Chris Mountjoy’s Determined Hump Day

Chris Mountjoy’s story in snowboarding started in the early days like so many. He discovered snowboarding on the East Coast, went pro, moved to Summit County, and spent years traveling and partying his face off. Back then, you see, being a pro meant no responsibilities other than to be a party animal and shred as hard as you could. After a little trouble a few too many run ins with the law, Chris moved to Montana in search of a mellower way to live the pro snowboard life, much to the chagrin of his sponsors. But determined, he made it happen, and eventually transitioned into a park builder at Moonlight Basin (the back side of Big Sky.) He worked hard to build a park from nothing, bring events to the middle of nowhere, and otherwise keep the snowboard hype going. And then, a couple years ago, he got sick. Really sick. But Chris is not one to give up easy, and this is his story.

How has cancer changed your outlook on life?

I don’t worry about petty stuff anymore. Stuff like bills, being too cool for school, money. Stuff that was such a big deal in my life, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s just about living every day and even more so snowboarding. I think it’s made me a better person for sure.

What do you mean by that?

I don’t take life for granted and I’m way easier on people. When I meet people or if I don’t know somebody I might have been more judgmental in the past. Now I just take everything with a more laid back point of view. I think I give people the benefit of the doubt more, where as before I was more judgmental on everybody. I look at it now and think it’s horrible to think that I was like that, but I was. I think many people probably are that way, it took something like cancer to wake me up to that.

Mellow spaceage cancer treatments.

What kind of cancer do you have? How did you find out?

I spend a whole year trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I had major pains in my head and my face. They thought that I had a disease called trigeminal neuralgia, which is more of an older women’s disease. It’s a nerve in your head that causing shooting pains through your face. For months we were thinking that I had that and couldn’t figure out why I had it. I was seeing dentists and face specialists and a regular doctor for pain maintanence. I was trying to snowboard and the pain was just phenomenal, taking me over. Every day I would succumb to head pain, I don’t want to say headaches, it was more like facial pains. It’s nicknamed the suicude disease because people actually kill themselves over it.

For months we thought that I had that and then at a doctors visit, the doctor saw my fingernails were clubbing. That’s when your fingernails take on a upside-down bowl type of shape, which generally means you have some sort of lung or heart disorder. He went and did X-rays of my lungs and compared it to X-rays from 7 months prior, when I was building the skatepark in Big Sky and we thought I had an athsma attack. With one X-ray you don’t really see much, but since we had to two, when the radiologist put both of them together, he was able to see something was growing and changing the formation of my lungs. He ordered me to have a cat scan and when we did that we saw the tumor.

Skateboarding saves. 

At that point with my family history I just assumed, ok, I probably have cancer. They went ahead and did a biopsy, which was absolutely horrible – they stick you with 15 inch needles and take samples out from inside you. Within 48 hours I got the phone call and I had lung cancer. I didn’t waste any time, they put me in the cancer center immediately, did a pretty aggressive 40 day treatment that consisted of 2 sessions of chemo that were 6 days in a row each. And every day I did radiation. People don’t really know what that is, but Chemo is a drug that’s pumped into your body through your veins and basically poisons you. Radiation is like being set up under a giant laser machine and then they zap you.

I came out of the first rounds of the treatment pretty clean, the cancer was in remission, but within 90 days I had a new tumor that occurred in my brain. When that happened things got real scary, real fast. I started having hallucinations and I was running into walls and driving off the road. I would go to set something on the table and drop it on the floor, but in my brain i thought I set it on the table. Pretty scary. I went into another treatment of radiation that zapped that out of my brain.

From there, I was confident and I tried to just get back to snowboarding and I caught pneumonia. I was on a ventilator for oxygen and I would try to go snowboarding and have breath or cardio whatsoever. I’d take a couple runs and then run straight home to the oxygen machine and try to catch my breath. I would do DJ gigs with the oxygen machine in the bar. I was pretty die hard about trying to live this normal life, but I wasn’t normal by any means! That case of pneumonia lasted pretty much all through last snowboard season and that led me into a blood infection. I was just one hit after another. Just keep trying to get up and live a normal life when you’re just taking blow after blow. The blood infection was one of the worst things I faced the entire time, more deadly than the cancer itself. Luckily I fought that away and just keep on kicking it.

Better cancer treatment. 

Damn. I know you said you don’t worry about money, but all this treatment is obviously expensive. How do you manage?

A lot of charity. Cancer foundations when you’re really in trouble. Medicaid and medicare, which is a horrible game because you can’t have any money to qualify to get help for something like that. It’s such a catch 22 in this country. Basically you go broke, and then they help you.

Speaking of charity, tell me about Strap in for Life.

That’s a great cancer organization that revolves around snowboarding. The goal is to help people with cancer and friends and families affected by cancer by giving them the chance to escae reality by going to the mountain.

Have they helped you out?

Yeah they definitely have, and I like to do awareness stuff with them and Grind for Life as well. That’s a cancer foundation that’s aimed at helping people that need to travel for treatment. For me I have to go 120 miles round trip just to get my treatment. So there’s a large cost involved with just getting treatment.

Glory days!

Do you think being able to continue to snowboard as helped you to stay up and be healthier?

Oh yeah, for sure. Mentally and physically. The physical activity of snowboarding is great. The more physical and the more normal life you lead, the better chances you have at beating this horrible disease. Everything involved, you have to complete a task and you feel like you’ve accomplished something. You spend a lot of time with cancer sleeping and exhausted from the treatments. That leads to just a lot of sitting around, so without snowboarding, I would spend a lot more time just sitting around and probably getting sicker instead of getting healthier. It’s too bad we can’t just beat this disease. We do great at stopping the disease once they have it, but we don’t stop people from getting it. Too much money involved.

How long have you lived in Montana?

I’m from Maryland originally. I’ve been in Montana 15 years now, by way of Summit County. I spent the hey-days of snowboarding there. But I thought I got to a place that was rural with mountains compared to Maryland, but basically I figured out that I got to a place that was a big city with mountains, so I decided to relocate from Colorado to Montana. I got there and all the snowboard companies I was riding for said, “what are you doing in Montana? You can’t have sponsors and be in Montana.”

So snowboarding was a career?

Yeah, it was definitely my career path at the time and you do get a whole lot of, there’s no people in Montana, you can’t carry a career there and I was determined to be like, well, bullshit. It led to a lot of traveling, trips to Cali and Oregon and Colorado, where the big centers are. But I just maintained home base in Montana and ultimately I was determined to prove that you can live here. It’s just beautiful here, and more laid back and better living and less developed. Maybe some people don’t think that’s ideal, but for me it was.

Duh life. 

Who were some of your sponsors over the years? Are any of them still in business?

(laughs) For sure. More recently Dragon has been a huge help, 686 was really there for me for years, 32 for a long set of years. Older sponsors – is Planet Earth still around? They were really good to me for years. You go further back and there were like 500 snowboard companies. Clockwork Snowboards, Shot Snowboards. Any snowboarder that’s been in it for more than 5 years could probably ramble a hell of a list. Grenade, those guys were always really good to me, Matt especially. Drop’s been behind me for 15 years now. It’s been so long, I don’t even remember if I’ve probably been with almost everyone a little bit. It’s funny.

How long ago did you start your own brand?

I decided around 2009 that I was going to go for it. Everything was falling into place. I was building park at the time, and I saw a resurgence of rider owned companies, and I started to research American made board brands. I started to see some of the American brands building other people’s boards at the time, and I saw the door opening. I just decided to go for it, the next thing I knew I had a legal case on my back from a candy company that I probably still can’t even name.

Was it the Mountjoy name or the graphics?

They didn’t like the Mountjoy name, with what so many Mountjoy’s have been made fun of over the years and called another name that’s very similar to a certain candy bar. With Facebook I’ve met all these other Mountjoy’s around the country and I’ve come to find out that it’s very common to be made fun of and called that name. Sadly if I say it I’ll probably get myself in trouble! I think I came home from SIA and had a letter in my mailbox that said, you’re getting sued for your snowboard, stop it. It took about a year and a half and then with the help of a family friend I was able to beat the case without destroying the boards. I can still sell the boards that I have, which are very limited at this point, but I can’t make any more. I sort of got away with it.

How many boards did you make?

I changed the graphics after that, and between the two runs I made close to 200 boards. I still have some of both of the graphics. The candy ones are very precious to me because of all that, and probably will be some sort of collector’s item if I ever get anywhere before cancer takes me.

Lifts are for jerks. 

You were “in it” during the golden age of the 90s. Do you think people who were born later missed out? Will it come back around?

I think right now it is coming back around. I think it’s very similar. Just over the last 5 years it’s really come back around to less corporate, more rider-owned. You see lots of people in general trying to start their own brands. Lots of riders that have just decided to start their own companies. Everybody probably takes a beating in the pocket book, but it’s gonna go through cycles. You see it in skateboarding for sure too. You have a resurgence of small companies and then it goes back to the corporations. Skateboarding has a longer history where you can see a pattern but I think we’re back and I don’t think anybody’s missed out by any means! Now a days we have much more snowboarder friendly resorts, and more parks and better gear. Maybe it’s gotten better. I feel lucky that I am still involved. There are so many people that either outgrew it, or just got to old or over it.

I think it’s easy to get burnt out on, sadly. 

Oh, I’ve been burnt out for sure, but it was always such a passion. I grew up riding on the east coast and for me, being this little kid, and having this passion of a board sport was everything. First it was skateboard and that evolved into snowboarding, but ever since the beginning I would look at myself with the silly name Mountjoy and think, well, there’s Bert Lamar and Tom Sims and Chuck Barfoot and Jake Burton. When you’re a little kid, you just think they’re brands but at some point you realize, woah, those are real people. I had the realization that I was Mountjoy and they would never have anything on me. It’s like a dream. I guess I’m lucky that I was even able to get it off the ground, some people never reach that point.

That’s pretty cool for sure, having boards with your name on em.

There’s lots of pro riders, and they all have their names on em.

Well, not anymore…

It has changed, you’re right. It’s changed a lot. I guess I don’t really think about that, coming through the mid 90s. There were hundreds of pro models. It’s interesting that it has changed like that. When there were 500 companies you had to have pro riders. The salaries weren’t big, but everybody did get paid. I almost think MFM might have been the last wave of pros. His branding was great. I spent a lot of time with him, snowboarding and skateboarding.

Tell me a good MFM story.

The stuff that sticks out in my mound is getting back from Vegas trips, driving all night and coming into Summit County with four feet of snow. Not sleeping and just going out filming on this ridiculous powder day that doesn’t even exist anymore. We’d just pull into the parking lot with a crew of riders and a camera and just go rip it up. Those are some of the best days I can remember.

Park making memories. 

What else have you done over the years? You were the Moonlight park supervisor, right?

Yeah I was the director, the man behind the park for close to 6 years. I fabricated all the jibs from a pile of metal and did things like organizing the events that came to town. I did lots of work with PB & Rail Jam – bringing this side of snowboarding to Montana that we didn’t have. Montana is amazing for free riding and mountains and powder, but we just didn’t have the scene. I guess through my experiences of Colorado and California and Oregon I just always saw this thing that we missed in Montana. I played a major role in doing all I could to bring that here. And for the years that we did it we had a great park, great events. The PB & Rail Jam always stood out in my mind because it was free for the kids and just a giant party. It was very fulfilling to make that happen. And when I first started my brand I traveled with the tour. I always loved those guys and what they brought to snowboarding. How they spent all this money on a nationwide tour. I’m really glad I could play a part in bringing those things to Montana. We don’t have that anymore, it’s come and gone that fast.

Some people like not having a scene, right?

You’re right. That’s Montana. That sorta sums it up. But I’m still determined. I’m not gonna change the location of myself or my brand because of that. I’m always gonna be from Big Sky Montana, cause it’s the best mountain that I’ve ever been to… that has lifts.