OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM “About a year after the old LTC van motor kicked it, Will Wesson had sniffed out a deal on a lightly used van in Massachusetts, previously owned by a laundry service. Will took a flight to the East Coast and bought the new rig with funds raised from donations by LTC viewers and fans. Luckily, Andy is also a talented handyman who knows how to build out a van and made the new one significantly warmer than the last. Sämi Ortlieb added the final touches with a full wrap of original artwork, composed of illustrations of scenes from past episodes, in clas-sic LTC yellow.” Photo: Jake Strassman “A break in unseasonably snowy weather allowed Andy to grill up brats for the Brighton, UT crew on Memorial Day in 2019. The sun was so rare that spring that everyone could usually be found huddled under make-shift tarp tents, but a weather break gave Andy and his ten-dollar Grill-It-Kit from the gas station a chance to shine.” Photo: Jake Strassman THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT “Beach skiing at Leddy Park in Burlington, VT. An ice rink is just up the hill and we used the ice rink snow for years to hit homemade PVC rails.” —Andy Parry Photo: Parry Family Archive “Backflip on Line Mike Nick Pro ski boards in Will Wesson’s backyard in Vic-tor, NY around 2002. The next year, I bought a pair of Solomon 720s with bindings for $200.”—Andy Parry Photo: Parry Family Archive 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 Wes-son 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 phe-nomenon. 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 under-standing 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 de-livered 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, memo-rably, 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. 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The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 3: Page 45
