The Gnar Deal

Noah at the Maryhill Freeride (Photo by: Huey)

Name: Noah Clarke
Born in: 1989 (currently 20)
Raised in: Southeast WA
Lives in: Bozeman, MT

I am a 20 year old college student who loves boardsports. My gateway drug into the realm of boarding was definitely snowboarding. My older sister started snowboarding and then my best friend at the time and I tried it. We both loved it and started going up more and more. Next up on the list I tried wakeboarding. I liked to wakeboard a lot but still it was just a substitute that came up short. I still loved to snowboard more than anything. Finally longboarding came along. My sister gave me her warped short little arbor. It was fun but it was still just a super casual hobby for me. Nothing serious. If you asked me then, there’s no way I would have known what a slide glove really was, or even how to footbrake.

What really got me into longboarding ironically was when Never Summer Industries decided to start making longboards. You see from snowboarding, I was a bit of a NS fanboy, and when they announced they’d be releasing longboards I wanted one. I bought an NS Eclipse as soon as they released them. I started doing some hills. Actually these weren’t very big hills to start, but I discovered the realm of cutting board slide gloves, and footbraking. Slowly but surely longboarding started to steal my heart from snowboarding. Friends who didn’t ride would call me to tell me about bigger and bigger hills. As I worked my way up my NS Eclipse wasn’t cutting it any more.

My first legit downhill board was an Evo. A few of my friends casually started bombing some smaller hills with me, but what finally got me into true speedboarding was when I met a couple of new friends. We were having a weekly cruising session on the river and I ran into a couple of guys walking across the bridge. Sure enough they were into speedboarding just as much as I was. We exchanged numbers and as soon as I got done with the mellow cruising session I called them to meet me at a decent hill. We showed up and had a nice little sesh. Soon we were skating all the time and challenging each other to go faster, and faster.