The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 3
WE'RE ALL LAME: Andy Parry Puts Community First
Words: Jake Stern 2022-11-25 11:58:05
“Kit check. Andy showed up to Sochi, Russia, in 2021 with two full Adidas tracksuits, provided by none other than his future wife, Brooke.” Photo: Jake Strassman
Sitting dejected on the curb outside of the Taco Shoppe in Government Camp, OR, Andy Parry and Will Wesson bantered about how far $2.50 will go. “The gypsy lifestyle is embracing me,” quipped Parry, buried among a pile of Full Tilt boots. It was summertime and the pair had managed to wrangle a little money and some lift tickets from Line Skis founder Jason Levinthal to visit Mount Hood and Windells Ski Camp. It was the first money Parry had ever seen for his skiing, and, he felt, a small sign that he had made it.
Parry and Wesson had spent all of 2010 filming together, chasing the park rat’s version of Turns All Year—in their case including a backyard wood-and-PVC-pipe setup. They’d skied the frozen-over Pass Lake early season at Loveland Pass, CO, and an indoor rail setup that resembled an airport security luggage roller at the SIA trade show in Vegas. Filming a nascent web series for $100 or $200 an episode (a total they split), they weren’t even close to covering their costs, but Parry and Wesson were kicking off a zeitgeist that two ski bums in search of a good taco wouldn’t fully appreciate until years later.
This was the beginning of an endless sea of gas station hot dogs, tendon-bending rail tricks, and the dirtbag icon that was Line Traveling Circus. LTC has become the longest-running web series in skiing and has inspired countless low-budget edits in the YouTube era. But Parry’s ultimate gift to the ski community has been the Tell a Friend Tour, where Parry travels and rides with kids at small backwoods ski areas, which has reminded an untapped community of young freeskiers that we are all connected.
Andy Parry was born in 1986 and grew up in Victor, NY, just outside Rochester. His mom worked as a dietitian for the city hospital and his stepdad worked for a publisher. Before he became a Newschoolers denizen, he was roaming the streets of Victor on four wheels, finding pools to skate. “There’s been a lot of rollerblade hate and people don’t understand that most skiing tricks came from rollerblading, which were stolen from skateboarding,” Parry says. “The only cool sport is skateboarding. We’re all lame.”
Parry’s family didn’t spend much time in the mountains until 2001, when Parry’s Aunt Roberta, a Lake George skier in the ’60s and ’70s, took 15-year-old Parry skiing at little Bristol Mountain. He went a few more times that winter and spring, but didn’t really think much of it until fall of ninth grade when he met a kid in his homeroom class named Will Wesson. Wesson had been skiing for a bit longer, and Parry remembers him launching off a little snowgun whale tail on his 98-centimeter Mike Nick Pro skiboards and doing a 540 double Liu-Kang grab. It blew his mind—from that moment Parry dove headfirst down the skiing rabbit hole.
The scene at Bristol was scrappy. Parry chased around the other park skiers there, befriending people like Ahmet and Giray Dadali. They would travel together to comps across the Northeast, entering the open category at Mount Snow’s Mega Mother Hucker and eventually connecting with Shane McFalls (who would become the filmer and illustrator for LTC), filming short edits under the name “I Hate New York.”
Once Parry gets an idea in his head he doesn’t stop. “It’s like a drug,” he says. “You start to try out a thought and then all of a sudden it becomes normal to spend six or eight hours moving snow around.”
What started with building inruns and shoveling off stairs turned into mad scientist construction projects—Parry and his friends dreaming up and building rail features out of PVC, wood, metal, rubber whatever they could get their hands on. The result were features as creative as their skiing, from constructing and hitting a moving rail as it slides downhill to using a friend’s skis as a launch ramp to throw a backflip.
Still, Parry never felt like he could keep up with Wesson or the Dadalis’ technicality, and understood quickly that he had to carve out his own niche or be left behind. He found that groove one warm April day at Killington, VT, in the early 2000s. His mind wandered toward the limits of inline skating. Sure, you could spin like a top, but what could you do with the long tips and tails of a ski that you can’t do in any other sport? He found a wide, flat box and started to incorporate things he’d learned from skating—blindsoul grinds, crossover tricks. Eventually he popped on a frontslide and picked up his uphill ski, bending his knee to lift the tip to the edge of the box. Pushing off the side of the box with his shovel, he spun a blind 270 off. His signature trick, the Hippie Killer, was born.
Parry took his strange new rail wizard style just over the New York-Vermont border to the now-defunct Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT. Growing up in Victor he’d never even considered skiing “out West.” Vermont skiing was the pinnacle in his young imagination. Wesson and Olson were up in Burlington and would come down to visit during their holiday break. They ended up handing him his first pair of free skis, a set of Line Invaders that had been drilled eight times. They snapped in half after a few runs, but Parry couldn’t have been more thrilled to get a free pair.
Despite entering every contest they could, none of the IHNY crew was winning much prize money. Parry was bored and frustrated that the skiers taking home the prizes were just spinning to win.
“Andy didn’t find his style by figuring out what tricks would please the judges,” Wesson says. “He found it by being himself.”
Parry’s crew spent New York summers crushing the suspension of Wesson’s mom’s minivan with ice rink snow to build crazy rail features in his backyard. “That do-it-yourself mentality really shaped pretty much everything we’ve done together,” Wesson says.
Parry finished his degree in ski area management in three years. Feeling lost as a new grad, he moved to Burlington and worked at Chili’s to stack cash before the winter. During that time, he and Wesson approached Levinthal. They pitched him in the breezeway of his Colchester, VT, home, offering him two projects. The first was a web series that would turn into the Traveling Circus. The second was a tour modeled after Siver Cartel’s the Siver Sessions, designed to get kids out on snow with their pro ski heroes.
Levinthal green lit LTC, which blew up into a 15-season phenomenon. As the longest-running web series in ski history, with some episodes racking up well over 100,000 YouTube views.
A big part of those numbers was thanks to Parry’s wider understanding of the outdoor industry. Large media companies foresaw the pivot to video around 2015, but Parry, Wesson and Levinthal began preparing for that shift back in 2010. They saw how kids on Newschoolers ate up the short-ski-edit format and channeled that with LTC. Parry didn’t need to shoot with a major film company or win X Games medals to make skiing his career. Instead, he delivered goofy content and technical skiing on a consistent platform that allowed him ultimate control over the end product. That way, Parry could shoot on the road, go where the snow was (or, memorably, where it wasn’t) and film on his own schedule.
Even with their newfound success, however, the crew hustled to get by. “We were never the kind of skiers who wrapped a season and went off to surf in Bali. Sometimes we struggled to get home,” Parry says. He remembers sitting in Garrett Russell’s apartment in Lake Tahoe in 2011 after filming the first season of LTC, selling everything he possibly could on Craigslist to pay for gas money back to New York where he would spend the summer painting houses to afford the next winter on the road.
As Parry and Wesson worked to grow LTC, the Tell a Friend Tour sat in the back of Parry’s mind for two years. In the winter of 2011, Parry had torn his ACL and spent the season thinking of how he could launch Tell a Friend. He didn’t get any money from Line to do it, so he schemed a way to link stops between his Traveling Circus schedule the next year. Parry got some sponsors to float him swag to give away, and, much like his backyard rail setups, started building his brainchild on his own.
Now in its 11th year, Parry considers the Tell a Friend Tour to be integral to his project to keep kids skiing. The 36-year-old and friends show up to a small hill, mostly in the Midwest or Northeast, and spend the day skiing the park with local youth. Once Wesson stopped filming annual features with Level 1, he started joining Parry on every stop.
“Tell a Friend is the closest thing you can get to bringing Windells to your home mountain,” Wesson says. Parry provides pizza and gives out thousands of dollars worth of gear at each stop. Underneath the swag, Parry’s works to create a space for kids to meet each other and develop an enduring desire to ski with friends. Friends like Wesson and McFalls have kept Parry on skis, and he knows those kinds of bonds can instill a lifelong love of the sport in others as well.
“Andy loves hanging out with these kids because he sees himself in all of them,” says Josh Malcyzk, former global brand director at Line. “Andy Parry, to some kid in Boston Mills, OH, is the top level. He’s the most famous person they’ve ever seen in their life in the thing that they love. He understands that connection.”
As Parry explains, “There’s that critical difference between seeing someone on your phone and then them being right in front of you, giving you a high-five for landing a front 270 out. The tour gives young kids an opportunity to discover skiing’s creativity with their friends in a free and noncompetitive environment. I don’t charge kids a dime for the tour.”
The Tell a Friend Tour arose from what Parry considers an utter lack of support for creativity in freeskiing—a struggle he’s seen firsthand. “Andy is so valuable in such a funny way, but you really have to understand what it is,” Malcyzk says. “To Line Skis he’s everything, but some other brands wouldn’t even know what to do with him.”
As he’s grown in the industry, Parry has watched sponsor dollars evaporate. From his perspective, if you didn’t grow up training 365 days a year in an academy setting or two doors down from the Aspen Valley Ski & Snowboard Club, you’re not going to the X Games anymore. Real Ski is gone, and Parry is sure it’s never coming back. It doesn’t leave much room for skiers from the suburbs of Rochester or many of the local ski hills Parry prioritizes these days.
In many ways, Parry’s presence highlights the tragic disconnect between those holding the purse strings and the skiers they aim to represent. He knows that all you need to do his tricks is a foot-wide box or rail—something that can be built after a trip to the hardware store. He also sees the paucity of opportunities to make a living in the sport narrowing the field of play. He lives somewhere in between, connecting miles of highways and small ski hills to weave those two realities together—understanding that you can style a hippie killer just as well at Trollhaugen, WI, as you can on the Horstman Glacier. Sometimes, he says, it’s about just showing up.
“I think Andy loves hanging out with these kids because he sees himself in all of them,” Malcyzk says. When pros like Mike Nick would come through Bristol when he was a kid, it made Parry feel like he was being graced by the presence of a superstar. “Andy Parry, to some kid in Boston Hills, OH, he is like the top level,” Malcyzk continues. “He’s the most famous person they’ve ever seen in their life. And he understands that connection.”
Parry eschews the idea that skiing is a luxury good for the bourgeoisie. Instead he wants to show that grassroots accessibility is still a thing. Sure, it’s become his lifeblood, but he just wants it to be a part of people’s lives—no matter how small. “My parents weren’t taking us down to Disneyland; they weren’t taking us to Europe,” Parry says. Instead, he saw the world as an adult, crammed into rental vans with six friends and thousands of fast-food wrappers. He’s skied PVC setups in Oslo and ended up in Chinese hospitals with dislocated joints. Parry has filmed in Japan five times, skiing powder and slurping up ramen in 100-square-foot motels. “All these crazy experiences I’ve had are all because of skiing, and otherwise who knows where I’d be,” Parry says.
For all the comedy that comes out of the Traveling Circus, Parry feels that he’s repaying a debt. Skiing has given him everything. Now decades into his career, he just got married and owns a construction business. He understands he would never have developed the drive to keep going (and working all of the odd jobs it took to fund his winters) had it not been for the work ethic he developed hiking rails in the dead of night.
Parry admits that skiing might not fund the futures of all the people he meets on the tour, but he knows the sport can provide a support system for kids when they need it most. He’s heard all kinds of stories—parents’ deaths, lost jobs, car crashes. He’s also witnessed how skiing has given each one of those storytellers something to look forward to, assuring them that they are not alone.
At each stop on the Tell a Friend Tour, Parry stands on a table with a megaphone and yells to the crowd: “Look at everyone around you. You don’t know anyone here? Meet someone. You see someone with a camera? Ask them to get some clips. See if you want to give them some clips. This is how I started.”
The Tour is a space for them to push each other and learn that it’s ok to fall.
In his skiing, Parry hopes to reflect the same—bottling up that mad-scientist feeling of building a kicker with your friends, falling, picking yourself back up and working until you nail it. Or don’t. Who cares? Trying is the point.
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