TOP TO BOTTOM This popular sledding zone in the Pemberton backcountry is one of Logan’s playgrounds come wintertime. Here’s one of his first backflip attempts on a sled in January 2019, three seasons into his sledding career. Photo: Eric Pehota After graduating high school, Logan worked summers at heli logging operations to fund his ski seasons. Here, he takes a different approach to a familiar landscape at BC’s Snowwater Heliskiing. Photo: Blake Jorgenson LOGAN CAN SEE the Central Couloir from the dining table of his childhood home. In 1996, Eric and Parveen, Logan’s mother, bought two acres of raw land in Pemberton, clearing enough space to plop down a 60-foot trailer with a bullet hole in the door along the banks of the Lillooet River. Parveen, raised in greater Vancouver by parents who emigrated to Canada from India in the early ’60s, went from snowboarder and bartender to homesteader and tireless mother (and eventually athlete agent). Eric, hailing from the logging community of Mackenzie in northern British Columbia, bought a sawmill that spring, cleared the land and started building their post-and-beam forever home a few years later. Every couple of years the family would complete a new project: barn, shop, carport, a truck port, Parveen’s garden. The coops have housed chickens, turkeys and pigs. The family collects pears and walnuts on their land, as well as raspberries and blueberries that Parveen cans. Eric and Dalton hunt deer and the family processes everything at home, making their own sausage and jerky. “The boys worked for everything they had,” Eric says. “Sometimes they didn’t like it, but there was no other choice.” When their friends were going to the lake or a soccer field, Logan and Dalton were headed home to stack firewood or shovel the driveway before dinner. “At the time I hated it,” Logan says. “What kid wants to come home from school and work again? Now I’m reaping all the benefits. I can do any sort of mechanical thing I need to do in our fully decked-out shop.” Though he moved out right after high school graduation (albeit only a kilometer away), Logan says if his parents ever sell the place, he’ll take them to court. Logan’s two-summer heli-logging gig off the west coast of British Columbia continued the Pehota logging lineage into a fourth generation. Exhausting and dangerous, heli logging involves hanging hundreds of feet high from the tops of trees while chain sawing and loading huge sections of timber onto lines dangling from helicopters hovering 500 feet above. By the end of the season, an 18-year-old hard-working Logan had won over a burly crew of cigarette-smoking, neck-tattooed loggers from Vancouver Island. A teenaged Logan developed newfound upper body strength and a level of grit that’s hard to achieve outside of the world’s most dangerous jobs. It also helped him earn enough money for his first sled, a second-hand 2014 Ski-Doo 800 Summit, which allowed him to unlock Pemberton’s vast backcountry. UNLIKE MOST PROS, Logan likes to keep his skiing close to home, opting to hang out with childhood friends over industry heavy-hitters, and honing his big mountain skills in the peaks surrounding his hometown. Of course those abilities do tend to lead him beyond the Pemberton Valley from time to time. In 2018, he won the Freeride World Tour stop at Kicking Horse by racking up one of the highest scores of all time (he’d finish the 2018 tour in 10th place overall). Logan’s competitiveness, style and creativity make him a constant threat on the FWT, but he’s never been a fan of the waiting and the tour’s sometimes-sketchy conditions. At one stop in Hakuba, Japan, he spent the better part of two weeks in a hotel room frustrated while his crew was skiing powder at home. In that respect, Logan is a lot like his father. Eric competed in one—and only one—ski contest. It was at Blackcomb Moun-tain in 1991. Eric entered last-minute and ended up beating Dean Cummings and Doug Coombs to win the first-place check he needed to pay for a ski expedition to Mt. Rainier. Logan prefers filming, starring in Matchstick Produc-tions, Poor Boyz Productions and Warren Miller films. He’s a natural talent on camera with a photographic memory and a photogenic, hard-charging style, but it was his role in Kye Petersen and Dendrite Studio’s film Numinous that earned him a 2017 Powder Award for Best Line. Three years later, Kye has called on Logan once again, digging up archival footage of Trevor and Eric’s exploits, researching the history of big mountain skiing, and ticking off iconic legacy descents with Logan on his heels. It’s part of a two-year film project called Kinship , a piece that brings the young men closer to their fathers’ life work than ever before. In early 2020, the two joined Matty Richard and snow-boarder Nick Russell on an expedition to Mount Tantalus, the Coast Range mountain their dads attempted together, and the peak Eric and Johnny “Foon” Chilton went on to ski and spread Trevor’s ashes from in 1999. The East Face, which Eric and Foon scored in perfect powder conditions, has yet to be repeated. “In their day, [our dads] were doing much harder ad-ventures than what Logan and I are doing,” Kye says. “Until now, I didn’t realize the weight of their accomplishments. It wasn’t just leather boots and steep slopes—they were hiking up 3,000-foot faces to ski deep powder snow. They started something that’s still to this day the raddest thing in skiing.” Kye hopes Kinship can do for skiers what Dogtown and Z-Boys did for young skateboarders who knew little about the origin of their sport. “[My dad] and Eric inspired people like Seth [Morrison] and people like us after that,” Kye says. “The older generation who lived it will shed a tear… [It’s] a cool story of bloodline connection and brotherhood.” Logan Pehota 075
The Ski Journal Volume 14, Issue 3: Page 75
