I knew I wanted to shoot in Japan early on. Years ago, we did a Japan segment in "The Community Project," and at the time I felt it was one of the better Japan segments ever captured.

There's no doubt 'normal' is changing - spring actually came a month early in Alaska, for example, and we had to stop filming.

One of the deep routed motivations for looking at our connection to snow and its journey to our mountains came from Bryan Iguchi, who I rode with a lot when I was just a teenager.

We started out making a film [ The Fourth Phase] about the incredible snow we get at home in Wyoming, the journey soon macroed out into this epic 16,000 mile trip around the North Pacific, taking us to locations in Japan, Alaska, the Kamchatka Peninsula in far-eastern Russia, and back to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

I'm very much looking forward to doing nothing fixed, just riding for fun.

I'm passionate about capturing amazing snowboarding action. I get so much out of the artistic endeavor of even getting one amazing shot in a pristine environment, using specialist cameras to showcase how fun and dynamic snowboarding is. That's what I live for.

I realized pretty quickly just how big and aggressive some of the mountains were down in Nagano Prefecture.