The Ski Journal - Volume 17, Issue 1
WHAT’S PARKIN COSTAIN GOING TO DO NEXT?
Words: Max Ritter 2023-09-15 11:03:33
Parkin holding still for just a second, a rarity for the young Montanan with an affinity for the throttle. Photo: Jonathan Finch
In April 2023, Parkin Costain got the call he had been long awaiting—Alaska. Teton Gravity Research. Spines. And it came laced with an opportunity to obtain a master’s degree in extreme skiing from two athletes that had helped define burly Alaskan descents: Sage Cattabriga-Alosa and Ian McIntosh. The phone started to feel a little heavier. Of course he wanted it, but the reality had started to sink in: This was more than a film trip—this was a passing of the torch.
It had the makings of a dream come true for the 23-year-old Montanan, who was raised watching the two big mountain superstars. Still, Alaska is never a sure bet. Skiing big mountain lines in the Last Frontier has always been about playing the long game and this year would be no exception. An extended dry period, intense warming, massive avalanches and a stout surface crust gave way to two weeks of clouds and heavy snowfall, none of which created confidence-inspiring conditions.
If Parkin wanted to make an impression during his dream trip, he knew his window was going to be small. But, always the tactician, Parkin also knew that TGR had opened a rare door, and he was ready to find out exactly what lay on the other side.
Born into a family of self-proclaimed ski bums, Parkin grew up in the small mountain community of Whitefish, MT. His parents Pete and Linda met as ski instructors at Mammoth, cementing their dedication to mountain-town living when they moved to Montana to start a family. Today, the Costains live and breathe mountain sports, owning and operating a successful mountain bike trail-building company and running a private bike park on Flathead Lake. They had Parkin and his younger brother Ladd on skis when each were 2 years old, and mountain bikes and snowmobiles followed shortly thereafter.
Parkin says his dad is his biggest influence in skiing, and from an early age, Pete instilled a sense of backcountry wisdom into his sons. That came with lots of early mornings walking uphill and careful observation of the terrain alongside the skintrack. “My dad gets all the credit for bringing me up in the backcountry,” Parkin says. “He was the one who taught me how to visualize skiing something and, more importantly, learn how to back off and say, ‘I’m gonna ski another day.’”
Cleancut with stylish blond hair, Parkin looks more prep than frontier-bred outdoorsman. His friendly, curious, yet calculated demeanor shines through the minute you meet him, and his initial impression makes him seem much older than his 23 years. Even though his skiing shone from a young age, he still approaches the mountains like a student, exploring possibilities and experimenting, while taking in everything he can from those around him.
Pete, in his own way, has provided a bit of a reluctant blueprint for his oldest son. Pete never settled for the 9-to-5, finding work not only as a trail-builder but also holding down gigs as a traveling ski journalist, dirt-hauling company owner, gourmet food salesman and nighttime resort groomer. All of it, he says, was to get more time on snow. Much of that time was spent with a young Parkin, and the parallels between them are hard to ignore.
In fact, Pete’s drive to ski above all else was ingrained into his son. Parkin’s voice never wavers when he says that by the time he was in middle school he knew he wanted to be a pro skier. Still he recognized the inherent challenges involved, that very few truly “make it” in the sport. He also knew that if he was going to reach the biggest stage in today’s changing ski world, his dad’s recipe was a good start, but he’d need to find his own path.
Flying out of the base of the Knik Glacier near Palmer, at the northern end of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains, the TGR team was right in the heart of some of the biggest terrain in North America. Sage, Mac, Parkin and his childhood friend and slopestyle superstar Maggie Voisin spent the first few days scouting from the heli and getting their feet under them on warm-up lines, but an extended unfavorable weather pattern left the mountains inaccessible. Many of the zones they wanted to film featured fluted spines glued precariously to vertical rock slabs, the kind of terrain that requires ideal conditions.
Sage knew the scouting process was all about patience, taking in the terrain as his body and mind got used to the game again. It had been five years since his last trip to Alaska, and he admitted that fear and doubt were weighing more heavily than they had during his younger days. Knowing that Alaska’s year had been rough even before they arrived, Parkin was also concerned. “I’m no expert yet, but I can tell you that having clouds in Alaska for two weeks straight is definitely concerning,” he says.
He leaned into the combined decades of experience of Sage and Mac, turning a tough situation into a valuable and timely crash course. Whether it was the mechanics of glacier travel, getting in and out of helicopters performing full-power toe-in landings atop a 60-degree face, or the art of slough management, the rookies learned on the fly. “You get inspired to ski like Sage and Ian just watching them drop into the most exposed stuff you can imagine,” Parkin says. “But after spending nearly a month with them on that trip, the key takeaway was learning that I didn’t have to send it every second of every day—sometimes it’s worth waiting a storm or even two.”
On TGR’s exploratory Alaska trips, it’s ultimately up to the athletes to choose the terrain they want to ride. It’s on them to make sure it’s in the right light at the right time. Sage and Mac recognized quickly that Parkin had the mountain skills he needed to succeed in this terrain, but they saw an opportunity to push Parkin toward a more measured approach. They passed along filming knowledge, like predicting when and where the light would hit to ensure a once-in-a-career line would shoot to TGR’s filming standards, and reminded him to always be certain the line has a safe exit. “To me, the scariest part of skiing in Alaska is that the mountains tend to roll over and the lines get steeper near the middle, so you often can’t see where your line ends,” Parkin says. “Is it the apron, or is it the 200-foot cliff your slough is spilling over?” In the back of his mind, he knew that getting cliffed-out in the Chugach wasn’t quite the same as at Big Sky. In these mountains, consequences multiply.
“Parkin really took to Sage and Ian’s process,” Maggie says. “It was really cool to watch him observe two legends. On the flip side, it was amazing to have him share his vision about how to ski stuff—lines he saw that even Sage and Ian couldn’t visualize.”
But Parkin doesn’t stop at visualization—he backs it up with the skills it takes to ride these video-game lines. Those skills are what paved Parkin’s road to Alaska. Parkin won TGR’s Grom Contest at age 15 and has numerous IFSA freeride competition victories to his name. With his dad behind the video camera, Parkin even scored the top spot at the 2017 Quiksilver Young Guns video contest with the only big mountain edit in a sea of park videos, beating out future Olympians Finn Bilous and Birk Ruud.
In 2018, thanks in part to the recognition he received from the Grom Contest, the then-18-year-old Parkin was invited to film a segment with TGR for their annual film Far Out, his first as an athlete. “Mom was definitely strongly reminding me that I should finish my education. But she never held me back,” Parkin says. “Dad was stoked to see it come together, and when I got the TGR invite, I figured it was time to focus on that.”
That year, he received a $3,000 travel budget from his sponsors for trips to British Columbia and Haines, AK. TGR covered some expenses once he was on location, but he dug into savings earned from operating excavators for Pete’s trail-building company, Terraflow Trails, to film his first major segment. Anything to stay on snow. It was a path Pete had taken years earlier and one Parkin found himself walking as a teenager. Still, Parkin realized that paying his own way to get into ski films wasn’t sustainable. If he was going to give professional skiing a go, he would need to make a statement.
Parkin made that statement in 2020 by winning Jackson Hole’s Kings & Queens of Corbet’s with a massive double backflip. He hadn’t been invited the first two years after the competition. Forever the analyst, he had watched the competition explode, and concluded that a high finish could give him the industry recognition he needed. He and friend Jake Hopfinger decided to take matters into their own hands, building a bigger lip atop Corbet’s, which allowed for just enough pop for Parkin to pull off his comp-winning maneuver. “It ended up being some of the biggest airs we’d ever done,” Parkin says.
The victory put him in the company of previous winners Travis Rice and Karl Fostvedt—both giants in snowboarding and skiing, respectively. Industry heavyweights like TGR couldn’t really ignore the win (and the viral double flip) and soon sponsors came calling. Suddenly Parkin had taken a step his father never did. Now he makes a living sliding on snow thanks to big contracts from Scott Sports, Polaris and Backcountry, among others.
Parkin says that despite the obvious gnar factor, Alaska is where he feels the most comfortable skiing. The huge terrain gives him room to ski fast, and there are endless features to trick and showcase his style. For years, Parkin had followed his dad through backcountry zones around Big Sky, Cooke City and Whitefish, seeking out big, rocky faces and exposed spine lines—miniature versions of what he now looks for in Alaska.
“I’m inspired by what a young eye can see and do in the mountains,” Sage says. “[Parkin’s] appetite for risk is that of a hungry 23-year-old. Where my years of experience have me look at a zone with a degree of temperance, he sees opportunities.”
Sage, along with Mac, saw Parkin and Maggie as wild cards. They’d never skied with the duo before and, despite the young skiers’ impressive resumes, they knew Alaskan skiing required a specialized skill set. It’s one thing to ski these mountains, but it’s an entirely different game to piece together a movie segment in Alaska.
While the act of riding Alaskan spines may look like committing to a semi-controlled fall, the rookies were quickly introduced to its layers of nuance. During their many trips to the Chugach, Sage and Mac had developed a systematic approach to searching out the exact place they wanted to ride, which had ultimately resulted in decades of successful round trips. But on this mission, they discovered that even though they were ostensibly the teachers in this terrain, their pupils offered up a few lessons of their own.
“This year, I was definitely the expert at figuring out where to go, but Parkin was the expert at figuring out what he was going to do once we were there,” Sage says. “Once we found a face, it was all about, ‘What’s Parkin going to do?’”
Parkin, for his part, joined in the planning and scouting process happily, learning from Sage and Mac in real time. Just as he’d learned from Pete throughout his childhood, Parkin was now taking cues from some of the best in the big mountain game. Within days of a good weather window, Parkin turned his learnings into action, executing the whole process—from light, to angle, to his own and the crew’s safety—and laying down film-worthy lines.
“The thing about mentorship in the mountains is that it’s informal, there’s no lesson plans or anything, but Parkin was able to absorb those skills by just being along for the ride,” Sage says. “He went from being a passenger to being part of the process.”
When, after nearly two weeks, the skies finally went blue, Parkin dialed in. Those fluted spines were beckoning, and with newfound wisdom imparted by the best in the game, he knew he was up to bat. With cameras rolling, Parkin dropped—and showed his teachers what he’d learned.
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