SE5:EP3 - Chris 'Gunny' Gunnarson: Building on Progression

Head to any Woodward Mountain Center and you’ll immediately be drawn to the kids in the Jib Park and Peace Park pushing themselves to new heights. Since Woodward’s humble beginning over 50 years ago as a gymnastics camp in Pennsylvania, progression has been central to its mission. Today, Woodward centers span the globe including Utah’s Woodward Park City. In this episode of Last Chair, we catch up with a legend in action sports, Chris “Gunny” Gunnarson. Now the president of Woodward globally, Gunny’s three decades in action sports has paralleled the dramatic growth from surf to skateboard to snowboard to ski.

Beginning at Snow Summit and Big Bear in southern California, Gunnarson quickly became a leader in the sport from building snow terrain for the X-Games beginning in year one, to crafting private training venues that sent athletes like Shaun White on to olympic gold. Along the way, he built a reputation as a leader in progression with his company Snow Park Technologies and a capable partner with resorts, ultimately helping the world’s greatest athletes achieve pinnacles of success in their career.

And while his career has been marked by relationships with the greatest athletes, Gunnarson is quick to point out that what’s central to his own mission is to bring that experience to enthusiasts of all ages and ability levels. Today, he leads Woodward on a global journey to provide fun and progression for all.

As a boy growing up in SoCal in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was immersed in the cultural revolution of action sports. His life was centered around skateboarding and a little surfing. But when he discovered snowboarding at 13, he used every angle to get up to the mountains and ride on snow.

Here’s teaser of Gunny’s Last Chair interview, which takes you back into the origin years of the culture of snowboarding and tracks you through the impact Woodward is making with people of all ages.

Let’s go back to the beginning – YOUR beginning!

Oh man, how I got involved in sport. I mean, I think I was around five when I got on a surfboard. I know I was seven when I got on a skateboard and I had a bike like every other kid in the neighborhood. And I heard about snowboarding when I was 13. In fact, for my 13th birthday, my dad took us up. I lived in San Diego, so I grew up in the southern California hotbed of board sports. And it was funny. My mom and dad were like, oh, snowboarding? You know, we used to ski before you were born and I didn't even know what skiing was, really. And so we get up to the local mountain and they were like, ‘no snowboarding allowed.’ We had rented some boards from the local surf shop. I rented a Chuck Barfoot board and they were like, ‘no snowboards allowed.’ My dad got so angry and he's like, ‘I used to ski here all the time. What do you mean no snowboards allowed?’ And so we ended up just … we had rented a cabin with a couple of my buddies for my 13th birthday to go snowboarding, trying to figure it out, you know, falling a lot just on this back hill. And I knew right then and there, like, I have got to figure out a way to do this for the rest of my life. And somehow I lucked out.

So you must have had some good skateboarding roots in SoCal?

Well, it was kind of all I knew. And, you know, sort of in my high school teen years, I was living up in the outskirts of LA, so I was skating swimming pools. There was a big earthquake in Northridge, and there were lots of empty swimming pools. We had maps of pools from condemned buildings and houses. And so we'd show up with buckets, mops, and we would skate all these different pools. I think we skated Tom Petty's pool at one point. It was like a condemned house that he'd owned or something like that. But that was my whole life and culture was skating and a little bit of surfing, but mostly skateboarding and trying to find as many pathways to get up to the mountains as possible.

Were your business wheels turning yet in your mind?

Honestly, not even a little bit. At that point, it was just living life, having fun and trying to skate as much as possible.

What was your first job in the industry?

I've had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but my first job in the industry was at Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake. I was fresh out of high school, and I was going to try and make it as a pro snowboarder, get whatever job I could on the mountain, and, funny enough, I got a job with the patrol at Snow Summit at the time. Being based right in Southern California obviously was right in the middle of what I'll call boardsport Mecca, except they weren't quite there yet. And so I get this job as a snowboarder, but on patrol, thinking, ‘oh, I'm just going to, you know, snowboard a lot.’ But I actually ended up really loving patrol and really loving resort operations – becoming a sponge and learning everything I could. They were a very progressive thinking resort ski resort, and they were just starting to launch terrain parks, and none of the other patrol guys wanted to deal with the terrain parks.

Was there a turning point for you when you saw your career as a terrain park developer come to light?

Over time, that was a real paradigm shift. The terrain park movement, which really was born out of Big Bear, also was a paradigm shift in the entire world of winter sports in the sense that right there in Southern California, it was meeting a market need. But as it became a broader national interest of how do we deal with these rowdy snowboarders and contain them? And now there's freestyle skiers that want to do the same kind of stuff – like we should just give them their own venue to do that kind of stuff and keep them in a little contained area so they don't screw with the rest of the mountain operations. But who knows how to do this kind of stuff? And that is actually when I saw a business opportunity.

Gunny, what was it that motivated you to bring your lifelong action sports skills and knowledge to Woodward, now serving as global president?

I've known of Woodward virtually my entire career – I mean, you can't be in this in the action sports universe without knowing what Woodward is. You know, it's got a 53-year legacy. I was super intrigued when I learned that Powdr, a ski resort company, had bought Woodward because, you know, everybody knew Woodward as a camp out in Pennsylvania. And it was the Holy Land. Like, if you were going to be a competing skateboarder, BMX athlete, that's where you went. And so when Powdr bought Woodward, I was certainly paying attention from afar. But to answer your question – there I was, life was good, I owned my own company, I had my own TV show. And the folks at Powdr came and said, ‘hey, we want to talk to you about you coming in and helping us figure out how to best propel Woodward from where it currently is.’ And I left it all. I moved to Park City, Utah from Truckee.

Talk about progression and why it’s important to Woodward?

Humans want to fly. They want to move. They want to move their bodies. They want to challenge themselves. All the way from the youngest ages – you can hear the kid right behind me. He's jumping on the trampoline. He's figuring out how to move his body in the air, whether he's doing a backflip or just monkeying around. We have zone coaches. We have an entire array of different types of programming, from casual, easy, fun all the way to very focused clinics and training so that people can get better. It's human nature to want to get better, whether you're a golfer or a swimmer or whatever yo...