Art Park | AR4T

January 7, 2011

Words by Torrey Cook, I AM Snowboarding curator

Mammoth Art Park is the first of it’s kind. Even on paper and through facebook photo postings, it’s interesting and fun. Art Park is a sculpture garden you can interact with made up of down-flat-down rails, gallery rails, curved rails, bomb drops, wall rides, etc. etc. etc. A playground built for the best and brightest creatives to showcase their work – on the art side and the snowboarding side.

But the real experience is testing it. Is it big and scary? Is it just for snowboarders? Is it only good for one jet through and then off to other parts of the mountain?

Of course I’m a bit biased, the first Art Park was built from the work of I AM SNOWBOARDING, an art exhibition for Jeff Anderson – snowboarding’s iconic muse – which traveled the world in 2009-2010. As curator I was fortunate to be involved with each step from inception and am forever in awe with how the art is able to touch so many people. The very idea of the art becoming three dimensional – in the form of a terrain park no less – put me over the moon.

Start of December, 2010: Josh Chauvet, Mammoth Mtn’s Action Sports Brand Manager, called with the idea of Art Park and had the full support of Mark Clausen, Mammoth CFO. They wanted it open by Mammoth’s annual Night of Lights weekend. I said I AM SNOWBOARDING. We had less than a month to do it.

After weeks of non-stop work by a tight knit crew, it was the celebration of the opening of the JLA Art Park. People were making the trek. Following his sold-out show at AR4T Space, Jamie Lynn was set to fly in from Seattle.

December 17, 2010: my husband Brian and I drove up the 395 through rain turning to snow to Mammoth. 4pm Jamie called and said his leg into Mammoth had been cancelled and he was in San Jose. He had lined up some friends and they were going to make the drive to Mammoth through Lake Tahoe. I’ve donethat drive before on dry roads and it’s a windy one through the mountains. I asked him if he wanted to wait and see if there was a flight the next day. He said no. They were ready to roll. I asked him if they had four-wheel drive? He said no. Two wheel drive Van with chains. They were coming. I kept my mouth shut. Their minds were made up.

9pm We got to the Village, it was dumping snow. That night MammothUnbound hosted an opening party at Hyde. An Unbound crew of ten people set out one of the big rails and two billboards out front. They were more than huge and looked awesome.

Hyde was warm and dry and our friends Matt and Meghan Baker got a table with bottles. You know how this part goes… Idanced a little too muchwith the girls on the bar seats and next thing you know closed the bar down. 2:30am Text to Jamie: they had just hit the 395. They made it through Tahoe but still had a long ways to go to Mammoth. These are the adventures to write songs (and stories) about.

December 18^th: Jamie and company pulled into Mammoth at six am to Billy and Sarah Anderson’s house – just in time to see the start of a storm that would drop seventeen feet in three days. There was some riding but for the most part the mountain was closed, too much snow too fast. No Art Park could be ridden this trip. No worries. Plan B! Take the crew up to the garage at Mammoth to see the rails. Town police had the road blocked in the Village at Mammoth – no cars going up. But that didn’t faze Billy. He took some back roads through the Knolls which spit us out just upwind of the blockade. No one noticed we had made it round and we were on our way.

The garage is warm and dry and houses all sorts of fun things like snow cannons, gigantic buses, and of course, the birth of rail gardens. We got to see the art – now in the form of over-head-high steel skeletons and huge painted sheets of plywood. It was awesome, but just a tease.

December 19^th: The storm carried on, and with Christmas approaching, the two-wheel-drive van crew left around 3pm to make the trek back. They went south to avoid the Tahoe snow and ran into a landslide just on the wrong side of Bakersfield. 5am they landed back in SF, and that’s a story you’ll have to ask Jamie for.

We followed suit, not getting to ride the park but vowing to come back. Christmas morning we got up to Santa in our house in SoCal, and that afternoon we saw the first pictures of people riding Art Park. Needless to say I felt a little tinge of jealousy that I wasn’t there with the inaugural posse.

I got my chance to ride Art Park on New Years day, the first day of 2011. With a foot of new snow on the hill from the night before and still falling, and having only a few hours before making the trek back down to So Cal, I set out to finally see – on snowboard – what Dustin del Giudice – Mammoth fabricator and artist – had created. Orange IAM beanie, check. JLA Volcom jacket, check. JLA Grenade mitts, check.

Ready to go I headed up the Village Gondola to Chair 16 with Brian Cook and Peter Stow. Two guys heavily involved with I AM SNOWBOARDING. I hate to admit, but I was grumbling about not getting to see Art Park when the sun was shining and that my first layer pants were gapping just over my boot leaving my shin cold under my pants and blah blah blah. We got on the chair and took off. About a third of the way up and hunched over to avoid the wind and snow, I glanced to my right into the trees. Instantly my mood lightened. You can see the Art Park from the chair! Bright brilliant artwork out there through the trees! And not just one feature but several! Like the biggest and best scavenger hunt you’ve ever been on.

We got to the top of the chair and worked our way down to the entrance to Art Park where the Stormriders and Gonz paintings were larger than life billboards welcoming us. Round Robin, the run is called. We started to ride down and explore. The first things you come across are the two gallery rails. We noticed right away that each feature comes with a sign that talks about the artist and the work – just like being in an actual gallery. The features are HUGE no doubt. But we quickly realized that the run is long and rolling, wide enough to ride or ski through with plenty of room to move and watch other people. Bomb drops intermixed with small hips and butter boxes.

We got to the bottom of the run and I wanted to do it again and again. My day of moping about my pant leg turned into moping because after two hours of riding the Art Park we had to get in the car and go. I wanted more! Guess that settles whether or not I should get a pass to Mammoth.

But we will be back to Mammoth soon, and after a few months Art Park will change from I AM to new art and be a new exploration all over again. I will continue to look online and live through pictures and stories about other people’s times in Art Park. And when I look at those pictures I might be a little jealous, but I know that soon I’ll be the one posting runs to the jealousy of others.

Life in the Art Park is just that good.