This short film examines what it means to be a snowboarder who isn’t social media famous. Now I know what you may be thinking: Why even watch a film if the subject is cloutless? Well, he does fight fires, if that sweetens the deal for you. Snowboarder Joe Lax is not a household name and doesn’t want to be. Dark Horse explores exactly what that looks like.
Joe Lax at play. Photo: Screenshot
Documentary photographer Brad Slack discusses his subject’s elusive, quiet nature. The film opens in Slack’s studio, and we first see Lax through his lens. Then, we hear from fellow snowboarder Joel Loverin, who stumbled upon Lax’s enigmatic Instagram account.
Brad Slack examines a large-scale print of Joe Lax snowboarding. Photo: Screenshot
Whiskey Tahoe
Under the name Whiskey Tahoe, the account posted clip after clip snowboarding steep lines, all without any locations or personal information. Social media comments fill the screen with requests to know more — where is he, who is he?
He’s Joseph Donald Lax. Born to a Saskatchewan farming family, he left home as a teen. He went to Whistler, British Columbia, then a hub for snowboarding culture. There, film companies lurked, creating compilation tapes of the most impressive athletic feats. This is the culture Lax came up in.
But he wasn’t interested in going with the crowd. Lax gets up early, what he calls “psycho early,” to ensure he is the only one on the mountain. Often, he finds and rides new lines in places no one else dares to try.
Joe Lax and Joel Loverin make their way up a slope early in the morning. Photo: Screenshot
Part-timer
Being an underground legend is technically only a hobby, though. By day, he’s a firefighter.
“I never saw snowboarding as a career pursuit,” Lax explains. He started firefighting as a means to support his time in the mountains. Work hard in the summer, and take the winter off to snowboard. Over the years, though, he’s worked his way up to an operations chief. He has seen fire season grow fiercer and fiercer, threatening the mountains at the center of his life.
It is “tough to watch” fires sweep across the landscape with increasing fury, says Lax. Photo: Screenshot
Something else came along, too, to threaten the primacy of snowboarding — a wife, Ulla Clark, and two daughters. Instead of choosing between family and the mountains, he brought his family to the mountains. The four of them live in a cabin, and he taught his daughters to snowboard and go on backwoods adventures.
Lax snowboards purely for the love of it and has built his life around it.
“it’s ’till the wheels fall off,” he promises. His friend Joel thinks they’ll be riding the slopes together as old men.
