After getting up at 5:30 in the morning and stretching, Jeremy Jones sits in his office seated in front of a lifetime of books. He is journaling. The man who is known for skiing the world’s steepest, most technically demanding snowboard descents has begun his daily writing process.
For the next two hours, Jones — who has arguably single-handedly rewrote the limits of big-mountain snowboarding — engages in a different kind of high-stakes situation. He hammers away at a manuscript, a rigorous daily program that he treats with the exact same tactical precision he once reserved for dropping into near-vertical Alaskan spines.
“In the mountains we’re all students; nobody has got it figured out,” Jones told me over a FaceTime call. “But like a big line, you break it down into sections and then just focus on each one of those sections.”
Watching Jeremy Jones ride in any of his iconic snowboard films like Deeper, Further, Higher, anyone can see that he is a clear pioneer of modern snowboarding. But when you read his work, it becomes apparent that Jones is more than just a gnarly rider — he is a student of the mountain who is still trying to decode its mysteries.
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Jones is well-acquainted with fear in his profession, but when he set out to write his book The Art of Shralpinism, he was greeted with an unfamiliar apprehensiveness. The mountain had never asked for his credentials, but the blank page sitting on his desk did. So he approached it the only way he knew how: by riding it like a big line.
When looking at a consequential line, Jones is studying the snowpack. He is meticulously scouring every feature on the mountain through binoculars and satellite imagery, noting every change of slope angle and mind-surfing every turn that he’s going to make. For him writing a book is no different, and so he broke the project down into sections. He built an outline, placed bullet points beneath it, and resolved to fill in that outline one day at a time. Along the way, he discovered just how a disciplined two hours a day, executed with consistency, eventually leaves a writer standing with a finished book in their hand.
In the The Art of Shralpanism, Jones hammers in the importance of understanding the fundamentals of avalanche safety when it comes to recreating in the mountains. “Everything I learned I learned in an Avalanche Level 1 class.” Jones said. “Those basic fundamentals are so critical when it comes to the mountains.” His ultimate hope for the book’s legacy is simply to help people connect with the mountains on a deeper level, allowing them to achieve their mountain dreams safely.
This obsession operates as a necessary counterweight to extreme winter sports cultures like the one found in Chamonix, where a legacy of extreme risk has become uniquely normalized. There is really no other sport in the world, save perhaps for BASE jumping, where a community has collectively accepted such a heavy baseline of danger. In these high-alpine cultures, ego becomes the most lethal hazard a rider can pack. True humility is the only defense, and Jones stresses that the most critical skill in the mountains is often the discipline of subtraction — knowing what terrain to cross off the list and deciding what you are explicitly not riding that day. But the only catch is you have to have the discipline to stick true to your decision in the heat of the moment, when the very dangerous terrain you said you weren’t going to ride is now suddenly glowing in front of you in a coat of fresh, untouched powder.
At the time of our conversation in June 2025, Jones had been focused on a new piece of writing, and was currently flirting with the working title Dance with Heaven or Hell. The project began as a series of raw journal entries that slowly coalesced into an exploration of the terrifying duality of snow. He muses on the absolute beauty of a “field of lust” — trillions of individual snowflakes, composed of ninety percent air, so light that riding through them “feels like flying,” in his words. Yet, in a single, volatile instant, that weightless beauty can transform into a monster violent enough to tear down old-growth forests, reshape the geography of the earth, and kill everything in its path.
To Jones it is a level of witchcraft, a profound natural power that serves as his ultimate fuel, leaving him solely powered by nature as his central power source and the space where his best thinking occurs. For Jones, sports like snowboarding, surfing, and mountain biking are ultimately what he calls the “Idiot’s Guide to the Present Moment,” where the sheer mechanics of moving through nature force a meditative, involuntary arrival in the immediate now. His advice to the next generation of riders and writers alike is rooted in that same surrender to the process. To young riders, the mandate is simple: first and foremost, live to ride another day. To young writers, his counsel is equally liberating: write like nobody is ever going to read it, encouraging creators to get to the other side of their brain, embrace the journey, and let it take them for a ride — because in the end, the ultimate outcome is entirely irrelevant.
Thousands of miles away from the snowpack, Brazilian big-wave pioneer Maya Gabeira applies a similar discipline to her creative work, turning to writing to process the steep trajectory of her life on the edge and bridge her reality with a literary audience. Gabeira, who holds world records for riding the largest waves ever surfed by a woman at Nazaré, Portugal, discovered her voice during the quiet stillness of the pandemic. “Literally, the pandemic,” Gabeira says on a video call. “I had time on my hands, and I had the vision to write picture books.” Following early children’s titles like Maya Makes Waves, she quickly realized that long-form storytelling possessed its own demanding learning curve. “Writers do have a gift,” she admits. “It’s been harder than I could have expected.” Her process mirrors her physical preparation; she forms ideas while walking on coastal trails before writing in the morning. Her latest work, a young-adult memoir titled Beyond the Board, traces her evolution from an asthmatic teenager in Rio de Janeiro to leaving home at 17 with just a backpack. She wrote the initial manuscript quickly while staying in Indonesia, but set it aside for three years before finally revisiting and rewriting it under deadline. “It took a long time, took some wrong turns. I had to rewrite,” she told me. “But I love the message. That life is challenging, and sometimes painful, but it’s our actions and thoughts that will define our existence. Above all, we must believe in ourselves and follow our purpose.”
This creative pursuit serves as a vital sanctuary from a punishing physical regime. To survive 70-foot walls of winter water, Gabeira subjects herself to intense preparation involving the gym, tow surfing, paddling, and agonizing underwater breath-hold exercises. “I’m trying to be under with some expendable energy,” she explains. “It’s terrible — you feel like you’re gonna die.” That simulated terror became a literal reality during her infamous 2013 near-death accident at Nazaré, where she broke her ankle, went entirely unconscious in the surf, and stopped breathing before being resuscitated on the beach by her surfing partner. “It was definitely a huge learning curve for me,” she reflects. “Today I see Nazaré in a completely different way — I believe I see it much more safely today.”
Surviving that trauma sparked an incredible story of resilience. Rather than stepping away, Gabeira spent years rebuilding, eventually returning to Nazaré to shatter two distinct world records — including conquering the highest wave ever surfed by anyone during the 2019-2020 season. “The first one being four years after,” she says. “It was about not giving up. It is terrifying, but at the same time, you always feel like you can get a better wave. I haven’t peaked yet, I still have a lot to learn.” To manage a big-wave day, she relies heavily on a structured mental approach, channeling her experiences into a powerful evolution as a mental-health and women’s rights advocate. “A lot of focus. Let the instincts take leave, be present. I feel fear, I meditate, and I know my limits a little more.” That deep self-knowledge has been an essential shield when navigating a male-dominated sport. “There has been a lot of sexism,” Gabeira states bluntly. “I was often questioned — the first thing people would ask is, ‘What is she doing here?’” Because of those barriers, her wisdom for young women entering the heavy-surf arena comes with a deep humility: “Enjoy yourself, respect the ocean, believe in yourself — we are the only ones that know our own limits.”
For legendary rock climber Tommy Caldwell, the transition from the rock face to the keyboard required an almost industrial level of work ethic. When writing his critically acclaimed memoir The Push, Caldwell approached the process with the grueling stamina of a big-wall ascent on Yosemite’s El Capitan. “I set my alarm for 5 a.m. every day for a year,” Caldwell recalls over a phone call. “I wrote from 6 a.m. to noon, five days a week.” Seeking guidance, he reached out to author Jon Krakauer, who handed him a blunt, unromantic truth about the craft. “Krakauer told me it’s just like ditch digging — you gotta get in the ditch and dig a few feet every day.” To help shape the narrative, Caldwell brought on author and next door neighbor Kelly Cordes as a collaborator. Cordes, who was the editor of the American Alpine Journal, would go on long ski tours with Caldwell to talk through ideas, who would then return home to write out the pages while Cordes provided editorial feedback.
The process quickly transformed from a standard book project into an intense personal therapy experiment. Excavating his past — including being taken hostage by militants in Kyrgyzstan and his historic first free ascent of the Dawn Wall — proved to be a double-edged sword. “I won’t say I was better off for it; I became darker for a time,” Caldwell confesses. “I was so in my head, I wasn’t as good of a husband and father. There are parts I think back upon and kind of cringe, because your perspective changes constantly.” The sheer volume of work surprised him, proving exponentially more demanding than writing short articles, and he ultimately gave up climbing for an entire year to finish the manuscript. “I feel like I aged maybe 10 years in that year,” he says, though he adds with a laugh that once the book was done, he felt like he got seven of those years back. Today, he still relies on physical movement as a creative catalyst, using audio dictation to journal while biking long distances. His advice to aspiring writers is simple: “Know you’re not gonna always feel it; you gotta keep moving forward.”
Professional ski mountaineer Cody Townsend views writing not just as an analytical exercise, but as an explicit act of rebellion against the modern digital landscape. As the mastermind behind The Fifty Project — an alpine campaign to climb and ski all fifty classic ski descents of North America — Townsend launched a long-form blog as a direct alternative to mainstream social media. “I have a complete disdain and hate for social media and what it’s doing to people and society,” Townsend says bluntly over the phone. “I wanted a platform to connect in a deeper way, to have conversations you can’t have on social media.” His blog features 2,000-word essays detailing intricate gear breakdowns, direct cultural commentary, and raw conversations overheard on the skin track, allowing for a more authentic, unvarnished line of communication with his audience.
Interestingly, Townsend finds the act of writing far less physically taxing than his exploits in the backcountry. “Writing is way easier for me; I can do it in a couple of hours. Bagging a big peak is a lot harder,” he says. However, Townsend acknowledges that the intellectual rigor of writing mirrors the objective challenges of a mountain face. “Writing forces you to actually challenge your own argument and back it up, just like a mountain challenges you.” As he prepares for even larger, more physically demanding “sufferfests” and alpine objectives in the seasons ahead, his writing continues to serve as a space to process the intense risks of his profession, including close calls and the deep layers of trust required between mountain partners. For Townsend, putting words on a screen is a way to ensure that the stories born in the wilderness retain their substance, offering a durable counterweight to a fleeting digital world.
There is a strange, inverse symmetry in the way these creators navigate their parallel lives. To survive the physical world, they must rely on absolute, unyielding logic — avalanche safety protocols, precise oxygen management, the cold math of climbing gear and friction. Yet to survive the internal world, they must surrender to the loose, unmapped witchcraft of the creative process, writing without too much focus on the result but rather to see where their brains will take them. The sports they choose remain a violent shortcut to a meditative state that forces a human being to stop thinking and start existing in the Here and Now. But the page demands the exact opposite: it requires them to sit still, to remember, to reflect at their past selves, and to back up their arguments against the heavy gravity of their own memories. For Jeremy Jones, Maya Gabeira, Tommy Caldwell, and Cody Townsend, the pen is not an escape from the mountain or the sea, but the only mirror capable of reflecting them clearly. The outcome of the book, like the summit itself, is mostly irrelevant. The salvation is instead found in the movement, in the daily consistency of the work, and in the enduring knowledge that the wildest landscapes —whether it be the biggest waves, the steepest lines, or the most daunting rock faces — they will ever have to conquer are the ones tucked quietly away inside themselves.
