After missing the last go-round, Gerard’s family will return to the to cheer him on. This year, he will have around 40 people on hand at the snow park in Livigno, doubling the number who traveled to PyeongChang and triggered an epic celebration when he took the gold in slopestyle eight years ago.

Gerard, 25, is making his third Olympic appearance. He is part of a close-knit family that includes sister, Tieghan, a food blogger who is hosting a big, family dinner in Milan halfway through the Games. Gerard will compete in big air, starting Thursday, then return to the mountains for slopestyle on Feb. 18.

Gerard’s family missed the 2022 Games in China due to COVID restrictions. Gerard finished fourth that year.

“They were bummed to miss Beijing,” Gerard said Monday during a news conference with the American snowboarders.

His teammates joked that you are more likely to see a Gerard than a local, given the number of family members coming.

Gerard said he doesn’t expect as rowdy party as in 2018. His brothers have had kids and mellowed out, he explained.

“Everyone’s kind of tamed out a little bit,” Gerard said. “Maybe a mellower crew but you kind of never know what you are getting with them.”

But X Games? Just a mere bronze (2020) to show for his time in seven prior appearances. That monkey is finally off his back as of Sunday after he held off Canada’s Mark McMorris to win slopestyle gold at Buttermilk Ski Area.

“It����ap everything. I grew up watching these contests, like X Games and Dew Tour and U.S. Open. To have a gold here means everything to me,” Gerard said after his win. “Just to land three runs, today was perfect. I’m just so happy.”

Gerard and McMorris, who owns the most Winter X Games medals in history, both had nearly flawless runs, but it was Gerard’s 1800 that stood out over McMorris’s 1620 in the end. McMorris had been going for the slopestyle three-peat after winning the event in both 2022 and 2023.

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Small, soft-spoken and eager to please, she welcomed me warmly, but the coq au vin blanc meatballs and coffee-frosted pumpkin spice cake were not to be. “That cake takes two days to make,” she said.

Instead, her staple white chicken chili simmered in a pumpkin-shaped Dutch oven. She sliced apples and toasted pumpkin seeds for her fall harvest salad before moving on to her favorite part of the process: arranging the shot. She tucked and pulled the greens, fanned out the apples so they looked plush and dotted the shiny seeds on top.

“I’ve always been about the visuals,” she said of her recipe-development process. “I work backward from how I want it to look.”

Since 2012, Gerard has published a new recipe on Half Baked Harvest nearly every day, each illustrated by dozens of photos and videos that she shoots here in the hilltop compound where she also lives. This fire hose of new content keeps her followers — 5.4 million on Instagram alone — well-fed and loyal. Celebrities like Gigi and Bella Hadid, Emma Roberts and Blake Lively extended her reach during the pandemic, with posts about cooking her recipes at home.

From the beginning, her recipes — many of them cheesy, crispy, creamy or a combination — hit a sweet spot between approachable and aspirational. She burrowed into it, thanking and responding to fans around the clock.

“I feel like I grew up with her,” said Tina Nowak, 34, who said she often uses all three Half Baked Harvest cookbooks in her kitchen outside Chicago.

But Gerard has also become an unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism.

Half Baked Harvest began as a chronicle of the big family dinners Gerard cooked for her parents, brothers and sisters — her seven siblings range in age from 3 to 38. Her intense productivity, paired with lifelong anxieties that have kept her near family, helped her build one of the food world’s most consistently successful platforms.

“I love the work, and I have to be creative,” because she spends so much of her life at home, she said.

Eleven years later, much remains the same for Gerard, who turned 30 in September. She has lived here since she was 14, apart from a brief attempt at fashion school in Los Angeles that was cut short by homesickness. Her mother, Jen, 57, still runs the business side of Half Baked Harvest from her house a few hundred yards up the hill. She still doesn’t like to drive, and she hasn’t traveled outside North America except to watch her brother, snowboarder Red Gerard, win a gold medal at the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

And Gerard’s recipes are still essential cooking for thousands of women living between America’s coasts, including her 700,000 daily email subscribers and the more than 2 million readers of her cookbooks. The 25- to 44-year-old women who make up her core demographic are still fiercely loyal; she said that 60% of subscribers open her newsletter every day, a stunningly high number.

But just as much has changed. Gerard, who is white, has long been called out for mispronouncing dishes from other cultures and misidentifying her creations, like calling tacos with pineapple “Hawaiian” and noodles with honey and peanut butter “Chinese.”

But the objections have intensified since 2021, when she posted a recipe for “pho” that was wildly unrelated to the Vietnamese dish, and many longtime fans spoke out about her pattern of disrespecting foods from nonwhite cultures. She apologized, promising to “do more research.”

When it happened again last March, this time with a “banh mi rice bowl,” the pushback was so strong that it was covered by NBC News. Gerard apologized again. (Both recipes remain on the site, with tweaked titles.)

“I think she is somewhat ignorant about other cultures, but in a sincerely interested way,” said Andrea Nguyen, a Vietnamese American food expert, who said she sympathized with the relentless demand for new content and praised Gerard’s work ethic. “In an ideal world, her mistakes would inspire people to do more research and less name-calling.”

Recently, Gerard published a “Thai” beef stew sweetened with pomegranate juice, an ingredient traditional in Middle Eastern cooking.

“I think she’s a great food stylist,” said Hannah Selinger, who writes about food and restaurants. “But why isn’t she more interested in food, and why does she get a seat at the table when there are so many people who actually know this stuff?”

Detractors have also flooded her comment sections when fellow bloggers, like Gaby Dalkin of What����ap Gaby Cooking and Adrianna Guevara Adarme of A Cozy Kitchen, publicly accused Gerard of copying their recipes. Her recipes and persona have generated so much online conflict that most of the sources I contacted refused to go on the record.

Gerard characterized her missteps as respectful enthusiasm for flavors from other cultures. Her critics say she enjoys unearned privilege because of her wealth and whiteness; she says she has worked hard for a decade to earn her following and success. They say she has no particular cooking skills and posts the same recipes over and over again; she says she meets her readers where they are.

When Gerard began Half Baked Harvest on WordPress in 2012, Instagram was only two years old, and she was a 19-year-old with a photography hobby.

Few knew then just how much Instagram, YouTube and other visual media would determine what the world wanted to eat. From the start, Gerard’s dishes, photographed in warm, high-altitude light, looked bountiful and beautiful — and homemade.

“I felt like I didn’t have to know a lot about cooking to be able to do what she did,” said Erica Vargas, a longtime Half Baked Harvest fan.

At first, home cooks — especially the large cohort of millennials who were just starting their own households — were drawn to her family life as much as to her recipes. Unlike other domestic goddesses like Ina Garten and Joanna Gaines, Gerard was young, unmarried and a proudly inexpert cook. Her parents spent little time in the kitchen when she was growing up, she said. Unable to tolerate the nightly chaos that was dinnertime, she started doing the cooking herself.

She learned how entirely from the internet. Where Julia Child studied with professional chefs, and Martha Stewart built her empire on a catering business, Gerard cites restaurant menus and other food websites as her culinary inspiration. Her studio kitchen holds six KitchenAid mixers, but no cookbooks. (KitchenAid, among other companies, sponsored the building of her studio.)

Her breakthrough moment came in 2017, when Anthropologie, the fashion and lifestyle retailer, began stocking her first cookbook. Her most recent book, “Half Baked Harvest Every Day,” published in 2022 during the pandemic, spent 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Gerard is a regular on “Good Morning America” and “Today,” has her own line of candles, touts cosmetic brands and recently collaborated with Home Chef, the meal-kit delivery service owned by Kroger.

But she also devotes considerable resources to the persistent online critics who parse her likes, scour her photos and analyze her body language. Gerard now has four full-time and two part-time employees; part of their job is to delete negative comments across her blog and social media accounts, creating an online echo chamber where she feels safe.

“I follow people who make me feel good,” she said. She dismisses most criticism of her as “internet hate” and said the vast majority of her audience are fans.

On Reddit, where her staff cannot moderate conversations, anonymous commenters publish detailed theories about her motivations and inner demons to a weekly “snark” thread dedicated to her. In October, members of the FoodieSnark subreddit monitored geotags in Chicago to track how many fans showed up at a promotional appearance for her new pumpkin-spice candle.

“People have kindly called her out and not-so kindly called her out,” said Hanna, a contributor to the thread who declined to provide her surname in order to avoid online harassment. “At this point it����ap bizarre that she never seems to take accountability or learn from her mistakes.”

The criticism that bothers Gerard most is more personal: that beneath all of the melted cheese and creamy sauces, she is concealing a chronic eating disorder. Day after day, followers — some with concern, others with vitriol — accuse her of peddling high-fat, high-calorie food while never eating it herself.

Gerard said she does not have an eating disorder but has long suffered from social anxiety and separation anxiety. She said that she is treating those “privately,” and that she calms herself with long hours of work, often forgetting to eat and sleep.

Her mother, also a small and intense woman, said the constant online discussion of Gerard’s body feels sexist and judgmental. “It����ap unfortunate that people feel entitled to comment on someone being underweight, when they would never do that if the person was overweight,” she said.

Despite her success in the food world, Gerard is now trying to elbow her way out of it. She built Half Baked Harvest on a homespun, rustic image, but now she wears Bottega Veneta cashmere sweaters, promotes $500 red-light anti-aging masks and posts breathlessly from runway shows at New York Fashion Week.

The Half Baked Harvest site is no longer exclusively a destination for recipes, as Gerard tirelessly posts links to clothes, jewelry and hotels, luring visitors to linger inside her bubble. “I want those clickbacks,” she said firmly. “TikTok could go away any minute. I don’t own Instagram, but the site is all mine.”

The approaching holidays are her favorite time of year — and the busiest time for her site: According to Jen Gerard, November and December each bring in 23 million to 25 million page views. But Tieghan Gerard dreads the technical questions they always bring, like how to safely defrost a turkey or how to modify a recipe based on high-altitude cooking. (Silverthorne is more than 8,000 feet above sea level.)

“How would I know that?” she said. “I’m not Google.”

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“I never cared about any of this, and all of a sudden, I find myself caring,” the 21-year-old said. “It����ap a bummer.

“It����ap just like, this has been brought to my eye over the last month-ish that we’ve been here. It����ap just been hard on everyone.”

Olympic judging at snowboarding events on slopestyle, in the halfpipe and now at big air has come under fire from the boarders themselves, who say they are fed up with inconsistent and, at times, blatantly incorrect scoring with so much on the line.

“It����ap heartbreaking,” Gerard said Monday. “There’s nothing they can do after they put the scores in to change it. … You’re talking about, this is life-changing for some people, you know?”

The most egregious error came at slopestyle last week, when gold medalist Max Parrot of Canada was credited with a full grab of his board on the first jump even though broadcast replays showed him holding his knee. Parrot has since acknowledged his error, which prompted Canadian teammate and bronze medalist Mark McMorris to claim that he should’ve earned gold instead. Gerard was fourth.

In the halfpipe, many thought gold medalist Ayumu Hirano of Japan was bizarrely underjudged on his second run, which included a triple cork — a trick that had never been performed as part of a complete run until then. That controversy was mostly squelched when Hirano went even bigger with the same set of tricks in Round 3 and won the contest.

Gerard said the judges erred again at qualifying for big air Monday. He complained that his switch backside 1620 was scored dramatically lower than others — he received 75.50 points on his first attempt, while McMorris earned an 81.5 for the same trick.

“It doesn’t really make complete sense,” said Gerard, who is third after qualifying in big air. “Having that six-point difference is pretty incredible.”

The judging panels at slopestyle, halfpipe and big air have been nearly identical. After the slopestyle debacle, the lead official told snowboarding website Whitelines that the judges weren’t provided with replays or shots of some of the angles that were showing up on social media after the contest.

“Yeah, I think that was somewhat a get-out-of-jail-free card,” McMorris said Monday. “Because I think there was a lot of things they could have done to maybe make that situation a little bit better.”

Still, both he and Gerard agree that snowboarding needs to provide judges access to more slow-motion replays and to ease the pressure they feel to make decisions quickly amid time constraints created by television broadcasts.

“Until we have people caring about having proper cameramen on the scene, proper feeds displayed for the judges, proper training and accountability for the judges, as well, it����ap going to be an uphill battle to get proper judging,” McMorris said.

Which brings him to his chief culprit: the International Ski Federation, or FIS. The International Olympic Committee appointed the Switzerland-based group as snowboarding’s governing body when it brought the sport into the Olympics in the 1990s.

The snowboarding community has grown increasingly frustrated with their overlords in recent years. Competitors roasted FIS and the IOC after the women’s slopestyle contest in Pyeongchang four years ago went on despite dangerous wintry conditions that risked riders’ safety and led to an underwhelming show. Alpine skiing on the same mountain was postponed that day.

FIS operates snowboarding events at the Olympics, and McMorris has no faith the judging situation will improve with that organization in charge.

“We just don’t have a snowboard league,” he said. “You know, FIS doesn’t take care of us as much as they maybe should. … They’re not caring about the snowboarding.”

FIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night.

In addition to improved camerawork, McMorris is asking for a higher level of professionalism in the judging panel, lamenting that the group scoring in Beijing is paid inadequately given the Olympics’ profile.

“I don’t blame them,” he said of the judges. “They do this almost as a hobby. They’re not making tons of money being judges for these events. They have to go work in the summer and stuff, so it����ap hard to expect such a professional level from them when we don’t treat them as such.”

Shiffrin’s opening race in the Beijing Olympics ended quickly with a rare mistake and a rare DNF — Did Not Finish. Favored to defend her gold medal in the giant slalom, Shiffrin instead crashed out a few seconds and five gates into the race. She lost control coming around a left-turn gate and fell onto her hip on a course known as The Ice River at the Yanqing Alpine Skiing Center.

The missed gate meant she was done early in the opening run of the two-leg event.

While Shiffrin is expected to have four more chances to add to her collection of three Olympic medals, including two golds, she said Monday’s wipeout will always stick with her.

“I won’t ever get over this,” Shiffrin said. “I’ve never gotten over any.”

Her stunning exit was her first DNF in a GS in more than four years, a streak of 30 races. Her last one was three weeks before she won the gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

“That����ap what drives me to try to keep working and improving, so I can try to make it (so) those things don’t happen,” she said. “But sometimes they still do happen and, unfortunately, it happened today. I felt like there was a lot to look forward to, but, well, now we need to reset.”

Shiffrin plans to race again Wednesday in the slalom, which she won as an 18-year-old at the 2014 Sochi Games. It’ll be her next chance to become the first Alpine ski racer from the United States to win three Olympic golds across a career.

“I’m not going to cry about this because that����ap just wasting energy,” she said.

Sara Hector of Sweden won the gold with a two-run time of 1 minute, 55.69 seconds. Federica Brignone of Italy took silver and Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland earned bronze.

On the slopestyle course, Gerard not only failed to defend his gold medal, but he was knocked off the podium entirely. A run by Canadian rival Mark McMorris dropped Gerard into fourth.

“There’s nothing you can really complain about and I don’t want to be a judge or anything,” Gerard said. “There were a lot of landed runs out there, and it����ap hard. But yeah, I would’ve liked to have been up there for sure.”

CANCER SURVIVER WINS GOLD

Three years after feeling a cancerous lump in his neck, Canadian snowboarder Max Parrot completed an inspiring comeback by winning the gold medal in men’s slopestyle on a course that includes replicas of the Great Wall of China.

Parrot����ap victory run was highlighted by his second jump, when he approached the kicker from an angle instead of straight on — the only competitor to do so — and flipped backward for 1440 degrees of spin, then stomped the landing.

“By far, the biggest run of my entire career,” he said.

Just like his battle back from being diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma 10 months after winning the silver medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. He underwent 12 chemotherapy treatments during the span of six months.

“I had to stop everything to fight,” he said. “I went through hell. It was the first time I ever put my snowboard in the closet. I felt like a lion in a cage.”

Su Yiming of China earned the silver and Mark McMorris of Canada took the bronze.

McMorris was happy for his countryman.

“Max beat (expletive) cancer and it����ap pretty sick to see him do well,” McMorris said. “And he didn’t come to any slopestyle this year. It����ap not his strong suit. Big air is, and he just won slopestyle today.”

MEN’S DOWNHILL

Beat Feuz of Switzerland won the gold medal in the men’s downhill, the one major victory that was missing from his impressive career accomplishments.

“I can’t think of anything more beautiful than flying home with a gold medal around my neck,” said Feuz, the four-time reigning World Cup downhill champion who won the silver medal in super-G and the bronze in downhill at the 2018 Olympics.

The diminutive downhiller edged 41-year-old Johan Clarey of France, with two-time Olympic champion Matthias Mayer of Austria getting bronze.

American skier Mikaela Shiffrin’s boyfriend, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway, was fifth.

GOLDEN WÜST

Dutch speedskater Ireen Wüst became the first athlete to win individual gold medals at five different Olympics when she took the 1,500 meters in an Olympic-record time of 1 minute, 53.28 seconds at the Ice Ribbon oval.

She now has six gold medals, five in individual events that are evenly distributed over each of the Olympics she’s competed in. She’s the most- decorated speedskater in Winter Olympic history with 12 medals.

“I don’t know what it is. I just see the rings and something magical happens,” said the 35-year-old Wüst, who plans to retire after the Beijing Games.

SHORT TRACK MAYHEM

Ren Ziwei of China survived a wild finish to win the men’s 1,000 meters in short track speedskating. Liu Shaolin Sandor of Hungary crossed the line first but was penalized twice and earned a yellow card. That elevated Ren, who crossed second, to the gold medal.

Liu appeared to bump Ren in taking the lead late in the race. Ren grabbed Liu approaching the finish line. Liu still managed to cross first before going down. The referee assessed the penalties to Liu.

Earlier, Arianna Fontana of Italy burnished her legacy as short track’s most decorated skater with her second Olympic medal in Beijing, the gold in the women’s 500. She let out a yell as she crossed the line to earn her 10th career medal.

Specialty: Slopestyle/big air

Age: 21

Gerard makes his second Olympic appearance as the defending gold medalist in the slopestyle. He was the youngest male Olympian to win gold in 90 years and the first person born in the 2000s to claim gold. All this after oversleeping after binging “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” on Netflix and losing his jacket before the competition. He also finished fifth in the big air competition in Pyeongchang. Since the last Olympics, he’s picked up gold in the Dew Tour (2020) and bronze at the X Games (2020).

Competing: Feb. 6-7, 14-15

Grand Prix will host halfpipe skiers and snowboarders from Dec. 9-11. The event will be followed by Dew Tour, which takes place from Dec. 16-19 and features halfpipe and slopestyle competitions as well as men’s and women’s snowboard adaptive competitions and a nighttime street-style jam session.

According to a release from Dew Tour, Olympic snowboarders Shaun White, Julia Marino and Silverthorne local Red Gerard are scheduled to compete in the Winter Dew Tour along with skiers Maggie Voisin, Alex Hall and Alex Ferreira.

Before the resort opens for the winter season Nov. 22, it will host Alpine ski race training in mid-October, including the opening of the U.S. Ski Team Speed Center. University teams, the U.S. men’s and women’s Alpine ski teams, and national teams from Austria, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Slovenia will be at Copper for training.

The high-profile training and Olympic qualifying events play into Copper’s new branding as “the athlete’s mountain.”

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Skateboarders have taken over Middle America this week. It����ap a dress rehearsal for this summer, when they’ll bring their show to the rest of the world at the Olympics.

The questions under the magnifying glass at this week’s Dew Tour — one of the last major qualifying events for the Tokyo Games in July — are whether the Olympics is ready for skateboarding and, more tellingly, whether skateboarding is ready for the Olympics.

“That����ap the beautiful thing about skateboarding,” said Mariah Duran, a 24-year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is one of a handful of U.S. medal hopefuls. “It takes you places you’ve never been.”

More than 20 years after its wintertime cousin, snowboarding, reluctantly took to the biggest stage in sports, skateboarding is grinding its way into the much more crowded summer program. It����ap one of a number of attempts by the International Olympic Committee — surfing, rock climbing and 3-on-3 basketball are also debuting in Tokyo — to appeal to a younger, trendier, more easily distracted audience.

Whether any of this is truly “saving” the Olympics for the next generation is a matter of opinion. Viewership numbers — many proprietary, most skewed by the online fragmentation of the audience and all of them open to manipulation to tell whatever story might fit the narrative — indicate the games still have issues with the in-demand 18-to-34 market. (That puts them in good company: The NFL and MLB and pretty much anything aired on TV are also doing worse in that demographic over the past decade.)

Regardless of whether either side enjoys a boost from this new partnership, suffice it to say that none of it would’ve happened without the 1998 introduction of snowboarding to the Olympics. Despite its now-veteran status in the games, the so-called shredders still get treated like the shiny new thing on the shelf every four years. And while the entire sport has prospered over the two decades, snowboarding has delivered only two athletes the average person might recognize on the street: Shaun White and Chloe Kim.

But lots of folks just beneath that level — Jamie Anderson, Red Gerard, Danny Davis and others — have made very good livings, as well. All of which has been enough to woo a big chunk of skateboarding’s elite into the Olympics without much hand-wringing.

“We’re like surfing or snowboarding, in that the competitors were pretty reluctant to join into something like that,” said one of skateboarding’s forefathers, 50-year-old Mike Vallely, who is helping call the action this week in Iowa. “But once Shaun White started having this great success, the kids coming up started seeing that as what is possible.”

Another conversation that enveloped snowboarding back in the day was whether competing for cash and fame fit into the overall ethos of the “lifestyle” sport that snowboarding wanted to be — a sport that valued fun and filming as much as money and medals. Skateboarders deal with that issue, as well, and some are just as good at threading that needle.

“You look at snowboarding and the way it is now, and I know they love to compete,” said 20-year-old Jagger Eaton, who is trying to qualify in both the park and street events being showcased at the games. “But they’ve also always loved being out on the (backcountry), and going out and filming projects. And they’ve shown they can do both.”

Said Dashawn Jordan, a football player-turned-skateboarder who is also aiming for Tokyo: “I was introduced to skateboarding through the competitive side. And then I found out a lot about what the other side of the sport looks like. I look at all the amazing people who try really hard to keep both factors in play.”

The most successful athlete in the current-day group is American Nyjah Huston, a 12-time X Games and five-time world champion who, in a sign of where the soul of this sport has already moved, includes a shoe deal with Nike among his cache of endorsements.

“I never put much thought into it being in the Olympics,” Huston said. “I was always confused about why it wasn’t in there, but at least it����ap in there now, and I’m hyped for it.”

There’s also, Sky Brown, the 12-year-old competing for her father’s home country of Britain who spent about half her time growing up in Japan, her mother’s native country and the place where all the action is happening this summer. She also surfs and recently took time off to star in, and win, “Dancing With The Stars: Juniors.”

As mass marketable as it might be, skateboarding still has some hurdles to climb. In Japan, skateboarding in broad daylight on a busy street is still frowned upon. It����ap not all that much different in some places in America.

“We didn’t start out as hoodlums or bad guys, but we came up against so much resistance and oppression,” Vallely said. “It spurred two different things. We wanted to promote skating, but also, there was pushback, and we weren’t afraid to say, ‘No, we’re not going take this.”

Josh Friedberg, the CEO of USA Skateboarding, dates some of this attitude back to a Life Magazine cover in 1965 that featured the girls national champion doing a handstand on a board, next to the headline: “The craze and the menace of skateboards.”

“It was immediately cast as something that����ap not good, and that carried on in different iterations through every decade,” Friedberg said.

If the Olympics might be viewed as offering some sort of mainstream seal of approval to a once-rebellious sport, what����ap left to be seen is whether the five rings will keep it fun or suck the life out of it. That, even two decades later, is a debate they’re still having about the superpipe in snowboarding.

However their show plays in Tokyo, skateboarders feel pretty good about their place in the sports world these days.

Des Moines spent more than a decade trying to get America’s largest open skate park built. The 88,000-foot venue opened this week for the Dew Tour. Leaders in the sport think the Olympics make it easier to build more like this in the future.

“I never needed the Olympics to justify skateboarding for me,” Vallely said. “But I sure get a lot of phone calls now. They see it����ap in the Olympics and they know I was involved in all this. I feel like I did some good work.”

He couldn’t shake that nightmare for nearly two months.

Even more, certain sounds — like someone cracking their back — caused flashbacks to that day nearly  in an avalanche near Whistler, British Columbia.

Swept away in the snow, Crouch heard his back break as he tumbled about 1,500 feet through a rock-lined chute.

For five minutes, he remained buried deep under the snow until his buddies dug him out.

On his left shoulder, Crouch now has a tattoo of the mountain range that nearly took his life. Along with it, a new recurring dream — to make the U.S. slopestyle squad for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“Can you imagine going from being buried for nearly 5 minutes to being on the podium at the Olympics?” . “That accident changed my whole life perspective, on living my every day life.”

On April 22, 2018, Crouch and some friends took a helicopter trip into the back country to do some filming. Being April, they knew the snow might be a little unstable and were conscious of the avalanche dangers. They scouted the line they intended to traverse and had an exit plan just in case a slide occurred. Crouch was wearing an avalanche airbag as well, along with a locator beacon.

“But it����ap Mother Nature you’re dealing with out there,” Crouch cautioned. “The mountain can change at any given second.”

It did.

Standing on a ledge, Crouch was about to start when there was a loud crack.

“The next thing I know, I’m in this big white-wash ball of snow,” .

He tugged and tugged on a cord to inflate his avalanche bag.

The bag never deployed.

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Crouch heard the sound of his back breaking as he uncontrollably plummeted down the mountain. When he finally stopped, he was buried under about 6 feet of snow.

There was no panic. Instead, a sense of calm washed over him as he tried to clear snow from his face. But it was as thick as concrete.

So he closed his eyes.

“I remember thinking, ‘This could be it,’” he recalled. “It will be a gift from God if I make it out of this one.”

His companions acted quick. One of them raced down on “pretty much straight rock,” Crouch said, to reach him. The others went around the slide as fast as they could.

At the sound of the avalanche, the helicopter pilot was in the air to get to him. He was able to point out the vicinity of Crouch before he disappeared under the snow.

Five minutes later, an unconscious Crouch was dug out by his friends. A few moments after that, he was alert.

“I remember screaming really loud, ‘I broke my back,’” .

He was taken to Whistler and transported by ambulance to Vancouver. On their way down, he tried to get the emergency personnel to make a stop at a convenience store.

“I asked if we could go buy a lottery ticket,” . “It would’ve been a good day to buy one, because it was my lucky day.”

His injuries: Three fractured vertebrae, torn pancreas, five knocked-out teeth, a black eye (from either hitting a rock or his knee, he’s not sure) and a bad concussion.

The good news: No surgery would be needed to fix the back. There was no nerve damage, either, for the snowboarder who’s been riding as much as he can since he was 3 years old – ���ǰ��� – and is sponsored by the likes of Burton boards .

One of the first to reach out to him soon after his accident was the late Jake Burton Carpenter, who founded the . Carpenter died in November after a relapse with testicular cancer.

“He asked for everyone on the crew that helped rescue me,” Crouch said. “He then called all of them individually and thanked them all for all their hard work. He sent them all bottles of champagne. How cool is that?”

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After a week in a Vancouver hospital, Crouch was flown back to Southern California.

Next, the emotional recovery.

He dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder after the avalanche. He had “gnarly dreams” of being buried, he explained. He was dating a girl at the time who cracked her back and brought back such intense memories that he would blurt, “You’ve got to stop that.” Living close to a small airport, the sound of a helicopter affected him.

To help him overcome PTSD, Crouch attended classes that his friend’s mom taught. The sessions helped ease the vivid nightmares.

“It made me a lot more comfortable,” Crouch said. “It����ap definitely pretty crazy, how your brain can be like that.”

Six months later, Crouch was back on snow. He went to Switzerland with the U.S. team for a training camp. By the third day, he was already hitting jumps.

The avalanche ordeal caused him to take a long look at his lifestyle. He vowed to take his snowboarding more serious.

“I was like, ‘Well, it����ap time to buckle down and get serious and try to make a comeback out of it,’” he said.

He’s taken a big step on the competition front this season by placing fourth at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado. Crouch also finished second to good friend Red Gerard in the slopestyle competition at a .

And while he didn’t make the final round at the Burton U.S. Open last weekend in Vail, his exuberance was on display when he greeted , and the other finalists.

“We’re not really competitors but best friends,” said Gerard, who won the Olympic slopestyle gold medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games. “I’m just happy he’s still here.”

High on Crouch’s future agenda: Return to that mountain spot for another attempt.

“It would be a very special moment,” Crouch said, “riding away from that.”

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This year’s bands include eclectic and experimental band tUnE-yArDs, Michigan’s Greensky Bluegrass, the Texas trio Khruangbin and Brooklyn-based Turkuaz.

The concert series starts Wednesday, Feb. 27, and run through Saturday, March 2.

The annual Burton U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships, now in their 37th year, is free and open to the public. Athletes who will be competing this year include Jamie Anderson, Red Gerard and Mark McMorris.

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