Welcome to the 10th anniversary issue of Freeskier magazine. Surviving the vicisitudes of a decade of skiing is a proud achievement, especially a decade in which the sport has literally turned itself upside-down. So 10 years after we debuted this magazine with Jonny Moseley and Cindy Crawford on the cover, we feel truly fortunate to have parlayed great timing, good luck and a large share of hardheaded persistence into a decade in which we had the opportunity to ski (a lot) and to have helped revolutionize the sport we love.
    We are celebrating our 10-year anniversary in the same year as Rossignol skis celebrates its 100-year anniversary. At the ski industry tradeshow in Las Vegas, Rossignol often sets out a large display of skis from its century in business, plus a few very old skis from long before that. You can’t help but be inspired by the lineage of this sport. When we started planning this anniversary feature, we were struck both by the opportunities that we’ve had over the last decade, and by the fact that skiing’s span extends far, far beyond the efforts of any one group of skiers.
    Part of the purpose of this feature is to remind ourselves that skiing as we know it today did not spring out of the snow fully formed. Today’s pipe and park skiers walk in the footsteps of Shane Szocs, JP Auclair and JF Cusson, who in turn drew inspiration from equally revolutionary hot-dog freestylers of the generation before them. Or to peer down a slightly different path, the progression might be from Dan Treadway and Hugo Harrison to Kent Kreitler and Shane McConkey to Glen Plake, Scot Schmidt and Trevor Peterson and so on. Skiers in wool sweaters jumped legit road gaps on wooden skis in the 1950s, while our grandparents strapped on skis to fight in the Alps during World War II. The equipment, the style and the scale of skiing are radically new today; the people, progression and passion are identical across the years. Whenever the sport has needed a shake-up, the right generation of people has come along to provide it one. The latest version of that story is what we’ve tried to record here at Freeskier.
    Freeskier has both documented and helped shape skiing, but we have also benefited greatly from the efforts of others. We have pioneered some and inherited much from everyone in this industry. We grew up on Greg Stump films and Powder magazine and we benefited from magazines that are now gone, like Freeze and Kent Kreitler’s Boards in Motion. Like everyone else in skiing, we were blown away by Moseley’s mute grab, by State of Mind, and a year later by Degenerates; by seeing skiing break into the X Games in Crested Butte; by watching Jeremy Nobis revolutionize big mountain and Dave Crichton, Candide Thovex and CR Johnson do the same for pipe; by athletes taking their tricks into the backcountry.
    We were lucky to be on-hand to capture moments that have defined the last decade on snow, and for our tenth birthday party, we want to pay them their due. This feature is not a history lesson. It is a tip of the hat to just a few of the people who have driven the progression of skiing and helped shape the sport throughout our 10 years. It is an attempt to provide context to where we are today. It is a shout-out to skiers for giving us such a rich tapestry to cover in these pages. And, not least, it is an excuse for us to remember how unbelievably fun this ride has been.
    —Patrick Crawford