Snowboarding scene has its renaissance man in Shrewsbury native Mike Ravelson

Over the last decade, Mike Ravelson has become a singular presence on the international snowboard scene.

His blend of video and audio creativity, technical prowess, gusto, fashion, skateboard-influenced style and a persistent rebellious edge gives him a unique identity that has enabled him, at 32, to maintain a steady stable of gear sponsors and stay relevant and influential as a pro rider even as legions of young snowboarders come up behind him.

Ravelson grew up in Shrewsbury riding at his local hill, Ski Ward, and at Wachusett — where he fired up a local snowboarding hotbed with Grafton native Cole Navin and other riders in the Eastern Boarder-sponsored terrain park orbit and drew regional attention.

Going global

Ravelson and Navin starred in Princeton native and snowboard videographer Tanner Pendleton's "Landline" movie for Vans, and moved to the world stage.

Growing up in a business-oriented family (his grandfather founded the famous Worcester clothing retail company Maurice the Pants Man, and his father, Bernie, ran it for a few decades before it closed after 90 years in 2017), Ravelson gravitated toward the creative.

He was drawn not only to snowboarding, his main medium of expression, but also art, writing and music.

"It was sort of ingrained in me that this would be what you do, but I would just go into a different world. I've always been a dreamer and a daydreamer," he recalled of his upbringing recently just after returning from his fourth snowboarding trip to Japan. "I wanted to go in a different direction as well. So the art was always big, and then I think snowboarding just happened to be the most potent form of rebellion."

Ravelson and Navin's "street riding" sequences in urban and industrial locales performing spectacularly risky maneuvers on fences, drainage pipes, walls and roofs and who knows what else became the rage, and the genre still is hot in snowboarding videos. Ravelson is also known for "flatground" tricks.

Local color, then a move west

"You take like all the stuff you see in snowboarding and just be from where you're from, and the people around you develop something, like a new color," he said when I asked if he feels there was or is a Massachusetts snowboarding style. "I would definitely say that the riders from Massachusetts, they have something just as any rider from any particular place has, but it's definitely unique."

After attending Plymouth State University in New Hampshire and six years of shredding the terrain park at Loon Mountain and pumping out big-time snowboarding videos, Ravelson switched up his lifestyle and relocated to Salt Lake City.

From his Utah base at home area Brighton, Ravelson has traveled the world year-round appearing in feature length and videos in all formats in Asia, Europe, Canada and across the U.S. with sponsors Capita Snowboards, Volcom, Vans and Union bindings and turning out snowboard clothing designs for Volcom and others.

Ravelson's latest work is featured in longtime sponsor Volcom's newest snowboarding video, "Creedlecosm," shot at various locations in Utah, British Columbia and New Hampshire. An amazing 31-minute video can be viewed on YouTube.

When COVID-19 hit, Ravelson reached deep into his psyche and reconnected with adult-lifelong passion for scribbling poetry in his notebooks and his love of painting and drawing instilled in him in his youth by his mother, Liz Ravelson of Shrewsbury, a talented painter and makeup artist and esthetician.

Visual art, music and poetry

His mother also introduced him to poetry. And he would make up rhymes a lot as a kid.

"When I was really young, we would always go to the art museum, and she'd always be drawing. She does incredible line work with shading stuff and intricate drawings that are really beautiful," he said about his mother. "And I remember seeing that and basically being just like a sponge. I was like, 'oh, that's how you draw. So I sort of developed sort of a style.' "

On the music side, Ravelson's uncle, Tony Postale of Worcester, an accomplished rock guitarist, encouraged Ravleson to play. These days, Ravelson jams with a band and records music that features on some of his shorter videos as soundtracks.

Interestingly, while some snowboarding video soundtracks have a more electronic soundtrack vibe, Ravelson goes for more of the hard electric guitar punk rock sound that to him reflects his own brand of riding energy.

Ravelson — who often goes by one of his nicknames, Mike Rav — already had established a niche as a modern-day snowboarding guru who in many snow sports media interviews and videos dispensed true wisdom about the sport and life derived from his travels and uniquely spiritual vision.

Now as he and the world turned inward in the face of the pandemic, he decided to make a physical book featuring his writing and art.

The book

Ravelson created the 87-page volume "Spiraling Infinity" during 2020-21 with the help of Salt Lake City visual artist Colton Morgan, who curated the astounding, inspiring cascade of typewriter-written poems complemented by dozens of Ravelson's swirling, colorful, mystical drawings and paintings of flowers and otherworldly fanciful images.

The self-published book is a work of art that rewards the reader upon multiple re-readings. Ravelson has not focused much on marketing "Spiraling Infinity" or trying to make money from it. Rather, he has made a practice of presenting it to friends and interested readers as a gift, sending it to them at his expense in beautiful packages accompanied by a typewritten note.

Ravelson said his snowboarding, visual art and writing are all "completely interchangeable" and fit in with each other.

"I'm realizing that my snowboarding is a poem too, you're sort of linking some things together in some sort of flow and saying something with every trick or every video," he said. "Words have always been easy, and I've always had notebooks and have been scribbling thoughts and drawings and stuff.

"And it got to a point where I realized 'I need to compile some of this stuff,' " he added. "The quarantine ended up being a huge blessing because I actually had time to do it."

Zen on paper

To me, Ravelson's poetry is clearly influenced by a Zen-like or Taoist (referring to the ancient Chinese religion in which people live in balance with the universe, sometimes referred to as the philosophy of "flow") outlook found in some beatnik poetry and prose of the 1960s, in which reality and consciousness are permeated by dualisms.

One Ravelson poem from the book that inspires you to live in the present and follow your dreams, goes: "Every moment you look away from this moment, this moment looks away from you." Another: "Projected decay is perpetual dismay."

(And I bet you thought this was a snow sports column, not a literary review.)

Some people think the book is a little far out, or don't understand everything in it completely.

Here's Bernie Ravelson's take on the work and his son that he sent me in an Instagram message:

"I always understood his love of snowboarding from a physical and athletic sense but now understand how it is much more than just that. Snowboarding has given Mike a lifetime of experiences, adventure and education that he just wants his friends and family to feel and bring them some happiness," the elder Ravelson said. "His book brings it all out. I am no poet, but Mike is for sure. He is so talented but so humble. I have learned so much from him and hope he has learned something from me as well. The best is yet to come."

A glimpse ahead

As for the future, Ravelson said he expects his riding to evolve more toward big mountain freeriding, surfing deep powder on big descents while also incorporating some of his street riding and terrain park styles into that more classic format.

He's also forging forward with his art. He's been painting a lot in his home studio and hopes to have a gallery show of 10 or so pieces sometime soon.

And he's started work on a successor to "Spiraling Infinity" that will include some more stream-of-consciousness writing as opposed to the rhyme schemes that predominate in the current book.

I talked with Ravelson about successful former pro snowboarders from Central Massachusetts whom I've written about and Ravelson considers friends such as Olympian and X Games gold medalist Todd Richards, who grew up in Paxton, and Holden native Alexei Garick, a lawyer.

"Some of the smartest people that I've met have just been sort of grungy snowboarders using the snowboard world as a disguise," Ravelson said.

—Contact Shaun Sutner by email at s_sutner@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Snowboard scene has true artist in Shrewsbury native Mike Ravelson