Published in The Post-Star (G14)
1/12/06
It was Friday night at a bar in Glens Falls, and Dave Armando was smiling with anticipation. He wasn't thinking about the beers on tap -- he was looking out through the glass door, where a few small, white flecks drifted through the darkness.
"Yes!" he muttered. "It's snowing."
For Armando, 28, life is simple.
"I just love to snowboard," he said.
Snowboarding is more than a hobby for him, it's an obsession.
"I feel like my hobby pursued me more than I pursued it," he said. This winter will mark his 17th season on a board, and he spends 30 to 50 days a year on the slopes.
His job, too, revolves around snow. He works in group sales at West Mountain, and worked seasonally for Burton Snowboards for the past five years.
"My goal is to open my own snowboard shop someday. I want to go to work every day and see snowboards; talk about snowboards," he said, then laughed at himself. "My God, it sounds like a fetish."
Armando grew up in Glens Falls, and was a teenage skateboarder when his parents gave him a snowboard for Christmas in 1989. He had been a skier for two years, but he didn't look back after shifting into snowboarding gear.
"I liked the versatility of it, and I was thinking like a 12-year-old: 'Hey, I can do tricks!'" he remembers.
Since then, he has based most of his major life decisions on the sport. He went to college at St. Michael's in Vermont, because it was near several big mountains. After his sophomore year, he left to spend more time snowboarding.
He competed regionally for a few seasons -- in 1998, he won a series at Gore that landed him a free trip to Breckenridge ski center in Colorado -- then decided that "it's not about that" for him.
"I never wanted to become a professional snowboarder, but I always just wanted to do it for me," he said. "To be able to make a carve on really good snow ... it's just a really good feeling inside, almost a spiritual experience. It takes you out of your reality for a while."
Although reality means getting a job to make a living, Armando blurs the line between work and play as much as he can. For several winters, he was the assistant to an independent sales representative for Burton, traveling among ski resorts in what was pretty much his dream job -- talking about, tuning, and showing off snowboards.
The high point of his career so far, he said, was having dinner at the home of "the godfather of snowboarding," Jake Burton. "He's one of my role models, so to be in his house, talking to him ... that right there was just awesome," said Armando, in a reverential tone.
Armando said he loves working at West because "it feels like giving something back" to the place where he discovered his passion. During high school, he and his two best friends, Matt French and Randy Kuba, spent nearly all their free time snowboarding there.
"When we first started, we were among the only few on the mountain, and now I think it's more like 50/50 between skiers and boarders," he said. "There are some really good snowboarders coming out of West these days."
His friends have gone on to jobs outside of the industry, but Armando said he'll never be happy working far from the slopes. His goal is to be on his board -- even if just for one run -- every day that he works at West.
He recently started taking classes toward a business degree at Adirondack Community College. That doesn't mean he sees a desk job in his future, however.
"I will try to snowboard at any cost. I'm 28, and I don't have a retirement plan, and I don't care. I would love to just live in a cabin in the woods with no electricity, and be on the mountain every day," he said. "I know it probably sounds ignorant, but I just want to snowboard."
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