Sean Pettit was on the scene as soon as he was tall enough to ride the Whistler park, and he's been among the best skiers in the world longer than he's had a drivers license. So when a skier who helped define a decade of freeriding casually switched to snowboarding, he raised a few eyebrows. At first, it was a surprisingly smooth hit here or there, peppered into his ski-heavy Instagram feed. Last season, however, he dropped a snowboard edit just as long as his ski part for the year. He's earned respect from the snowboard world as a rider with a playful, relaxed style and a propensity for bold, creative hits cultivated over a lifetime on skis. (You can read the profile I wrote about Pettit and his carefully commoditized skiing experience here.)

We caught him in a rare break between gardening, filming with Red Bull, and working on designs for his new streetwear brand Superproof to talk about his transition to snowboarding. Which, he's quick to point out, isn't replacing his skiing. Pettit isn't giving anything up, he says, just bringing more of the good stuff in.

Sean Pettit in Valdez, Alaska, shooting for his new apparel brand Superproof. PHOTO: Blake Jorgenson

Abigail Barronian: Snowboarding is just one of many side hustles you've had going these past few years. It makes sense. Your adolescence was marked by such rapid growth: your career was skyrocketing, with fresh opportunities and challenges every day. Was this just another way to keep the pace up?

Sean Pettit: You know, it’s totally ingrained in who I am as a human; trying to keep up and be on top for so long. You want to be the best, so you’re going to do anything you can to come up with fresh ideas. You can’t accomplish something if you don’t present yourself with a problem or some sort of challenge. The ski industry is awesome, but it’s small, and eventually, I felt there was no room for growth. I did a lot of the things I wanted to do in skiing, so what’s next?

AB: With these projects--snowboarding, dabbling in film, the brand--do you feel like you’re able to come back to skiing with a new perspective? Does it offer you a reset?

SP: Definitely. Now that I have these other projects, I don’t need to present so many challenges to myself in skiing, which makes it really nice to go back to. It’s about the pure enjoyment of it, the leisure and the fun of the sport. I don’t want to redefine gravity or do some death-defying shit, that’s just not how I perceive skiing. There’s a huge side of the sport that's like; if you’re not putting yourself in extreme danger, then it’s not worth watching. That's crazy in my opinion. I’ve had a lot of friends die skiing. It's not something that I need to push. I'm not trying to be too serious or change the world because I went off a bigger cliff.

All I have to do is go skiing. I know how to ski. It’s ingrained in me. My brain doesn’t have to work that hard and I love that. I can just let my body take me. Whereas snowboarding I’m still learning so much. I have to focus, I still crash all the time. It’s one of those things where I still have a lot I'd like to accomplish. I guess that’s the difference between my skiing and snowboarding at this point in time.

PHOTO: Blake Jorgenson

AB: The way you’re describing how you approach skiing now is a little more playful and a little less about, like you said, doing the next death-defying thing.

SP: I think that’s where snowboarding is ahead in a sense. People think that it’s all about speed and charging really hard. And some people totally get off on that, but that’s not how I function. That attitude has been ingrained in skiing for a long time. “No friends on a pow day” is…so wrong. And not true. That's the craziest thing anyone’s ever said.

AB: Do you think that your style on skis has changed now that you snowboard as much as you do?