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While scanning the start list for The North Face Masters, a big mountain snowboarding competition held at Alyeska Resort last week, one would have noticed two Fairbanks ski areas listed among the other riders’ much more impressive home mountains: Cleary Summit and Moose Mountain.

Those are two of the places where Fairbanks-born Ryland Bell and Morgan Hebert got their start, building jumps and hiking for untouched powder in an area of Alaska not known for having big, steep mountains or a lot of fresh snow.

“In Fairbanks there wasn’t any parks or jumps, so you just learned to hit whatever you had — natural hits, lips, windlips,” Bell said.

The jumps they did have were often built out of hay, Bell and Hebert said, because there wasn’t sufficient snow to build them big enough. Sometimes they would even find moose eating the jumps.

Occasional trips to Alyeska gave them a taste of what it was like to ride bigger mountains.

“A big part of riding in Fairbanks, for my riding, was it made me very hungry to get out and see what else there was, because I knew Fairbanks was the low end of the totem pole,” Bell said.

After schooling themselves in the classrooms and on the hills of Fairbanks, Bell and Hebert, both now 22 years old, started spending their winters riding Squaw Valley, California in 2003. Commercial fishing during the summers has allowed them time and money to snowboard as much as possible during the snowy winters around Lake Tahoe. Bell is known around Tahoe for how many consecutive days he’s ridden; two seasons ago he logged 104 days in a row.

Fast forward to 2008 and The North Face Masters, and the two buddies are competing with some of the sport’s best snowboarders on some of the steepest, most challenging mountains in the U.S. Hebert held his own up till the finals where he was cut at 32nd place. Bell made it to the last day of riding, the super finals, which included only the top 15 men. In the end, he took sixth place.

This is the first year that outerwear company The North Face has held the Masters. The event is aimed at bringing competitive snowboarding out of purely freestyle or downhill events, and back onto the wide, expansive terrain preferred by the majority of snowboarders. The two-stop tour started in Snowbird, Utah and finished off at Alyeska with about 90 men and women competing for a total cash purse of $45,000.

Riding the steep aspects and deep powder of the backcountry are what many snowboarders call “soul boarding,” and it is by far the most popular form of the sport. But access to this kind of riding, via helicopter, snowcat or snowmachine, is expensive, and there are very few events in which big mountain snowboarders can compete and possibly make some money doing so.

“This is literally the first time in 12 years that there’s been a touring big mountain (snowboarding) competition,” said Nicole Pelletier, media relations manager for Mountain Sports International, the event’s organizers.

The judging for big mountain riding isn’t always the same, but for the Masters, three judges looked at the overall difficulty of the course area and rated the difficulty of the line selected by each rider. Then, the riders gained or lost points based on three criteria: fluidity, control, and creativity and style. With a difficult line, no crashes and a few tricks thrown in, a rider had a good chance of winning the event.

In his first competition of any kind, and at a mountain he’d never ridden, Bell snagged second place in the first round of competition at Snowbird. Coming home to Alaska to compete in the finals was an easy decision.

“It was sweet,” Bell said. “It felt good to come back and get to ride the stuff that we grew up riding and show these guys how we do it up here.”

Bell and Hebert’s freestyle-influenced riding differs greatly from what is called “billy goating.” Billy goaters pick intricate lines down the mountain face, hopping and turning into tight rocks and placing themselves above precarious ledges that they then drop. Alternatively, Bell and Hebert link the tricks they first learned on hay-built jumps in Fairbanks with the natural terrain of big mountain riding, airing and spinning off windlips and cliffs and rarely stopping for even a second.

“It’s come full circle,” Bell said. “It’s all about doing tricks on natural features. We’re bringing (freestyle) back to the big mountain riding.”

Legendary big mountain rider Johan Olofsson, who himself is known for taking park moves and translating them to big mountain riding, echoed that sentiment.

“That pretty much shows that the rider’s a pretty well developed rider, they have a good eye for the terrain,” Olofsson said. “It’s a good way to get points, because you can tell right there that they have full control.”

“There’s a few people that are going to reach the level to start combining it and start working on it,” Olofsson said.

Still, the freestyle-big mountain hybrid is different from what many riders in the competition were doing. Bell showed just how different his style is during his run in the finals on Alyeska’s North Face.

Bell dropped a 20-foot cliff into a rocky chute — a no-crash zone, so named because if a rider makes one bad turn, it could cost him his life. His spot-on landing led him to some natural hits farther down. Bell’s most impressive move was a 720-degree spin off of a natural windlip, which he landed cleanly, finishing off his run with another 360-degree rotation and charging into the finish area with his bright yellow jacket flapping.

Landing the freestyle moves takes lots of practice, but picking a unique line on a face you’ve never ridden is the hard part, Bell said.

“Spotting stuff is super hard, it’s a skill for big mountain riding that you don’t really think about it. It’s a huge part. You’ve got to look at something from down here and then find some sort of landmark up there, so that when I’m coming down from above I’ll be able to recognize it and see where my airs are supposed to be so I don’t land on rocks,” Bell said.

Bell’s unique riding drew significant applause from the raucous crowd, and legendary snowboarder and judge Sean Farmer also had some nice things to say about him after the super finals.

“He did pretty good,” said Farmer, who’s snowboarded since the sport’s beginnings, starred in dozens of snowboarding movies, and won Squaw Valley’s All Mountain Extremes contest. “I thought it was one of the sicker (lines) of the day. I scored him pretty good.”

Though Bell hopes that judges of big mountain events recognize the difficulty of landing tricks on a steep face and score those moves higher in the future, he feels that his second place finish at Snowbird and his sixth place finish at Alyeska were a success. Until next year, he’ll be riding in the backcountry around Haines, then fishing for the summer, and then trying to ride as many days next season when the snow flies again.

Bell was reached via cell phone from Eaglecrest Ski Area in Juneau, where he was once again getting runs on fresh powder. He was, in fact, talking while riding down the mountain, and paused only momentarily to reflect on the contest he’d competed in three days earlier.

“All in all, it’s like I think I rode a different style of riding than everyone else, and I still came out sixth, so I’m pretty stoked,” he said. Then he hung up and kept riding.