March 19, 2010 in Outdoors

CV graduate Norman never tires of the attire

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Eric Norman is living the dream. He travels around the world, getting paid to wear top-of-the-line gear while he does crazy things on skis in front of cameras. His job is to conjure an image outrageous enough to be used as fuel for the ski industry marketing machine.

Norman, a 21-year-old freestyle athlete who graduated from Central Valley High School, doesn’t bother with the rigid boundaries of terrain parks. He’s making a living by exploring what is possible in bizarre settings.

“When you shoot on any normal day in the park, you can’t get creative or significant enough for a marketable shot,” he said. “You’ve got to start trekking out in the middle of nowhere to find unique stuff that’s cool. That quest is what I really enjoy about this job.”

Norman entered the world of ski imagery his junior year at CV after he got cut from the soccer team. With time on his hands, he focused on skiing and got a summer job at Timberline in Oregon, where he learned tricks riding the Palmer Glacier with big-name performers. Eventually he caught the eye of production companies shooting there.

Today Norman is part of a team performing for Faction skis. His other sponsors include Silver Mountain Resort, Anarchy Eyewear and Fuel, an apparel company. He travels with a crew of skiers, photographers and videographers looking for the magic shot.

“I get incentives based on where and what I appear in,” Norman said. “If I don’t get the logo or brand in the photo I don’t get paid, so you have to wear their stuff at all times. My sponsors send me boxes of things I’ve never seen before and I just randomly put it on. I don’t even know what I’ll be looking like next week, so it’s pretty cool.”

Norman was in his hometown this week, taking a break from a film project being produced by Voleurz, a Canadian apparel company.

“I just got back from Canada up around Revelstoke, Kelowna and Nelson,” he said. We were trying a lot of different stuff – dropping off cliffs, slashing powder, jumping off roofs, hitting rails and walls in the city. You can do a lot of weird stuff in the city that looks pretty cool – things that people don’t really expect are possible to do.”

Norman is riding at Schweitzer and Silver Mountain this week, working on new tricks.

He described one as a switch double cork 1,260 similar to the eye-popping stunt Shaun White pulled off in his recent Olympic gold medal performance in halfpipe. Another is a forward double cork with two different grabs and 31/2 half rotations.

“The 40-foot tables I’ve been working on are pretty small for tricks like that,” he said. “I’ve probably fallen 10 times for every time I’ve landed them. But I should have it more dialed in for an upcoming shoot at Stevens Pass in April.”

Norman, who usually skis more than 100 days during the season, will keep shooting into the summer on glaciers at Mt. Hood and Whistler. He’ll also return to winter in the southern hemisphere with a trip to New Zealand. It’s a tough gig, but he’s willing to put up with the adversity.

“It takes a lot of work to put together a quality segment,” he said. “But when we’re filming its just like hanging out with the boys. It’s great when you get a shot that goes somewhere. But if you don’t, it’s still a day playing in the snow.”

Bill Jennings can be reached at snoscene@comcast.net

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