Words by Ian Fohrman

It was the third day of the storm in Aspen, and the fluffy frozen deluge showed no signs of slowing. The X Games circus had just moved on, and Aspen felt like a real ski town again. Aspen Highlands was nearly deserted, and Eric Hjorleifson and a group of locals spun lap after untouched lap on some of North America’s steepest in-bounds terrain.

Hoji, as he is known, was scheduled to leave town in an hour and was scrambling around the lodge trying to find enough cell phone bars to delay his flight for just a few hours, until after the lifts stopped spinning.

“No more flights today and it’s too good to leave now,” said Hjorleifson. “Fuck it, I guess I’m skiing powder again tomorrow!” Smiling his trademark mischievous grin, Hoji handed the borrowed phone back to the befuddled tourist, suited up and headed back out into storm. This ended up being his first of four rescheduled flights. Hoji stayed in Aspen for the rest of week, crashing on a local’s futon and, despite closing down the bars more often than not, caught the first chair every single morning.

“I love skiing more than I like hanging out, you know? Charging around a resort when the snow’s good and you’re following shredding locals to the secret stashes; that’s real skiing and it can be as good as any helicopter time,” says Hjorleifson in his typically excited, slightly nasal Canadian accent. Hjorleifson spends his entire season being dropped off in the best terrain in the world by helicopters and snowcats, but he still claims that week of couch surfing and in-bounds skiing in Aspen was the best week of his season.

“Everyone knows Hoji is a sick skier but he’s also so humble, so pumped on skiing, and always has a funny one-liner ready to bust out,” recounts Aspen local Tony Prikryl. “It’s amazing the impact he left on the whole group after that one week.”

Hjorleifson grew up in Canmore, Alberta, a small mountain town on the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies. His parents were both skiers, and they put him in the Lake Louise race program early on. The program laid down a solid ski foundation, but by age 16, Eric found himself feeling trapped by the rigid constraints of racing.

As Hjorleifson was making the transition out of racing, a former racing coach introduced Eric to Andrew Sheppard, a big-mountain skier from Lake Louise. Sheppard was a Canadian skiing legend who had starred in RAP Films movies. Sheppard nicknamed Hjorleifson “The Kid” and took him under his wing. Over the next four years they spent their winters together in the backcountry. Hjorleifson always had an intense passion and connection to the mountains, but Sheppard helped Eric take his mountain awareness and big-mountain skills to the next level.

Around the same time, Hoji saw State of Mind, the original Poor Boyz Productions “new-school” video, in a shop and was immediately captivated watching JP Auclair and the rest of the crew jump. He watched the video on constant repeat. That summer, in 1999, Eric joined a small crew of diggers at Camp of Champions in Whistler, BC.

Hoji showed up as a naive, quiet kid from a town nobody had heard of, but quickly became the sub- ject of every T-bar conversation. “It didn’t take him long before he had the best cab 540 on the glacier and was doing double backs off the [Whistler] windlip,” says Matt Sterbenz, founder of 4FRNT skis, “He had developed a repertoire in the park that was as good as anybody’s, but he still had this history and inspiration in skiing big mountain.”

In 2003 Sheppard was filming for a Honda commercial in Haines, AK and invited Hoji to join the crew. The trip was Hjorleifson’s first Alaskan experience and his first time in a helicopter. If that wasn’t enough to intimidate a 19-year-old rookie, the conditions were as dangerous as they get.

“Everything was super loose and cowboy,” Hjorleifson recalls. “We were experiencing the worst avalanche conditions I’d ever seen. We could hardly ski anything. The helicopters were triggering avalanches remotely on every aspect as we flew over the mountains. It scared the shit out of me, to tell you the truth.”

Fortunately, no lives were lost that week but the mountains took down a handful of Hjorleifson’s seniors. Jonaven Moore and Reggie Crist were buried, Dave Swanwick blew his knee, and trip-mate Dustin Lindgren took a ride in a Class 3 avalanche that almost buried their chopper. The trip was the best education Hjorleifson could have received at the beginning of a long career based around spending inordinate amounts of time in inherently dangerous situations.

“What I saw really made me appreciate mountain knowledge and mountain sense.” He explained, “You gotta take chances to film. Everything you step out onto is pretty fucking gnarly, but you gotta also think about what you’re doing, your responsibilities and the decisions you’re making.”

The trip didn’t produce the epic skiing that anyone had hoped, but it generated enough footage for Oakley, Hjorleifson’s eyewear sponsor at the time, to convince Matchstick Productions that he was a superhero in the making.

“I remember getting the footage and it was really impressive because there was this young kid that no one had heard of, throwing down as hard as anyone in Haines,” says Murray Wais, founding partner at MSP. “It was good enough footage to make our movie straight off the reel.” The next season, Hjorleifson was officially added to the MSP roster and immediately began work on his segment for the 2004 release, Yearbook.

“Shooting with Hoji during Yearbook was incredible,” says MSP’s Steve Winter. “His work ethic put him on top of the stack for getting footage. He would keep working, hiking, snowmobiling, or whatever it took to get the shot. Between that and his smooth aggressive style, I was blown away.”

In 40 seconds filled with as much stylie jumping footage as technical lines, Eric Hjorleifson went from a virtual no-name skier from Canmore to skiing’s skinny, white Canadian hope. The rise of Hoji’s on-snow career enabled him to start designing skis for his new ski sponsor, 4FRNT, a process that would mirror his skiing progression and become a major part of what has defi ned his skiing throughout the rest of his career.

Hjorleifson’s ski designs are always inspired by the terrain he finds himself in and his vision for how it should be skied. In 2005, Eric’s perspective changed dramatically when he moved to Whistler and started chasing Helly Hansen teammate Hugo Harrison around Blackcomb.

“Hugo really opened my eyes to the speed you can ski through just about anything, and I could see the advantages of a big ski with very little sidecut,” he says. He looked at the skis that Harrison was riding and immediately found things that he wanted to improve upon. With their race-inspired flex, big shovel and tail-heavy mounting position, Eric thought the big mountain skis of the time were much too one-dimensional for the kind of skier he aspired to be. And so the first EHP was born, Hjorleifson’s brainchild and one of the skis ever designed with zero camber and a progressive tip.

“I tried to give them a more gradual shape than most skis at the time, with a bit of pintail,” he says. “They had a solid platform to stomp big airs and Mach through anything.” During his first season of filming on his creations, the qualities Eric designed into the skis shone through in his performance in MSP’s Push. Eric stomped big landings, charged big lines at speed and was also able to do tricks and break the skis out of a carve to slide McConkey-style down huge faces.

That season Sterbenz asked all his athletes to write a short summary of their skis for the 4FRNT catalogue, and while he was having trouble coaxing a sentence or two out of most of the team, Hjorleifson responded with a novel. Sterbenz described the writing as a perfect mix of science and literature. “He’d write this passion-filled statement about exactly how the ski felt in each possible environment and then follow that up with metric measurements that would back up exactly why the ski would feel that way.”

Hjorleifson was becoming as enamored and skilled at designing his skis as he was at skiing them. Not only was he going through countless prototypes each season, he was also designing the graphics from scratch. Eric had grown up in a family of artists, but he had neglected his sketchpad for years. Not surprisingly, he was reinvigorated when given the chance to design the graphics for the skis that he’d poured so much of himself into.

In 2006, after a return to interior British Columbia, Hjorleifson had another design revelation, and as usual, one that was inspired by his skiing. He started work on the ski that he feels forever changed the way he approaches the mountain. In BC, he was touring more and getting into more of what he calls micro-terrain: pillow lines and little gems with technical moves that he could skin under and study from below. He realized that to ski those lines the way he wanted, his skis needed more maneuverability and floatation, which meant more gradual tip shape, longer tip profiles, more reverse camber, and even more of a pintail. Hjorleifson not only drew the new ski concept; he found a print shop that could print up his shapes in full scale. He then built scale-models of the skis using cardboard layers and tape to create the exact base contour he was looking for.

“He showed up at Camp of Champions the next summer with these full size cardboard models of the new skis he wanted to design,” says Sterbenz. “They were all worn in the middle and you could tell he’d spent hours standing on them in his living room getting them exactly how he thought they would best perform.”

Every year since then, Eric’s skis have continued to evolve with his ski style and his eye for the mountain, and he’s now working on the newest incarnation of the EHP as well as a new ski dubbed “The Renegade.” Not only is he designing two signature model skis for 4FRNT, he is also working on revolutionary new designs for signature boots and bindings. He passionately points out that boot design is something that every skier bemoans, yet has barely changed in three decades.

Hjorleifson was skiing on the prototypes for his newest skis during that post X-Games week in Aspen and one day he found himself on a three-man chair sandwiched between Peter and John Gafton, twin brothers who both happened to be riding EHPs.

Hjorleifson immediately struck up a conversation and ended up trading skis with Peter for a run so, he could try the new prototypes. They skied half the day together and each chair ride they’d talk shop, dissecting flex points and progressive shapes. When it was time for Hjorleifson to take a lodge break to reschedule his flight, the two left him with the best words a ski designers could hear: “Just so you know, I’d give my left nut for a pair of next year’s EHPs!”

The season kept getting better. Almost straight from Aspen, Hjorleifson loaded a plane for his return to Haines after a six-year absence. The last time he had been there, he was a 19-year-old rookie following Andrew Sheppard onto a helicopter for the first time. Now he was a seasoned veteran with and the rookie, Sean Pettit, was following him.

“I remember one particular peak where we let Hjorleifson and Pettit out on their own,” says Steve Winter. “I was in the door of the heli, watching them get dropped off on this gnarly knife edge. It was crazy thinking about this 16-year-old kid being up there, but I think that being with Hoji and feeling his calmness and confidence in the mountains helped Pettit deal with it.”

Hjorleifson watched Pettit attack the terrain and marveled at how far the sport has come since his first Alaska trip. “This is the best time ever to be a skier,” Hoji says. “The barriers are broken down and people are receptive
to new and innovative ideas. Kids like Pettit get to learn on amazing equipment that allow them to push the sport further than we could have imagined.” Hjorleifson had come full circle, returning to the place that started his career and “scared the shit” out of him after a six-year transcendence to a confident, accomplished professional skier and designer. “There’ll be a day when I don’t want to jump anymore, my knees will be too old, but I’ll still be out there shredding powder… I can guarantee that!” he says. “Best life I’ve ever lived, buddy!”