Out There: Rise of the dirt star

SNOWMASS VILLAGE - There’s almost nothing in mountainboarding that Jason Lee doesn’t have his hand in.

At the U.S. Open Mountainboarding Championships in Snowmass this summer, Lee designed the jerseys for most of the team riders. He shot the photos. He made the medals to award to the winners. He lugged along the repair kit, the spare parts, the tent for selling hats, T-shirts and boards. He took the iPod to blast through speakers between races. He even took the giant launch ramp that cranks up from the roof of his trailer for the Big Air contest.

“I’ve got this stuff pretty figured out,” said Lee, 39, as he raised the ramp. “I’ve been doing it awhile.”

Oh, he also invented the sport of mountainboarding, which is essentially riding a skateboard with big, knobby tires on dirt. And he founded the first and largest mountainboarding company, MBS, based in Colorado Springs, in 1993 with longtime friend Patrick McConnell.

Since then, Lee has won the national championship five times. He has become one of the true ambassadors of the sport, drawing crowds by pulling stunts such as a 22-foot backflip over a pit of alligators.

“He’s pretty much the godfather of the sport,” said Brandon Johanns, 21, a racer from Colorado Springs competing in boardercross at the U.S. Open. “I mean, it’s amazing, he started the sport, and he’s still winning races.”

Ask any of the kneepad-wearing, dirt-smudged riders who traveled to Snowmass from all over the country for the three-day event, and they agree: Lee is the godfather.

“He put this together,” said Jereme Leafe, a 23-year-old who is one of the top pros in the world (and sponsored by MBS). “If it wasn’t for Jay (Lee), we wouldn’t have all this.”

NOT QUITE A CRAZE

Mountainboarding hasn’t caught on as quickly as early riders and promoters thought it would — the U.S. Open attracted only about 60 riders — but it’s gaining speed.

It started, most agree, when Lee, who grew up in Colorado Springs, moved to California and met McConnell.

They were both die-hard snowboarders.

“We were sitting around lamenting the long summers because we wanted to carve powder,” McConnell said.

They decided to do something about it. So, in 1992, they cobbled together an all-terrain skateboard. The tires were burly rubber from a dolly. The trucks had salvaged engine valve springs that acted as shock absorbers. The deck was a long plywood plank reinforced with a steel frame.

“We really designed it to mimic the feeling of carving on a snowboard, and that’s what it did,” said McConnell. “It was awesome, man. We were living in San Francisco at the time, and we rocked that whole town on those things.”

For years they made a few boards in their spare time, giving them to friends. Then, in 1996, they decided to try to go big with it, and the timing was right.

In the boom times of the late 1990s, when extreme sports were Gen X marketing gold, mountainboarding was seen as a no-brainer. Buzz about the new boards quickly landed Lee and McConnell in national newspapers and magazines. They started shipping nationally. They had commercials and magazine ads. In 2000, the pair sold the company to a much larger conglomeration that wanted a piece of the action.

Both men stayed on to do sales, marketing and product development.

“It was a real roller coaster ride,” Lee said. “The company was bought and a lot of money was sunk into it. People really thought it was going to boom, but it didn’t.”

Initially, mountainboarding was easy to sell to shop owners and investors by telling them all those snowboarders crowding the slopes were jonesing for a ride when the snow melted. Problem was, mountainboarding was a lot harder than snowboarding. Stopping was harder, landing a jump was harder, and the ground was much, much harder.

So, said Nancy Ng, one of few professional female mountainboarders, the sport got a stigma.

“Whenever you saw a mountainboard in an ad, it was always something really gnarly. One ad had a guy calling 911 before he got on his board. So people were like, ‘I’m not trying that,’” she said.

After an initial wave of interest, many shops stopped carrying the boards. REI, the largest outdoor sports retailer in the country, dropped mountainboards because of slow sales.

Even in Colorado Springs, birthplace of the sport, only a few shops carry them. Competitors have come and gone, but MBS has survived.

“At the beginning we said within 10 years we wanted 10 percent of snowboarders to own a mountainboard,” Lee said. “Obviously, that didn’t happen.”

With disappointing sales, MBS was sold in 2003 to Colorado Springs entrepreneur Marc Jenkins.

Sitting in MBS’s small, stripmall office recently, Jenkins said he didn’t go into mountainboards expecting huge growth.

“We keep our dreams big but manage the reality,” he said.

Not that reality is so bad. The company expects to sell from 10,000 to 15,000 boards this year in about 200 retail shops in 30 countries. The boards, originally made in Colorado Springs, are now made in China. A recent made-for-TV Disney movie about mountainboarding, called “Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board,” caused a tsunami of interest among young kids. MBS has sold out of its kids starter boards and is scrambling to fill more orders.

Growth is slow but steady, Lee said, and these days it is driven not by media buzz and big marketing budgets, but by “an organic, grass-roots type of ridership — kids getting their friends into it. It’s the young guys who are really driving the sport.”

TIGHT KNIT

For the riders who showed up at the U.S. Open in Snowmass, the size of the sport and future forecasts of growth don’t matter. Mountainboarding is a passion.

And if it’s a sport that has yet to go mainstream, all the better.

After winning a qualifying run in the Junior Boardercross, an event where four riders at a time weave down a course of jumps and banked turns, Josh Cole, 17, from Colorado Springs said he liked the sport’s small community.

“Part of the appeal is the size,” he said. “You can come to one of these events and be just starting, like me, and be here with the best in the world, and they know your name.”

Pro boarder Leafe agreed, smaller can be better. He’s also a pro snowboarder, but with the big fields of competitors on snow, he rarely gets a chance to shine.

“Here, I can throw a 720 off the ramp and win a competition,” he said. (That’s two full rotations.) “In snowboarding, I’d have to do some crazy kind of switch 1080.” (That’s three full rotations, starting backward.)

That’s changing though, as younger riders bring bigger, better tricks.

At Snowmass, new and old gave it their all. Lee made the final four in boardercross against riders a decade younger, but fell at the start and lost the chance to clinch another championship. The race was won by one of his team riders, Leon Robbins.

But winning didn’t seem to be the point. Riders hung around the course, even when not competing. They joked. They compared boards. They told crash stories. It was a rare chance to spend time with other mountainboarders.

“It’s more of a family reunion than a hard-core competition,” Lee said.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0223 or dave.philipps@gazette.com