Hannah Matranga
Primary Outdoor Sports: Snowboarder & Splitboard Mountaineer
Favorite Beverage: Coffee
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunset
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Board Games
Favorite Season: Winter
Favorite Trail Snack: Pocket Bacon
Favorite Camp Game: Spicy Uno
Fun Fact: I’ve received a medal for raising chickens
Book Recommendation: Name of the Wind
Three Words to Describe You: Driven, Sassy, & Curious
“Snowboarding existed in my world because I’d had two trips. The first trip I went on with my school, I went skiing. Then the second time, I went snowboarding because the kid in my class that I had a crush on was a snowboarder. So I lied so I could go on a trip with him and I said I was an intermediate snowboarder, in fact, so that I would get put in the same group. I spent that entire day eating shit down the mountain over and over and over again. Then for some reason, I was like, ‘This is it. I am a snowboarder.’ So all through high school, I told people I was a snowboarder even though I had been that one time in sixth grade.”
“In January or February of 2018, I had a friend that I’d met on a mission trip years and years ago. She posted something online of her apartment, that she and her husband had just moved into. They’d decorated their walls with ice axes and I was like, ‘Hey, I need one of those. I know that’s a tool for something I’m trying to do. Can I buy one?’ They were like, ‘Uhh, sure.’ They happened to live two hours away from my mom and so I drove out there and bought this ice ax from them. They were like, ‘Well, what are you doing right now?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely nothing. I’m unemployed. I’m single. I got nothing going on. Not much.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, sweet. Do you want to come up and climb Mt. Shasta with us?’ I was like, ‘Hell yeah I do.’
I knew absolutely nothing. I don’t know why they let me go. It ended up turning into this huge, huge trip. They took me splitboarding in the Trinity Alps. We waited for a weather window for Shasta. It never happened. So we ended up going up to Crater Lake and they took me splitboarding there.
They took me on this wild trip for a month with them. We went climbing and shredding in the Castle Crags and did all this stuff that I had no idea how to do and I just became obsessed with it. It was like that first taste of ‘I knew I wanted to do this, but now I really know I want to do this.’ So I started accumulating more stuff from them.
I really had a terrible time on most of that trip because I had no gear that was sufficient. I was splitboarding in mountaineering boots that were two sizes too big for me. But still, for whatever reason I was like, ‘This is it.’
After I started to get that taste of it, I went back the next summer to Glacier and dove way more into the technical mountaineering side of stuff. Started doing some technical glacier traverses and learning a little bit about ice climbing and team rope climbing.”
“I went to Steamboat, got my housing, got my pass, and got my job. Finally, I had access to all this stuff. I had bought all of my gear on Evo’s Labor Day Clearance and it worked. It got me through it. I showed up to Steamboat and just told everyone I was a snowboarder because I always had been in my brain. And, I just started going snowboarding. I didn't really have anyone to go with so I started going up alone and just spent a few days rolling my way down the mountain.
I immediately fell in love with it. I’m like, ‘What else am I going to do? I live here. I can walk to the gondola. Of course, I'm going to go every day.’ I put in 100 days that season and I’ve put in 100 days every season since then.”
“I think that part of why I love Bachelor, in particular, is because it is really suited to the particular style of riding that I love, which is just being able to read the terrain and find interesting lines down something. You could still be riding a line that no one has ridden before. The mountain is changing all the time. We’re constantly getting wind lips in new places. Last year, there was this couple week period of time where all of the trees were solid but they were snow. They weren't ice and you could ride all of them. There were trees bent over and you could ride off the trees and all of the pinnacles up in the bowls on the front side. Everything just turned into a hit. Everything turned into something that could be a part of your line all of a sudden. That’s absolutely my favorite style of snowboarding, looking at a mountain in a different way. As opposed to obstacles, I’m now looking at things that become a fluid part of how I’m going to interact with the mountain.”
“It’s playing. I think that’s why I love it so much. Snowboarding is the thing that’s out of the box. It’s not restricted. No one’s telling me how to ride something or what to ride. It’s just sheer joy and just being out there. It’s playing. I’m on a playground.”
“I’ve entirely built my life around snowboarding. I’ve had the conversation with people. Often, I get these comments either from friends or people online of ‘Wow, I wish I could do what you do.’ I think that people only see those of us that live this way and only focus on the privilege, not to say that there isn’t privilege because there is 100%, and don’t recognize the sacrifices as well.
It’s not easy to make this as big of a part of my life. I sacrifice different things. There's other people that sacrifice access to this stuff to live the way they want to. On the flip side, I sacrifice being able to live affordably in a place by myself. I’ve lived in some dumps with a lot of people. You know? We sacrifice our sleep schedule because we go and work nights so that we can afford to do what we want to go and do. We’re not sleeping very much because we're working when everyone else is resting after work. It requires sacrifices around your time, around your lifestyle, where you live, how you live, the kind of jobs you’re able to do because you can’t really invest in skiing and snowboarding the way that we do if you have a normal job. They’re just inherently incompatible.
For a long time, I also sacrificed community. I moved around so much doing these seasonal jobs because they gave me access to this stuff though that sacrificed stability of any kind. It’s certainly something that if you choose to be as invested in it as some of us are, it requires a lot.
I’m willing to make these sacrifices. Every time I’m out there, whether it’s the day that I was upset in the wind or whether it's the days that I’m up on Bach just soaking wet on shit snow or the days at work up on Mt. Shasta when I’m freezing and just want to go and be warm somewhere, I still, even when there's those moments of ‘I wish I was warm’ or ‘I wish I was comfortable’, I still never wish to not be there. In all of those situations, even in the worst ones, I’m still happy to be right where I am. There is not anywhere else I would rather be. I think if you can find something that makes you feel that way. It’s worth sacrificing most things.”
“There’s one specific day I remember. It was after I had worked a season in Glacier. We were just at the southern tip of Glacier and I was so stoked to be in the park in the winter. We got really lucky with an amazing snow day and we rode some of the deepest powder I’ve ridden in my entire life. I hadn’t ridden anything like that prior and didn’t feel super confident about my ability to do it. We ended up dropping this face and it was my first time in the white room. My first face shot. I just remember, especially being in the backcountry, just the absolute silence of being the only one making turns on this snow. Just listening to nothing but the sound of the powder coming out from underneath my board. I actually wrote a poem about that sound two years later because it stuck with me so much. I keep going back to that moment. There was something about being in that space, being completely alone in those moments in the snow on this mountain, just having only that noise with me. I would ride one hundred shit days a year for that moment.”
“Being on my snowboard gives me a confidence that I don’t have in a lot of other areas in life. There's many times where I’ve been like ‘Nah, there's no way.’ Recently, with this urban rail, I was like, ‘Hell no.’ Then, finding out that I, in fact, could ride an urban rail, you can’t not feel cool snowboarding down a rail in the middle of a city. So, I think that is for sure part of it, consistently seeing progress and seeing things that I didn’t think I could do and finding out I could do them.
Also, in the rest of my life I’m pretty clumsy. I trip on shit all the time, hurt myself, fall over. I’m even pretty clumsy when I’m mountaineering as well. It's kind of dangerous sometimes. I don’t feel clumsy on my snowboard. I feel smooth. I feel cool. I feel fast.
Recently, as I’ve come into being more socially visible to people and being in front of people through the context of working with brands, there's suddenly a lot of people that look up to me. I think that is confidence building too and it makes me want to continue to be better for these people who have for whatever reason decided to look up to me. I don’t think there was really anything in my life before snowboarding that put me in a position like that.”
“When I first moved to Bend, I liked it here, but I wasn’t having that feeling of ‘I fit in, I belong.’ I met some cool people, I was really welcomed here, but I didn’t feel like I had much going on. Then, the mountain opened and I immediately had friends. I could show up to the mountain by myself and immediately have people to ride with. Suddenly, I had friends. I had purpose. I had community. Now, my jobs are centered around that as well. That’s also how I know my partner, through snowboarding. It’s brought me a lot.”
