Snowboarders walk to the slopes at Hoodoo Ski Area in January 2022.

Austin Smith has received gear and sponsorship from snowboard and outdoor companies for years, but it wasn’t until he started sharing the activity that he recognized its value. The professional snowboarder in Bend had not seen the point of organizations that take youth on outdoor excursions. He wondered: How could a one-time trip help kids who wouldn’t be able to afford gear or lift tickets in the future?

He got the answer when he started volunteering with Snowdays Foundation, a Portland nonprofit organization that takes youth with no other way to get outdoors into the mountains to learn to snowboard.

“You volunteer with them one day and see how psyched these kids are,” Smith told The Bulletin. “There are tons of benefits, whether it’s just experiencing the mountains for the first time, or whether it’s developing a life-long passion for snowboarding and skiing, so much good can come from one day, two days, three days.”

This winter, Snowdays is expanding its efforts to Bend, bringing youth from Bend’s Caldera High School and CASA, a nonprofit that advocates for the needs of Central Oregon’s 300 foster youth, to the Hoodoo Ski Area for snowboarding lessons.

The goal is to make an activity — where lift tickets, gear and transportation can be pricey — more accessible.

That expense, as well as the tendency for snowboarding communities to be full of white men, can make youth trying to break into those communities feel out of place. Whether they’re youth of color, foster youth or youth from low-income homes, Snowdays aims to make getting into the activity comfortable by bringing them to the mountains together, according to Jen Lorentzen, the nonprofit organization’s board chair.

“They’re in a safe space with other people that look like them, and it feels like they can just focus on the snowboarding and maybe not what they might feel if they were there alone,” Lorentzen, said.

Professional snowboarder Travis Parker founded Snowdays in Portland in 2004 after packing a relative’s high school class into a van and teaching them to snowboard on a school district snow day.

Since then, the nonprofit has grown, with plans to take 240 kids from a dozen Portland-area youth groups to the Summit Pass ski area at Timberline this year, plus another 40 from Bend to Hoodoo.

The goal of the trips isn’t to turn each of the youth involved into pro snowboarders. Rather, the nonprofit focuses on providing new outdoor experiences to youth who face challenges and for whom getting outside might be their last priority after school, the challenges they face at home and an ongoing pandemic, according to Lorentzen.

“When you take an emotional and physical challenge, by combining those two things with the outdoors, you create a separation of space — a transformative experience — that allows the trauma that this person is experiencing in everyday life to fall off of them,” Lorentzen said.

Funded through sponsorships from snowboard companies and regular donors, the nonprofit has relationships with many in the snow sports industry, including a handful of professional snowboarders who volunteer as coaches for the organization.

Smith, the professional snowboarder from Bend, will join other pros in guiding students through their Snowdays sessions at Hoodoo. As someone who’s made snowboarding his career, he said getting started can be life-changing.

“I’m an example of someone where snowboarding can completely change your life, change your passions,” Smith said. “It’s changed everything about my life, so I think it can do great things for people just having that passion. And if people can find snowboarding to be that passion, then that’s incredible”

Smith said he’s often asked by new snowboarders how to get started. A low-risk, guided opportunity like Snowdays provides an easy entry, he said.

“Snowboarding can be pretty unpleasant the first few times you try it,” Smith said. “I always tell people they’ve got to do it at least three days.”

And with four sessions planned for each of the Bend youth groups this year, Smith doesn’t doubt the participants will pick up some skills.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s going to be a whole handful of rippers after that month,” Smith said.

More information about the nonprofit is available on its website at www.snowdaysfoundation.org.