Snowboarder Jeremy Jones Ventures to Earth’s Far Corners for Conservation

Jeremy Jones at the office. Photo by Clark Fyans

My organization, Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC), has always been concerned with connecting the adventure and science communities. Both communities are very diverse, and from an adventurer’s point of view we’ve worked with the entire spectrum.

Although we think that weekend warriors and average Joes can (and do) make an enormous impact, we’ve always been drawn to getting elite athletes involved as well because they not only bring years of skill and expertise, but their celebrity can provide an excellent platform from which to educate others.

Recently ASC was connected with professional snowboarder, environmental advocate and fellow National Geographic Adventurer of the Year Jeremy Jones through our incredible friends at Clif Bar who are sponsors of both Jeremy and ASC. Jeremy was literally on his way out the door to cross the globe when I got ahold of him in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Jones was headed to Nepal with his sights set on some untouched, unvisited lines high in the Himalaya. There he was joined by a crew of professional snowboard mountaineers and a film crew from Teton Gravity Research, who were filming for his next movie Higher, the final installation in his Deeper, Further, Higher trilogy.

Jeremy is known as one of the best big-mountain riders to have ever touched a snowboard, but more recently has made his name a household fixture for his dedication to climate change advocacy. He started a non-profit organization, Protect Our Winters, to mobilize the winter sports community to make changes in response to the threat of climate change and has changed the way he plays outside, now relying primarily on human power to access his turns using a splitboard rather than helicopters.

He even started his own snowboard manufacturing company, Jones Snowboards, that focuses on building high quality and high performance snowboards and splitboards with minimal environmental impact.

Slowing down and using his own power access powder stashes and big lines has given Jeremy a closer connection to the mountains and has led to a revolution in the snowboarding world for which he was named one of National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year in 2013.

Jeremy Jones collecting samples in Nepal. Photo credit Teton Gravity Research.

Because of Jeremy’s passion for the environment and particularly the effects of climate change on mountainous environments we connected him with our glacier snow and ice sampling project.

For this project he collected snow and ice samples to help researchers understand the extent of glacier thinning and his samples from such a remote corner of Nepal are a valuable addition to the dataset.

Thanks again to Clif Bar for their support of ASC and connecting us with Jeremy. Be on the lookout for more about Jeremy from ASC and Clif Bar soon! In the meantime check out the trailer to Higher and keep an eye out for its release next year. You never know, you may see ASC in there.

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To donate to Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation click here.