You know, I wouldn't even call snowboarding a sport, you know for me it's just a way of life

Apart from those other riders there is a whole production team [ of The Fourth Phase] behind the cameras too, hauling hundreds of kilos of fragile and awkward filming equipment up those same frozen landscapes. They're the real heroes.

Now you're gonna take beatings. It's written in our DNA, you know. You're gonna go down. You get up, it's that simple.

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 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.

We're all doing what we love. It's how we express ourselves - operating in a space where you don't know if something is possible or not.

I've been to Japan so many times, but I still constantly stumble across things that are so foreign to me.