier. Kelly and other top riders have their own "signature" boards and travel the globe for sponsors and video producers.

Eight years ago, all of these folks might have called that a sellout. But times and people change. You do what you know. And what this crowd knows - collectively, perhaps better than any group on the planet - is how to surf down a mountain.

THIS MOUNTAIN MASTERY didn't arrive overnight. It is the product of thousands of hours of trial and error in places people really were not meant to be. Nobody taught snowboarding in 1984, when the Mount Baker Hardcore made their first treks to Baker.

Turk and Janko, then roommates at Western Washington University in Bellingham, shared a crude board and learned what millions of other riders now know: Snowboarding and skiing have less in common than Rush Limbaugh and Ted Kennedy. Skiing is all knee flex and lower-body angulation, the body always facing downhill. Boarding is a total-body experience, equally suited to riding sideways, backward - and occasionally upside down.

"The concept and mechanics behind carving a turn are the same, but you initiate them differently," says Howat, who unlearned years of skiing to master a board. Skateboard and surfing experience are bonuses. Skiing skill is not. "You use different muscles," Howat says. "Different everything, really."

The snowboard learning curve is steep, and the first day is like learning to ice skate - downhill. `People who try it and don't get frustrated and aren't worried about their egos being destroyed get hooked instantly," Turk says. And permanently. Few proficient snowboarders ever strap on skis again.

Turk and Janko were addicted from day one. In their hours off as Baker lift operators, they teamed with Swanson and Fulton to scout new powder runs now legendary in Northwest board lore: Armpit. Pan Face. Hairy Scary. The Blueberry Chutes. Sticky Wicket.

These golden days of Baker boarding launched a revolution. While Californians were developing a sideways, surfboard style, and East Coast boarders a forward, mono-ski method, Baker's terrain sparked a unique, in-between approach: Freeriding.

The mountain, open only on weekends, was alive with bold riders inventing new ways down the slope and redefining "fat air:" Jumps with drops of 30 to 40 feet were not unusual. The mountain's trademark bumps and knolls served less and less as hazards, more and more as runways.

One of those flights, with Swanson at the controls, buzzed right by a 12-year-old skier named Amy Howat, who happened to be riding up Chair One above a chute where even extreme skiers stop and swallow hard.

"I saw this guy come flllllying out, right to the side of me, and just sky off of this thing," she recalls. "I thought it was the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my life. I was in complete shock. I can remember it as clear as day."

From that second on, Amy was a rider. Two years later, she was a world champion, winning European World Cup events. She spread the magic of Baker worldwide for another two years before a serious elbow injury forced her to reconsider a competitive career.

Perhaps more important, she spread the boarding affliction within her own household. Her father, Duncan, felt a tugging at his own punkstrings and hopped on a board left at the family home by Tom Sims, a Californian who, along with Vermont's Jake Burton Carpenter, is credited with launching the sport in the late 1970s. Soon Duncan Howat was rippin' himself, frolicking in the powder with Amy each weekend. Early on, that youthful attitude "created a bond between Dad and the snowboarders," Amy says.

It was cemented in 1985 with the launching of the Legendary Mount Baker Banked Slalom, a halfpipe race that continues to draw 200 of the world's top riders each year. Competitive circuits, amateur and pro, sprung up and now attract thousands of young riders across the United States. A push began to make snowboarding an Olympic event.

Gradually, begrudgingly, snowboards were accepted at other Northwest areas, from Stevens and Snoqualmie passes to Crystal Mountain and Oregon's Mount Bachelor and Mount Hood, which in recent years has emerged as a summer snowboard Mecca. All of those areas now engage in an awkward courtship dance with boarders. But to riders here and around the globe, Baker remains the heartland.

"The first big crew of hot riders in the world came out of Mount Baker," says Seattle's Mike Olsen, who made his first snowboard in woodshop and now runs Mervyn Manufacturing, which makes Gnu and Lib Tech boards at a plant near Lake Union. He travels to trade shows worldwide and finds Japanese and European dealers who know only five English words: Please, thank you, Mount Baker.

"A lot of them come here and it blows them away," he says. "Baker's definitely got it all. Snowboard heaven."

SKIER HELL?

For many longtime skiers, what began as a curious sidelight has grown to an intolerable intrusion.

Boards were banned in many areas until the late 1980s, and still are considered anathema in some snooty, Gore-Tex-and-fur enclaves in Colorado. But today 85 percent of U.S. ski areas have hopped on the boardwagon.

Some days, boarders outnumber skiers at Mount Baker. Nationwide, the snowboard population has exploded to 1.6 million, prompting the U.S. Ski Industries Association to offer this cutting-edge insight: "Snowboard skiing can no longer be considered a fad or an aberration."

Although many older men and women are taking the ride, three-quarters of all boarders are under 25. They are overwhelmingly male. And a lot of them would spit at anyone who calls what they do snowboard skiing.

Small packs of them always seem to ride on the cutting edge of trouble: "boardsliding" on deck rails and picnic tables, carving gashes in their image. Boarders careen into skiers, jump into crowded traffic and Cuisinart carefully cultivated mogul runs. Some of that criticism is just. Much isn't. But all is noted by ski officials. Even Duncan Howat, who takes it quite seriously.

So seriously that Mount Baker, for years the snowboarder's best friend, last spring issued an ultimatum: Straighten up or get out. Baker threatened to limit boarders to two chairs, removing them from the mountain's prime terrain.

It sent shock waves through Boardworld. That was by design.

"We sort of set the tone here for everybody else," says Gwyn Howat, Duncan's other daughter and Mount Baker's marketing director. "When we had to crack down, it was a pretty strong statement."

If Baker truly is five years ahead on the snowboard evolutionary scale, this portends problem elsewhere. It is a dilemma faced by the entire stagnant U.S. ski industry, which thirsts for the snowboarding dollars. But not if doing so risks alienating its bread and butter, the skier.

As much as Baker loves the spice and dollars snowboarders add to the mountain, one cold, hard fact remains: When the snow melts and receipts are counted, snowboarders still provide less than a quarter of Baker's total lift-ticket revenue. (Nationally, that figure hovers around 8 percent.) If the mountain isn't big enough for both, it's clear who gets the boot.

Meetings were held, fliers posted, jaws dropped. Behavior improved.

One reason is Baker pioneer Dave Wallace, who has taken biting-the-board-that-stokes-you to a new extreme: He's Baker's newly appointed "snowboard sheriff," charged with pulling passes from misbehaving snowboard punks.

Wallace rips across the mountain wearing a star-shaped sheriff's badge. When he sees a young shredder cut off a skier, toss a wad of duct tape onto Baker's hallowed slopes or spit in the lift line, he roars up on a 170-centimeter Nitro Fusion and makes instant goggle contact.

"Hey!" he announces. "I AM the snowboard patrol here. This is why I'm here: You guys can go out and be out of hand and do what you want. But do it in the right place at the right time and with heads up. Don't cut off your own heads here."

Generally, they listen. Wallace wrote the book - the first-ever instructional book on snowboarding. His first board, a Burton Backhill roundtail, now rests in the Stevens County Historical Society Museum in Colville. Years ago, he was banished from Baker himself after calling Duncan Howat a "petty tyrant." Today he calls him Boss.

Baker's mission is to educate riders, most of whom never attended ski school and know zip about mountain etiquette. After that, "What they do is up to them," Amy Howat says. "I think they'll figure it out. If they can't ... they don't deserve to be on the mountain."

Some Baker riders still flirt with disaster by venturing out-of-bounds alone. But the crackdown, coupled with a new chairlift that has spread traffic across the mountain, was warmly received by skiers.

The truce holds. For now.

ALL OF THAT political blather, "spew" to a board type, circles the air around Mount Baker but doesn't seem to stick. On the mountain today, snow is deep and things are as they should be. That in itself is a shock, considering the sport's unnatural growth spurt.

The Northwest now is home to half a dozen major snowboard manufacturers, who produce new models in a vain attempt to meet demand that doubles every year and won't even slow to catch its breath. A sport that began as a means to get away has become dominated by ways to cash in.

In Bellingham, on a clear, snow-frosted day in an old converted church he calls home, Dave Wallace is struck by the irony.

"I did a lot to promote this thing," he recalls, reminiscing about months he spent living in ski-area parking lots in a Rambler station wagon, with toaster-oven kitchen in the front seat, living room in the back. "Sometimes I wonder: Is this what we really wanted? There's a lot of claimers up there now, a lot of posers. They're doing it for the scene. Gag me from 10 paces. This thing was a good personal experience for me. Being in the mountains and flowing down a hill like that - that sensation just rocked me hard."

Maybe, he thinks, the two forces can coexist.

"That's why we have our little community in Glacier, and other spots throughout the Northwest," he concludes. "We have our own pockets of purity."

Glacier is an enclave, its inhabitants throwbacks. A tiny burg along the Nooksack River's north fork, it rarely is touched by the sun and on some winter days is visited by more bald eagles than people. Glacier is a poor man's Hood River, an Oregon town run by windsurfers.

A growing klatch of riders live here, sleeping in ramshackle apartments or trailer houses and hanging out at Milano's, a local Italian place that serves world-class chicken gorgonzola out front and happens to employ some of the world's best snowboarders in the back.

Across the street, the walls of Marcella Dobis' snowboard shop are plastered with color photos of Mount Baker alumni who have put their sport on the map. Many of these are advertisements. On the counter is a snowboard magazine, complete with an ad for a "Shred Americard." Shelves are stocked with snowboard magazines, brand-name stickers and hurricane pants with Kevlar-reinforced knees. Even in Glacier, freeriding is big bucks. From woodshop to worldwide in a decade. This is what snowboarding has become.

But the founders will be quick to remind you this is not necessarily what it is about.

It's about world extreme snowboard champion "Texas Mike" Devenport catching air so big skiers stop and drop their poles. Or Carter Turk, the lone wolf of Baker, bursting through powdery trees, providing a brief peek of his shamelessly unhip $27 Costco plastic rainsuit, then stealthily disappearing into the woods. About constantly reinventing oneself on a mountaintop.

Beneath all the hype, it is this, Amy Howat says, that brings her back to the mountain each week. And it is this that is likely to pull millions of youngsters in her footsteps.

Howat's friends might think her life today is somewhat square: taking history and Russian language classes at Western, dreaming of a global environmental awakening. These days, Amy can be found riding Baker's powder waves on weekends, often with her mother, Gail, 45, and her Aunt Bunnie, 41. Not for profit, pride or social statement. For fun.

She does not know where her life is going - only that she will get there with her snowboard, not on it.

She is certain of two things. One, she will have company. Snowboarding - whether a lifestyle, a peer-pressured indulgence or just an occasional warm embrace with thin air and deep snow - is here to stay.

The other is that none of this will really matter. There is no going back. Symphony or cacophony, crowds or no crowds, once you have tasted Shuksan powder on a clear day, riding a snowboard down a mountainside no longer is optional. Like blinking and breathing and getting wet in January, it is something you just do. You and the mountain. Together.

Ron Judd is the outdoors reporter for The Seattle Times. Fred Nelson is a Times photo editor. --------------------------------------------------------------- Snowboarding, 101

The look -- Loose-fit, high-strung post-nuclear. Various inflammatory combinations of wool, cotton flannel, Gore-Tex. What lumberjacks and jills would look like if they fought fires on off hours. Outrageous: Good. Neon: As if! Snow down pants: Yikes. Long coats: Essential. Popular clothing brand name: "Stoopid." Enough said.

The gear. -- Board: ("stick"), wood or foam core. Average price: $300 to $500. Choice of wild, cryptic graphics. Hot local board: Lib Tech Doughboy Shredder. -- Boots: Freestylers wear softies, such as Sorels, racers and carvers hard-shell plastic for better torque. -- Hat: Tubehead style "Mambosock," with string closure at top to irrigate cranium, vent angst. Also good: polar fleece beret, jester or "scrooge" hat.

The talk -- Surf Nazi-reggae-valley-rap, with slight mountain drawl and touch of bait-boy candor. Most excellent terms: "Goofy Foot" (riding with right foot forward); "Fakie" (riding backwards); "Frontside mute stiffy" (type of jump); "Pipe" (halfpipe, a snow trough for jibbing and jumping).

Essentials -- Duct tape. -- Advil. -- Moosehead.

Stuff: -- Best reason to stop, breathe, ponder future, plunge ahead anyway: "STOP - CLIFF" signs. -- Best corporate slogan: "Rage in peace" - Mistral snowboards. -- What all riders really wanna know: "How can Clinton smoke in the pipe if he never inhaled?"