There's a local crew of skiers who've taken their passion for skiing and are sharing it with other like-minded people. Not only is their social media presence on point within our snowsports community, but they're gaining some serious traction on a much bigger scale as well.
Meet the Potato Boys: Essex Prescott, Blake Bowerman, Stephen Matkin, Kyle Vandever and Cameron Hotchkiss. This party of five is constantly scheming and coming up with some badass ski adventures. Two winters ago, they recorded their ski exploits and produced a movie they titled Famous Potatoes, which had a great response from the skiing community.
Famous Potatoes was brewed up during the COVID lockdown, which prohibited any sort of international ski travel for the boys. They thought they'd dig a little deeper and explore some of the mountain ranges in North Idaho. This 15-minute film chronicled the Potato Boys as they ventured around the local mountains, accessing some difficult and extremely challenging backcountry ski runs. All this took a lot of research on Google Earth, skis on the ground and even a little aerial recon.
It wasn't uncommon for the Potato Boys to be out on some serious scouting missions, looking for that next adventure, whether it was riding motorcycles in the summer or snowmobiles in the winter (usually involving some difficult maneuvering up snow-covered creek drainages). The Potato Boys are serious about what they do, even going as far as renting a plane to scout topography and enter and exit access points from above.
Prescott from Coeur d'Alene is the front man. His skiing and marketing skills have attracted serious sponsors to the Potato Boys' endeavors. With support from Subaru, Nordica Skis, Carhartt, Thule and a few other sponsors, the crew is given the tools to make their adventures more achievable.
As for the other Potato Boys, there's Blake Bowerman and his free flowing hair. He and Essex go back almost 20 years and have spent endless hours pushing each other's skiing to the next level. Matkin, a mild-mannered civil engineer during the week, is a hard-charging skier on the weekends. Vandever and Hotchkiss are the magicians who capture these incredible video and photo moments.
"It's so cool working with Kyle and Cam, those guys are on a super high level," Essex says of the two cameramen. "Cam's awesome, he came out and helped us shoot some stuff halfway through the season. He came in clutch for the rest of the year. We were lucky to get Kyle, who came off a long season of filming his good friend, professional bass fisherman and Bassmaster's 'Angler of the Year' Brandon Palaniuk."
Essex recalls his introduction to Vandever: "I knew he filmed the bass stuff, and Kyle told us he had a passion to make a snow film. He's like, 'I really wanna make a ski movie.' Kyle's now a big part of Famous Potatoes. He's so creative and good with the camera. That kid can handle anything, he basically eats nails for breakfast."
Together the Potato Boys have created a tasty recipe for exciting and entertaining ski content, whether it be through social media, short movies or some upbeat web advertisements for Nordica Skis.
After a couple of injuries last season slowed their filming adventures, the Potato Boys will be back at it again this winter. "We got a big list of stuff to do," Essex says excitedly. "It just kind of depends on where the snow fills in and what looks good."
Most of their adventures have some tough logistics. "Everything we're doing, it's so damn long to get out there," Essex explains. "I felt the maximum of what you could do in a day was a lot on the body, to carry that much gear that far and then have to ski at a high level after that led to some late nights. So we're like, we gotta figure out how we can stay out there."
This winter, the crew plans on snow camping and using a teepee with a stove. That way, the Boys can take on challenging adventures without feeling rushed or tired. They experimented with it a few times last winter with some decent success.
"Most days we'll use the snowmobiles only for like the first hour in the morning just to get down the road or drainage then we'll have to carry our gear and hike in the rest," Essex says. "It can be pretty tiring if we're carrying all our overnight gear and cameras. So for these bigger trips, we started throwing the teepee and overnight gear out of a plane. There's some crazy logistics behind that, and it's a whole can of worms in itself, but it's fun and exhilarating. There's nothing like it when you get to that bag that you chucked the day before and everything's OK."
Skiing these uncharted areas comes with many risks. The Boys' avalanche awareness skills are on point, but when there's not much data collected on a zone throughout the season, things can get sketchy.
"Like back when I lived in Whistler," Essex says, "I mean everyone was going out all the time, and you knew where it was good via Instagram or talking to people. Here, you're kind of on your own, getting a lot of the information yourself, so it was really important for us to spend a lot of time going to the same places and gathering the data throughout the season to understand how things were developing and what the snowpack was doing, how stuff was filling in, what the approaches in were like, the whole nine yards."
Their experience with their first movie, Famous Potatoes, was a realization for the Potato Boys that there are lots of adventures around here and skiers want to see that. Essex says with a smile, "The local community loved it, and it was so damn fun to do." ♦
Bob Legasa has been a Snowlander contributor to the Inlander since 1994. He's also a Hayden-based independent videographer, TV producer and snowsports event promoter with his Freeride Media company.
