Let’s get one thing out of the way right here: Skimo isn’t cool.
By association, Splitmo shouldn’t be cool either. In theory, it’s the opposite of what most of us hop on a snowboard for. The power hiking, the jostling around at the starting line, the spandex. It goes against what we value most as snowboarders, which is style.
With that said, I guess now is as good of a time as ever to tell you that I will be participating in Last Skier Standing this year.
For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s an uphill skiing race. Well, kind of. Don’t actually call it a race. More like an event, where the goal is simple:
Skin one lap uphill, and ride one lap downhill. Every hour without taking any breaks. It’s over when the last skier is standing…and then does one final lap.
“It’s one of my favorite events of all time…People are just going to be suffering for like three days straight,” said Adam Jabber on the Out of Office podcast.
Massachusetts’ Jack Murphy did 45 laps last year on a splitboard. That broke his previous record of 37 laps, which he set just a year earlier.
The event goes on for days at a time. Last year, Justin Lagasse won it with 76 laps. In 2022, Brody Leven won with 65 laps. That means the two skinned up and skied down for 76 hours and 65 hours consecutively.
This year’s version of the contest will start at 10 a.m. on February 7, 2025. It’s the sixth edition of the event, and it will be held at Black Mountain of Maine in Rumford. Participants, like myself, will go up and down the Allagash Trail until they can’t anymore. The course is approximately 1.5 miles up and 1,200 feet of gain.
I got into splitboarding for the exact same reason so many others did: the Covid-19 pandemic hit, rules at ski resorts were weird, and I was tired of paying for a season’s pass, only to not be able to use it. That was in the winter of 2020. The following summer, I bought my first split setup off of a guy in the south shore of Massachusetts who was cleaning out his garage. A little over four years later, I’ve become a splitboarding apologist.
So I’m participating in Last Skier Standing for a few reasons. I want to push myself. I want an excuse to splitboard and eat hot dogs all day and night. Mostly, though, I want to experience the New England ski community coming together to put on such a niche, awesome, ridiculous event.
Outside of Snowboarder, I work in public radio, so it’s only fitting that a podcast is what sold me on the dream of Last Skier Standing. The Dirtbag Diaries got me hooked with their retelling of Brody Leven and Ben Eck’s 65-hour battle for the crown in 2022. I was hooked by the storytelling, but what truly got me was the sense of community surrounding the event that Andrew Drummond and Monte McIndoe have curated.
Check it out below.
I was once a member of that tight-knit community in New England. I've since moved to North Carolina, where we've got our own thing going on. It's fantastic, but it's definitely more park laps than splitboarding. It will be nice to head back home for a bit. I just hope the Allagash Trail is as welcoming as my friends and family are upon return.
So here I go. My board bag is packed with multiple pairs of gloves, headlamps, socks, and puffy coats. I’m flying with bags of beef jerky for the second time in my life. I booked a hotel room that I don’t intend to use.
No matter how many laps I’m able to complete, no matter how many blisters I get, I can promise the readers one thing— You won’t catch me dead in spandex out there.
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