CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT “A photo of some of the first air I ever caught. I grew up without a terrain park early on but learned to jump on signature east coast snow making piles…aka whalebacks.” —Tom Wallisch. Photo: Wallisch Family Archives “Growing up in Pittsburgh, PA, our ski season was short and often warm. I spent countless days learning rail tricks in my backyard without any snow. Rail setups like this one taught me balance, edge control, and led to my love of rail skiing. To this day, I find it to be the most accessible aspect of our sport.”—Tom Wallisch. Photo: Wallisch Family Archives “Some of the first twin tips I ever got were Line Skis. They finally enabled me to learn 540s, land switch, and progress my skiing in wild new ways. Fifteen years or so after this photo was originally taken, I moved back to Line Skis as my ski sponsor and began building my own pro model ski with them. It’s been an amazing full circle story to go from learning my first switch skiing with Line to creating a ski for future generations to ride.”—Tom Wallisch. Photo: Wallisch Family Archives “It was 8 p.m. on the backside of Mammoth. We were battling pockets of thunderstorms throughout the shoot, patiently waiting for pockets of light. It was almost dark when the clouds cleared enough for the rain to stop and give us a perfect backdrop. The iconic minarets of the Ansel Adams Wil-derness were once described as ‘very lofty and inaccessible grand pin-nacles of granite’ by the California Geographic Survey in 1868. To this day, they are the defining feature of shooting in Mammoth, CA.” Photo: Josh Bishop TOM MICHAEL WALLISCH hails from Pittsburgh—not exactly the breeding ground you’d imagine for a freeski su-perstar. When he was a toddler, his parents bought a condo at Wisp Resort in Maryland, two hours from the Steel City. That’s where Wallisch and his younger sister learned to ski when they were 3 years old. As he got older, Wallisch and his friends would build jumps on the side of the trail and take turns throwing themselves into the air. He’d make jumps out of anything—piles of snow on the frozen lake behind his condo or the roof of his house in Pittsburgh. By age 14, he was watching any freestyle ski video he could get his hands on. He’d record X Games contests on VHS tapes and screen them on repeat, dreaming of standing atop his own X Games podium one day. When he found ski movies from Level 1 and Poor Boyz, he sat mesmerized, watching pioneering young freeskiers such as Tanner Hall and Simon Dumont revolutionize the sport. On school days, Wallisch would night ski at Seven Springs, PA, a ski resort about an hour from his house with 750 feet of vertical drop. In the resort’s terrain park, he taught himself tricks from the videos he’d watched. It didn’t take long until he was the best skier in the park. Wallisch used to joke, “My dad taught me everything I know about skiing until I was 4.” His dad, Mike, filmed his son in the park for years, until the day Wallisch and his friends started filming each other. When he’d leave to go skiing, his mom, Patty, would ask, “What’s your middle name?” “Caution,” Wallisch would call back on his way out the door. It sounds like a joke given his antics, but at a young age, he developed an understanding of calculated risk. He was always willing to walk away from a jump that didn’t look right, and learned increasingly harder tricks in steady progression. After skiing, Wallisch and friends would come back to the condo to review footage while Patty cooked up a batch of French fries. In high school, he took AP classes, ran cross-country, and describes himself as having been a bit of a nerd. But being on skis was his secret superpower. Suddenly he had confidence. When he’d win rail jams, he’d be rewarded with gift cards to the local ski shop. He progressed from there, competing in the Vermont Open and other regional contests. He enrolled at Salt Lake City’s University of Utah in the fall of 2006 and fell in with a crowd of skiers that remain some of his closest friends today. He met a girl back then, too—her name was Steph and she was a talented skier as well. Although they’d stay friends for years, she would eventually become his wife. Online edits were just emerging at that time, so instead of waiting for annual ski movies in theaters or ski magazines to arrive in the mailbox, ski fans were suddenly getting their fix on demand. Sounds normal now, but at the time, it was game-changing—especially for a kid like Wallisch. He could upload his content for free and speak directly to his own fan base. Production budgets and sponsors didn’t exist for him yet, so his videos felt gritty and real. He and his friends, a group known as 4bi9 Media, lived together in Salt Lake and filmed each other on basic camcord-ers. That’s how he made the edit for Level 1’s SuperUnknown contest, which he put together his freshman year. He was doing technical rail tricks nobody else was doing. Specifically, he’d mastered the pretzel—spinning one way onto a rail and spinning the other way off—and the edit made him known across a tiny but fanatical corner of the internet. At the time, if you wanted to become a pro skier, you had to win com-petitions, but in this new online age, Wallisch was renowned before he’d ever entered a major contest. His fan base exploded largely because Wallisch was excep-tionally good at hitting something a kid anywhere in America could also hit: rails. He didn’t come from a destination resort out West or an elite ski program. He had a shovel, a bit of snow and a rail. “Rails were always my thing,” says Wallisch, who would set the world record for longest railslide when he slayed a 424-foot beast at Seven Springs in 2016. “That was the way I could shine.” Invited to his first X Games in January 2010, Wallisch made it to the slopestyle finals but didn’t land a finals run. At X Games in Tignes, France, a couple of months later, he took home his first gold. His breakout year came in 2012, when he earned a score of 96—the highest recorded X Games slope-style score at the time—and another gold medal. 072 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 14, Issue 1: Page 72
