by Eric Blehm
First published 2024
Eric Blehm chronicles the life and death of Craig Kelly, the snowboarder who earned the nickname "the Michael Jordan of snowboarding" before abandoning competitive success to pursue his passion in North America's backcountry. The narrative follows Kelly from his origins as a latchkey kid whose athletic talent and innovations transformed winter sports into a global phenomenon. Blehm traces Kelly's journey as he walked away from mainstream competition to seek increasingly extreme mountain environments. The story builds toward January 20, 2003, when a thunderous crack echoed through British Columbia's Northern Selkirk Mountains. A 100-foot-wide wall of snow swept down the slope, burying more than a dozen skiers and snowboarders in the Durrand Glacier Avalanche. Seven people died in the slide, including Kelly himself. Blehm weaves together Kelly's personal odyssey with the broader cultural explosion of snowboarding, showing how the sport evolved from a niche Gen X activity into an Olympic event and billion-dollar industry marked by fierce rivalries. The book also examines the seductive danger of mountain wilderness, exploring both the glory these environments offer and the deadly avalanches they can unleash without warning.
Genres: adventure, sports, non-fiction, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: personal-journey, rise-and-fall
Setting: British Columbia, Durrand Glacier, North America, Northern Selkirk Mountains
Period: 2003
352 pages · Hardcover · Harper
Content warnings: death