In this year’s January issue of Snowboard Canada, the magazine compiled a list of Canada’s most influential snowboarders. I’m sure his name was mentioned and thoughtfully considered yet, perhaps due to his reclusive nature, Greg Todds was not one of the riders on that list.

Greg’s a bear of a man, weighing over 200 pounds. His words are chosen carefully and spoken in a husky voice. An enormously kind heart is revealed by the twinkle in his eye. Pictures of his beautiful family are displayed proudly on his walls alongside eclectic pieces of snowboard memorabilia. His house serves as a museum for the last two decades of snowboarding.


I asked Greg questions about his past but he became much more animated when talking about his present and future. It was refreshing to see that after everything he had achieved in his life as a snowboarder, he wasn’t nearly as interested in what he had done as what he had yet to do.
Anyone who has been part of the Western Canadian snowboarding community for the last 15 years knows who he is. In the early nineties, his groundbreaking video segments for RPG films helped set the standard for snowboarding today. His influence on terrain park and halfpipe design can be seen at virtually any ski resort in North America. His aggressive style on big backcountry lines showed a new and unique way of looking at the mountains.

Greg uses his considerable size and an uncanny ability to read terrain to make the impossible look effortless. After riding for so long, his riding reached such a high level that further progression meant contention with life or death circumstances. The prospect of being a father forced him to re-evaluate the risks he constantly found himself taking. This gave rise to the invention of the noboard.
Snowboarding at the height of his ability had become extremely dangerous for Greg. As an innovator, he felt he had to do something new to progress the sport. In 1998, he did what he considers to be the craziest thing he has ever done. He got rid of his bindings.

“The noboard became a way for me to express my passion because after snowboarding for so long it got boring unless I was doing 100 miles an hour with my pants down,” he explains with a laugh.“So getting rid of my bindings slowed me down a bit and rekindled my passion.”Instead of conventional bindings with straps and highbacks, the noboard offers a rubber traction pad that covers the stance area of a regular snowboard. To compensate for being unattached, there’s a rope fixed just in front of your front foot and just behind your back foot.











“The rope’s kinda like training wheels," explains Todds. “If you pull up on it, the board sticks. And if things get a little gnarly you don’t lose the board. The pow pushing on your base makes the board stick to your feet like surfing or skateboarding.”

The noboard is a product of the environment in which it was created. After spending eight years in Lake Louise and two years in Whistler, Greg moved to Revelstoke and began to explore the surrounding Selkirk and Monashee mountain ranges on his snowmobile. The peaks in the area gets blasted by over 30 feet of snow annually and the riding conditions are almost always ideal. The deep, fluffy snow of the BC interior serves as Greg’s training ground for the progression of the sport he created—noboarding.

When I had a chance to see Greg wield his bindingless creation, I watched in awe as he finessed his was down a staircase of snowy pillows and came speeding out the bottom into an open powder field. As he went careening past me, he threw down the rope and put his hands in the air. After that, I could hardly keep up to him as he linked a thousand feet of turns through the legendary “Selkirk silk.” “Freeriding without bindings is a very soulful thing,” he states proudly.

“It’s his progression,” states friend and co-creator of the noboard Cholo Burns. “First he became an amazing snowboarder, then when he blew his knee he learnt how to ride just as well regular-footed as he was when he was goofy-footed so he could keep on snowboarding. Then when his knee felt better he reverted back to his original stance and started riding without bindings. I guess it was the natural thing for him to do,” concludes Burns.

Greg is turning 33 years old in early December. He was born to Richard and Francis Todds at the Montreal General Hospital in 1971 and has an older brother named John. They grew up in Beaconsfield, a suburb of West Island Montreal. The first time he came to BC was on a school ski trip to Silverstar Ski Resort when he was 16. “That’s when I knew I wanted to move out West with the big mountains,” he recalls.

Back home, he and his family would take regular ski vacations around the hills of the East. Greg started skiing when he was two years old and gravitated towards it immediately. Even at such a young age, it was his favourite thing to do. Well, that was until he tried snowboarding for his first time in 1986 at Sugarloaf Resort in Maine. At the resort’s ski barn, his Dad bought him his first snowboard ever—a Burton Cruiser 165.
“Before that day, I had no idea why I was on the planet,” remembers Greg. “But then I discovered snowboarding and was like, oh yeah, this is what I’m gonna do.”
After graduating from high school, Greg acted on his mom’s advice and drove across the country to Lake Louise. He had missed the family ski vacation there the year before because he was flunking math. But when his mom came back she told him she’d found him an incredible place to go ride his snowboard.
The Rockies were a new arena for Greg’s rising talent. He quickly made a name for himself shattering people’s perceptions of what could be done on a snowboard. Greg had a natural ability to see airs and lines that no one else would even consider; he would wait for the conditions to be right and then blow everyone’s mind defying the odds with grace.









Greg’s first job in Lake Louise was bussing tables in the daylodge. Eventually, he traded jobs with a friend so he could work outdoors and get four-hour ski breaks. He ended up working as a lift operator on the Friendly Giant chairlift and his breaks awarded him the opportunity to ride seven days a week. Greg and several other talented riders formed a crew called Team Core that gained a reputation for being the best posse of riders in the West. The spotlight that shone on Team Core helped start Greg and the other members’ careers in the industry.

Todds competed for a while on the Alberta Snowboarding Association’s competitive circuit. His frequent podium finishes in both the halfpipe and racing divisions affirmed his role as a leader in the progression of the sport. But it was the video sections that showcased his ability to destroy backcountry terrain that really set him apart from other snowboarders.

In 1993, Greg made his screen debut in RAP film’s “The White Room”. He had been invited by the producers of the film to go cat-skiing at Fernie’s Island Lake Lodge. He hadn’t really filmed before and was frustrated by all the standing around that accompanies getting quality footage. Nevertheless, he nailed one of the most memorable shots of the video launching his first cliff ever—an 80 foot behemoth that few riders would step to, even today. “I just remember it was so big that I could feel the air pushing on my base and bending my knees.”
After that, Greg established a working relationship with cinematographer Lawrence Roeck. He was featured in all three of Roeck’s movies displaying an inhuman confidence that translated into an effortless style. Set to hard-hitting heavy metal music, Greg’s segments showed him making his distinctive mark on the mountains of Whistler, Lake Louise and everywhere in between. You can see in the videos that Todds thrived on the kind of riding that had the potential to deal out very real consequences.

“The closer I came to death, the more alive I felt. But now that I have a family, they make me feel alive. I don’t necessarily have to endanger myself anymore. My family makes me feel alive.” Greg and his girlfriend Nicole just brought his second child into the world. Lily Francis Marie Batiste-Todds was born in November this year. She’s got a three year old brother named Ashton who was born to a different mom. Greg is an incredible dad. The way his eyes light up when he’s holding his kids provides a rare glimpse into his enormous heart .Greg recalls a story when he was working in the spring digging out tree-wells for logging companies. It was the end of a 10-hour shift and he was soaked after working in sleet for the entire day: “I just concentrated really hard and thought about Ashton. After a while, I was totally warm again.” Greg can be intimidating when you first meet him, but once you see the love that he shows for the people (and pets) around him, he becomes a more accessible person.

Greg’s family has given him a newfound purpose in life and they are in fact one of the main reasons he chose to change the way he rode his snowboard. The paradox of the noboard is that, although it seems incredibly dangerous, it’s conducive to a much safer kind of riding. “It’s a lot harder than riding with bindings,” explains Greg. “I’ve crashed a lot more in the past few years than I used to when I was strapped in. I used to go months without crashing but whenever I wiped out with bindings, I always seemed to get hurt. The board slipping out from underneath me gives my body the freedom to compress in a more natural way.”
The noboard is essentially a backcountry device and the peaks around Revelstoke are some of the most avalanche-prone in the world. Greg is no stranger to the damage they can inflict. The year of the new millennium was especially devastating. “Parks Canada had three pages of avalanche deaths that year and I had a friend on every page. The mountains were hungry that year,” he states seriously.
“It feels like the mountains have been trying to get me for a long time too,” he goes on. “I’ve escaped death a handful of times but I’ve never been fully buried. I had one avalanche just miss me that was going about 200 miles an hour. Pieps, shovel, nothing would have mattered with that beast.”
“Greg calls me once a year to thank me for saving his life,” says Greg’s friend John Hopper who was there to scream at him after he aired into the pocket of unstable snow that set the slope in motion.

Indeed, Greg has spent most of his life riding a fine line between life and death. The noboard has given him a new and safer way to spend time in the mountains—a project that will keep him around to take care of his family. He may not have made the list of Canada’s most influential snowboarders, but Snowboard Canada Magazine is beginning to recognize the sport of noboarding. In the publication’s Buyer’s Guide of this season, there’s a 1000 word write-up on Greg’s new discipline of riding. It shows a sequence of him stomping a 15 foot drop and riding away with one hand on the rope, one hand in the air and a huge smile on his face. Maybe in the future we’ll see issues of Noboard Canada. If so, there’s no question who will be number one on their most influential list.



Greg Todds' Family Trust
www.noboard.ca
Greg Todds Discussion



Life, Death, Progression
The Greg Todds Profile
By Mike Nixon