Words: Sakeus Bankson 2018-12-10 15:31:09
If a mullet was a human being—and if it had a mustache—it would be Parker White. It’s not as random a comparison as it seems. Parker has been sporting both for years, a look that was in full effect when I met him in downtown Bellingham, WA in March of 2018. He and Level 1 Productions director Freedle Coty had just finished a week at Mt. Baker Ski Area after a trip to Europe, a refreshing change for what best friend Chris Logan calls the “Vermonter turned-Montanan, wishing he was Canadian.” The 27-year-old Parker moved to the Big Sky State in 2010, and he’s spent the majority of the past few winters skiing and shooting in British Columbia. If it sounds like a quiet existence, well, you’ve never met Parker White. “He’s one of the biggest characters and funniest people to be around,” Logan says. “He’s always laughing, and most the time he has a beer in hand and his shirt off, just lettin’ ’er breathe.” A seemingly improbable mix of Montucky brash and East Coast class, Parker is an enigma in the ski world. He burst onto the scene with Level 1’s 2010 film, Eye Trip, throwing frontflip double-tip grabs over a 110-foot channel gap in Sun Valley, ID. Four years later, he dipped from ski-film stardom into the relative obscurity of online edits to start a production company, the Big Picture, with Chris and Sean Logan. He actively avoids trade shows, competitions, or general self-promotion, a steadfastness that’s lost him some of his biggest sponsors but earned him an ultra-core fan base, industry-wide respect and an anti-hero-esque mystique. “It was overnight success, or as close as you can get,” Freedle says, referring to that 2010 Sun Valley session. “But it was more than just Chris and Parker hitting a big jump. It was their personalities. I think that’s the biggest draw with Parker: There are people who are good at what they do, and there are people who have a personality to match it, and Parker’s personality matches his skiing. It’s this X-factor, and it translates into everything he does.” And though he’ll tell you he’s lazy, he does a lot. He’s an avid hunter, rides a Harley, and races stock cars. He’s also a spokesman for the Montana Wilderness Association, a talented chess player, and he and Chris even cowrote the sign-off poem for the Big Picture’s finale, Lite Years. That’s Parker—he seems too outrageous to be true. Ask the best skiers in the world; better yet, ask the stock car racers, blacksmiths and occasional hobo in Bozeman, and they’ll tell you Parker is the real deal. He’s the business side of party, and you can’t help but be drawn into the festivities. “You know that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Ozff, when the secretary is talking to the principal on the phone?” Josh Berman, founder and owner of Level 1, says. “When she’s like, ‘the sportos, the waste-oids, the dweebs, the dickheads, they all adore him, they think he’s a righteous dude?’ Well, that’s Parker. One righteous dude.” It would be easy to mistake Parker for a Montana native. Between ski photos and shots of his dog, a pit-bull/basset-hound mix named Slim (“he’s a salamander crossed with a river otter”), his Instagram feed is a chronicle of hunting, lighting things on fire and riding his Harley. But he didn’t move to Bozeman until he was 20; he grew up in Dorset, VT, a town of some 2,000 people wedged between classic ski resorts like Mount Snow and Stratton Mountain Resort. Skiing was a White family tradition. Their mom raced professionally, only missing the US Ski Team by a few spots, and their father was an Olympic kayaker who ski raced collegiately. Alongside his older brother Vesa, and older sister Xan, Parker began skiing as soon as he fit into ski boots and joined the race team at age 6. He immediately hated it. He was color-blind, which made differentiating the gates difficult, and the drills kept him from jumping off little cliffs and jumps around the resort. When Parker was 9 years old, he convinced his dad to let him get into freestyle and spent the next few years competing in moguls and aerials. That’s when he met his “archenemy”: Chris Logan, a 12-year-old from nearby Mount Snow and Parker’s main competition. What started as a rivalry became a tight friendship, and when the two began classes at Mount Snow Academy in 2004, Parker lived part-time with the Logan family. It was the same year SAS Films released Wicked, which Parker still considers his favorite movie. Featuring Liam Downey, Tanner Rainville, Sean Decker, and Chris’s brother Sean Logan, Parker and Chris emulated everything they could from the film, from clothes to music to tricks. When a group of those athletes decided to move to Mammoth Mountain, CA in 2007, Parker convinced his parents to let him join—on the condition he take online courses for school. “It turns out a 16-year-old living in California with a houseful of 25-year-olds isn’t very conducive to education,” Parker says. “I didn’t do any of the courses, but didn’t hear anything from my high school over the summer. I showed up in Vermont for my senior year figuring no one would know, but when the counselor found out she gave me one month to complete second semester of junior year. That was a group effort—a whole bunch of friends and I spent a month just hanging out, doing my schoolwork.” Meanwhile, Parker was proving fully capable on the hill, where he developed a reputation for his subtle, ultra-smooth style. Both Chris and Parker had been sponsored by Rossignol since 2004, and Electric and Skullcandy since they’d met Jimbo Morgan at the Vermont Open a few years later. It was through Morgan and Rossignol team manager Matt Rihm that the duo ended up at Oregon’s Alpine Meadows in the spring of 2010, filming alongside the Level 1 crew. Berman and Freedle were impressed, so much so they invited the East Coasters to shoot a feature in Sun Valley: a 110-foot channel gap, big enough that coming up short could legitimately mean death. “The jump was massive,” Berman says. “We had probably 15 athletes from the crew there, and only four actually hit it. Chris took it upon himself to guinea-pig it, and the rest is history—maybe a trite way to say it, but accurate. Even today, some of the tricks from that shoot would be tough to beat.” One of those tricks—Parker spinning a switch 540 Japan—ended up on the DVD cover of 2010’s Eye Trip, and earned Parker and Chris spots on Level 1’s lineup for the next season. After a quick stint coaching at Mt. Hood’s Windells Ski Camp, Parker crashed on his brother’s couch in Bozeman and waited for the snow to fall. To pay rent, he got a job at the local movie theater, a coveted position back in Vermont. “I hated it so much,” Parker says. “It was in a shopping mall, and I had to wear a shirt and goofy shoes. That’s the last job I had.” A few weeks later, Monster Energy offered him a sponsorship. He quit his theater gig, and hasn’t worked since. During the next three years, Parker was on fire. He had the opening segment of 2011’s After Dark, the closer of 2012’s Sunny, and a short-but-standout part in 2013’s Partly Cloudy. He took third in the X Games Real Ski Backcountry the same year, and second at the Red Bull Line Catcher competition. But even as a star, Parker struggled to fit the industry mold. “Parker’s closing segment of Sunny put a kind of a period and exclamation point on what had been a very fast track,” Freedle says. “After that, I think he needed to do something different, just to mix it up. When you reach success that early, you can’t necessarily keep it up.” That change of pace came during the summer of 2013, when Parker and Chris began dreaming of starting their own project. They envisioned something similar to their skiing: intentionally low key and style-centric, with complete freedom to let their creativity wander. At the time, webisodes like LINE’s Traveling Circus were bringing skiing directly from athlete to viewer, a perfect platform for what they had in mind. After enlisting Sean Logan to film and edit, they started The Big Picture and released a 26-second trailer that fall. Their first full episode, “Zero/One-Zero/One,” dropped in 2014, and found a dedicated audience almost immediately. Each video featured a rotating cast, including Adam Delorme, Mike King, Tanner Rainville and Duncan Adams, the talents of which were accentuated by Sean’s elegant and artistic editing. But it was the skiing that made the Big Picture such an understated sensation–cutting-edge style, clean and precise without being perfect, set to endless, gluttonous powder. Whenever a new episode dropped, their dedicated audience gobbled it up. “The best part was we had the final say,” Chris says. “We could do what we wanted, go where we wanted, and ski with who we wanted. It was all our personalities, all the music, all our vibe, and I think that’s what made it pretty special.” Unfortunately, their dream soon butted against the unforgiving reality of business—though esteemed by skiing’s elite, the series only garnered modest reach. In 2017, the company released Lite Years, its first full-length feature and the Big Picture’s last film. “It was super sick for a long time, but it never took off into this super big thing,” White says. “It’s gross to talk about money, but it got really hard to pay everyone what they were worth. I think the episodes got better, but it wasn’t like they were showing them on airplanes. Still, it stayed grassroots the whole time. I think that’s cool.” Meanwhile, life in Montana continued to get more interesting, in a “let ’er buck” sort of way. When asked about his off season, Parker’s initial response was a brief “I skateboard a lot, drink beer a lot, hang out with my girlfriend and our dog.” Then the subject of hunting came up. “It’s awesome,” he says. “I didn’t grow up hunting. Typically, your dad teaches you when you’re a kid, but I found it later in life. I taught my dad to hunt, actually.” He picked it up gradually from friends in Montana, starting with simply going on trips, then helping to butcher the animal if the hunt was successful, until he was versed in the entire process, start to finish. He got his first hunting license five years ago, and now uses it as preseason training. When he’s traveling, you can usually find a cooler of venison or elk in his truck. For Parker, it’s an activity far greater than simply pulling a trigger. “Shooting an animal is like 1/100th of a percent of hunting, and so much has to line up for that to even happen,” he says. “I love the whole process—being up at the crack of dawn, being out in the woods, finding the animal and being on a stalk, everything coming together just right. And then the point you’re about to take a shot, that literal life-or-death moment, is just so intense. It hooks you. “Then to be able to bring that home, cut it all up, and have a huge feast for your friends—that’s the best. And it’s the best way to get meat, if you’re going to be eating meat.” Parker’s most recent pursuit is stock-car racing, a hobby he got into last summer on the quarter-mile dirt track outside of Bozeman. His brother offered to buy Parker a car if he started racing. Parker’s answer was “Hell yeah!” and a short while later he had “Car 911,” which they picked up for $1,200 at a pawn shop. While he’d spent time on motorcycles, racing was whole new world for the young White brother; so was the constant maintenance, which made him respect the regulars at the track who have racing mechanics dialed to a science. “It’s this whole weird counter-culture in the town where I live, and I didn’t even know it existed,” he says. “I thought people were going to be pissed because I didn’t know what I was doing, but they weren’t at all.” Vesa and Parker soon earned a reputation, and not necessarily for their skill. “We were pretty loose, and stuff was usually falling off our cars on the track,” Parker says. “We were hazards, but we had a lot of fun.” Fun, but after a summer spent constantly working on his car, not an experience he intended to repeat. With one more race, Parker wanted to cap off his stock-car career right. “A lot of races, my car would break down or I’d crash, and I wouldn’t make it over the finish line,” he says. “So I was saying to myself, ‘I’m finishing, no matter what.’ A few laps in, the hood comes loose and just flaps straight up in front of my window. I couldn’t see anything, but just thought, ‘Screw it, I’m going to keep on driving.’” Parker made it three more laps before the track’s control tower made him stop. And while he didn’t finish, by the end of the race everyone was cheering for the crazy, mullet-clad kid in Car 911. “I can view Parker as one of my best friends, but also how people react to his presence,” Freedle says. “The haircut, the swagger, the way he carries himself—none of that is contrived. Skiing’s supposed to be this rebellious sport, but it’s not at all, and I think a lot of people see Parker as some sort of rock star, lost-cause, end-up-in-a-ditch-style dude. But he’s not. He’s got his shit together. In a lot of ways, he’s got it figured out.” Keeping things figured out over the past few seasons, however, hasn’t been easy, especially with the rise of the “social media influencer.” Parker has always influenced through a larger-than-life personality and pure talent, which only go so far in a landscape dependent on earning likes from followers you’ve never met. “The industry’s gotten to where you have to market yourself without fucking shame,” Freedle says. “Parker can’t do that, and it has hurt him. He’s like, ‘What is my role as a professional skier? I’m staying true to myself, I’m at the top of my game, but I can’t compete with influencers on Instagram for a paycheck.’” When the Big Picture wound down, Parker began losing sponsors, including Skullcandy and Monster. Then, in the summer of 2016, he got a phone call. It was Pat McCarthy, team manager for the iconic snowboard outerwear company 686, and he had a proposition. “I grew up with Forest Bailey, who rides for 686,” Parker says. “They were looking to add a skier to the team, and Forest gave Pat my name. Everything just kind of fell into place. It’s one of the most positive things that’s happened to me.” The same qualities that left Parker so stymied in the ski industry found fertile ground at 686, and he became the company’s first ski athlete. He returned to Level 1 as well. Parker had left the company on good terms, and after Lite Years he approached Freedle about filming—an easy conversation, considering the two have lived together for the past five years. Berman and the rest of the crew were equally receptive, and—at least for Freedle—it wasn’t a surprise. “When the Big Picture ended, Parker didn’t try to milk it out,” he says. “The project had run its course, and he wanted to get back in the fold. A lot of people saw him shooting with Level 1 again as some kind of comeback. But you have to leave to come back, and Parker never left.” This fall, Level 1 released its 2018 film, Zig Zag. The cover art is a 1980s-esque cartoon of a skier doing a hand drag—a skier with a mustache and mullet. “From my perspective, there is no other skier I would rather have back into the fold with us,” Berman says. “His presence provided a whole new round of inspiration and motivation for certainly both Freedle and I, but for the rest of the crew too. Even if they don’t go on any trips with Parker or don’t ski with Parker, I think having him back meant a lot, to a lot of people.” Back in Bellingham, the rain has picked up again, meaning the storms have likely returned to Mt. Baker, and Parker and Freedle decide to head toward the mountain in hopes of catching some early powder the next morning. Before they leave, I ask Parker what he thinks the next few years will bring. Unsurprisingly, his answer is straight to the point. “I’ll ski for the rest of my life, obviously, and as long as I can avoid a real job I’m still super lucky,” he says. “But I don’t want to be an industry party guy. I’m not interested in that. Once all my sponsors drop me and I don’t have any obligations, I’ll probably just powsurf. Or I’ll do something else.” For Parker, it’s that simple. But though he jokes his sponsors are going to leave him, in some ways he’s a bigger figure on the ski scene than he’s ever been. He was recently invited to Kimbo Sessions, a skatepark-esque event in Sweden, where he was the only backcountry specialist among park skiing’s elite, including the Bunch crew and a few Olympic medalists. “I think that speaks to the level of influence and respect Parker has,” Berman says. “Even those athletes, with vastly different skiing styles and focuses than Parker, still look up not only to what he has done, but what he continues to do.” Starting the 2018/19 season, Parker has another thing figured out: After a summer back in Vermont, he’s moving to Nelson, BC to finally become a Canadian (albeit temporary). But there’s a very un-Canadian secret about Parker that Freedle lets me in on: Though he doesn’t do competitions and could care less about social media stats, when it comes to things like racquetball or S.K.A.T.E. Parker is extremely competitive. Freedle won’t play chess with him, to avoid risking their friendship or work relationship. It seems surprising, until I ask Parker about the future of his mullet. Then it makes perfect, hilarious, outrageous sense. “I have a lifelong bet with Chris. If I cut my mullet, he gets to slap me in the face and I have to give him $20,” Parker says. “But if I keep it until the day I die, he has to slap my face at my funeral, in front of everybody. It’s going to be open casket, a big party with an open bar—super fun. And Chris is going to have to slap my dead corpse in the face, mullet and all.” Photo Caption: Parker White grew up skiing in Vermont before moving out to Mammoth, CA to pursue a professional skiing career, which has taken him to places like Bralorne, BC with Level 1 Productions, pictured here. Photo: Blake Jorgenson
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