Tag: Noah Salasnek

To help Noah Salasnek in his fight against cancer, please visit and support this GoFundMe fundraiser here.

Words: Jesse Huffman

It’s hard to calculate influence, especially when the digital age has sent snowboarding’s attention span spiraling with all you can eat, on-demand content. As if that’s not hard enough to cut through, just consider that at one point your average pro snowboarder had a pretty good chance of wearing hard boots and rocking head to toe neon. Yes, long before the internet, snowboarding looked, well, pretty bad. Talk about influence— without Noah Salasnek, who knows where snowboarding would be?

The Nor-Cal local grew up riding ramps, and by the late 80’s was a legit pro vert skater, sponsored by none other that H-Street. It only made sense that when he got into snowboarding, style and technical progression became his benchmark. Soon, Salasnek was talking to Mike ‘Mack Dawg’ McEntire— then a skate filmmaker— into filming him snowboarding. Before that, Mack Dawg wasn’t interested in anything having to do with mountain. Together, they sparked a revolution of sorts.

In seminal Mack Dawg films like “New Kids on the Twock” and “Pocahontas,” Salasnek brought a skate-inspired attack to the slopes, bonking, buttering, tweaking and spinning his way to being one of the pioneers of “new school” snowboarding. By 1992, when the Hatchet brothers and Standard Films set their lenses on Salasnek for “TB2: A New Way of Thinking”, the former pro skater had a polished, loose and ultra boned out style across the whole mountain. “The Salaz” had mastered transitions of all degrees— incorporating cliffs, lines and natural takeoffs into his video park just a fluidly as he ripped the burgeoning terrain parks and of course halfpipes. 

Throughout the 90’s, Salasnek’s presence was heavy, and his riding progressed even further with stomped rotations off massive Tahoe drops, and first descents down sheer Alaskan spines. As any kid from that era can attest, you just had to open Transworld Snowboarding and you’d see a Salasnek still image or sequence that burned the era’s blazing temperature of progression into your mind. From his signature deck with skate truck graphics to his library of video parts and magazine photos, Salasnek defined skate-influenced riding for a whole new generation.

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Read more at http://snowboarding.transworld.net/photos/1000301468/#4hQzAl3xkx23Gf5J.99