In the early days, White was known to throw a front flip double nose grab he’d tweak right to his helmet. These days he’s known for charging down pillows and throwing effortless tricks in the backcountry. Here, P-White spins over the famous Mt. Baker, WA road gap. Photo: Brad Andrew t 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 com-petition. 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 I 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 Ros-signol 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 legiti-mately 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 sponsor-ship. He quit his theater gig, and hasn’t worked since. 066 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 12, Issue 3: Page 66
