18-03-2025
- Politics
- National Geographic
How snowboarder Jeremy Jones is fighting to keep our winters cold
A pioneer of big-mountain snowboarding, Jeremy Jones watched as helicopters made remote backcountry runs suddenly reachable, enabling access to lines that had once been unfathomably remote. 'We would get dropped in the mountains and link up these runs where you hike and ride and hike and ride,' he says. 'I was like, Oh my God, this is where I need to be.' But he had misgivings about the means of ascent. 'I knew, when I got in a helicopter, I was taking up resources,' he says. He began hiking up mountains instead and found the experience exhilarating. 'The snowboard is a tool to challenge yourself to connect with nature. When you strip away the machines, the tool is much more effective.'
Jones became a splitboarder, ascending slopes on skis that could be combined into a snowboard for the ride back down, and eventually created his own company to manufacture equipment for the pursuit. He resolved to use the cleanest available materials and to give one percent of sales to environmental organizations, but he couldn't find any nonprofits in the snow sports world focused on climate change solutions. So, in 2007, he launched his own: Protect Our Winters, aptly known as POW, a nod to fresh powder.
The group's alliance of elite athletes now includes Jessie Diggins, the gold-medal-winning cross-country skier; Jim Morrison, a world-class ski-mountaineer; and Tommy Caldwell, one of the greatest rock climbers on the planet. Together they represent the interests of what POW calls the Outdoor State, the millions of Americans who consider the outdoors a central part of their lives. It's a diverse group—about 31 percent Republican, 40 percent Democrat, and 29 percent independent, according to a 2019 market research study commissioned by POW—and Jones is fond of saying that the mountains aren't blue or red but purple. Among POW's trickiest challenges is convincing conservatives that climate change legislation will help save the ski resorts and snow sports they love. 'Certainly, we're going to find people that fight against us,' Morrison says. But, he explains, 'we want to get outside the tribe and make a difference.'
