“I’ve been waiting 20 years for this.” I was only half joking when I told Iris this as we kicked off an official interview a handful of months after our initial introduction. But I was also kinda serious. I’ve spent the better part of the last three decades documenting the world of professional snowboarding, a job which began in 1999 with a monthly column about the Montana snowboard scene for Snowboarder Magazine. In those early days, I’d hit up Boards of Missoula, Stumptown, World Boards, various local photographers and resorts every month, sharing word of the many regional pros, contest results, and gossip coming out of my home state. Over the years, I moved to California to work as an editor for TransWorld SNOWboarding magazine, then to Bend, Oregon, which has a thriving snowboard community of its own. But I never stopped paying attention to the Bozeman scene. It was still home. And yet, somehow, Pham had flown under my radar until that fateful day
in Detroit.

Figuring It Out as You Go…

When we finally connected for a proper interview this past winter, Iris was driving her self-built conversion van back to Bozeman from a weeklong Risk Maturity class at Baldface Lodge—her first introduction to backcountry safety and avalanche rescue led by the legendary backcountry guide John Buffery. Her board sponsor, Never Summer, sent her a splitboard last season, and right before the Baldface trip, she completed her kit with bindings, skins, and poles and went up to Bridger Bowl with her dad, Chris, to test it out. The snowpack at Bridger was meager. The next time she took the board out was at Baldface with Jeremy Jones, his daughter Mia, and Austin Sweeten. She said, “We woke up early one morning and went and skinned for the sunrise. It was so sick.” A mellow sunrise split with Jeremy Jones at Baldface Lodge sounds like a great second day of splitboarding. This little anecdote encompasses the speed of Iris’ rapid rise in snowboarding.

A couple of years ago, Iris didn’t know anything about the snowboarding industry. No concept of it at all. All she knew was her own experience of snowboarding, which was laps at Bridger Bowl and the Big Sky Park. Iris said, “I didn’t travel much growing up. We went to Michigan for Christmas a couple of times, but I had only been on a plane three times before snowboarding.”

Iris’ parents moved here from Michigan; her dad’s side of the family is first-generation Vietnamese. She was born and raised in Bozeman along with her younger brother, Bentley. Iris said, “I skied until I was nine every weekend. If it was a powder day, my dad would call me out of school, and we would go and hike the ridge together; it was sick. I’d also just ride with my little gremlin friends. We would try new stuff together, go build little jumps in the meadows, just messing around.”

Pham’s dad is a skateboarder and a snowboarder. After she switched to snowboarding, the progression came fast.

“As I got better, my dad would always find good features for me, whether a box or a little cliff to boost off, and then he would go and post up and film it on his GoPro,” said Iris. “In the afternoon he would make an edit of our day to a lo-fi beats song. There are so many of those videos on his Facebook.” Iris entered the local terrain park jam at Bridger Bowl during high school. There weren’t any other girls, so she competed with the guys—and won. “Which was funny,” she quipped.

Beyond this little local comp, she kept a low profile during high school. She never joined the freeride team, never competed in any USASA events, and never really even made a blip on the radar of the local snowboard shop, World Boards.

“Money was tight growing up,” explained Iris, “but we always found a way to get on-hill. We always had a ski pass, and we would go on eBay or Craigslist and get me an old used demo board.” Growing up a ski/snowboard bum in Bozeman might sound like a dream life, but Iris gets emotional talking about some of the struggles she experienced. Her parents divorced when she was six, and her mom has been in and out of her life ever since.

“My mom has trauma that just built up and never got fully resolved; she became a serious alcoholic.” Iris paused, then added, “She’s awesome when she’s sober.” She gets choked-up talking about the difficulties back then, about how protective she was of Bentley. It’s obvious Iris is uncomfortable talking about such things, but she wants to share her struggles. “I think it’s good to open up to people and talk about challenges. Growing up in Bozeman hasn’t been easy—there’s a lot of privilege here.”

A statement that we can all probably agree needs no further elaboration.

Breaking Out

During the pandemic, Iris’ junior and senior years of high school went online. The timing couldn’t have been better. “I could finally afford to go to Big Sky with the M-BAR-T pass [students with a 3.0 GPA qualify for a 300-dollar season pass]. That’s when I started riding park more.” Offered Iris. She connected with a group of freeskiers at Big Sky. “All these guys were a little older than me,” she said. “They pushed me a lot—they’d be like, alright, do a 360 out of that rail. I was the only snowboarder, and I was just trying random shit. I didn’t even know what tricks I was supposed to do or what tricks looked cool—I didn’t even know any tricks!” The freeski crew, dubbed Entourage, started traveling and filming and invited her along.

Jack Price, the lead filmmaker and the brains behind Entourage, joked that as the only snowboarder and the only girl, Iris was the “dark horse.” He shared an early memory of her when she was maybe 11, he guessed. “I was on the ski team, maybe 15 or 16 at the time, training with my coach, and she was hitting rails alongside us. My coach would give us specific feedback, and her dad was there cheering her on—her hype man.” When Iris started riding up at Big Sky, it was a no-brainer to film her, said Jack. Just as she wrapped high school, Iris managed to get four clips in Price’s film From Us to You. “That was her first window into it all,” explained Price. “She’s always been very independent and super entrepreneurial—she fully bypassed the typical Bozeman come-up. She’s a product of Bozeman, but she just skipped over the local step and went straight to the next level.”

Now 20 years old, Iris has made her own way, initially forging industry connections during a summer trip to Mt. Hood with an ex-boyfriend. On that trip, she met a pair of riders from Never Summer, Sam Klein and Emily O’Connor, while sessioning a rail together. She was riding Never Summer boards at the time and always tagged the brand in her Instagram clips. Iris further got the brand’s attention through a Never Summer Instagram contest, naming every rider in a video part to win a free board. “I did this crazy, stalking, search-thing to figure out who each of these riders were.” said Iris, “I got all of them right and won a free board. And then Sam and Emily also said, ‘Hey, we just met this girl, Iris,’ and that’s what kind of started that sponsorship … And then [Never Summer] flew me to Minnesota.”

She went to Trollhaugen, a little resort in Wisconsin hosting an all-female event promoting women park builders called Take the Rake. “I posted an edit from that event, and it went crazy,” said Iris. “It got thousands of views. So many people saw it, and right after that, a ton of snowboard companies reached out. That post was definitely a pop-off moment for me.”

Among those starting to notice Iris was Joe Sexton, a longtime pro snowboarder and the Red Bull Heavy Metal competition director. Joe said, “I’d seen her clips online. She has the skill and the right kind of ‘it’ factor that makes her stand out—she’s young, but she’s strong and powerful, and she has a unique trick selection.” Joe invited her to a newly reborn street snowboarding event in Duluth. “He just DM’ed me out of nowhere,” said Iris. “He sent me a picture of the main rail and asked if I wanted to come. It was scary.” She made fast friends with another young rider named Jaylen Hanson, and together they navigated the event. Iris hit the first two features, and then saw some other girls doing the big rail. “I was like, okay, I guess I’m doing it. I feel like I blacked out in this situation. I was so scared, shaking, and nervous, and so many people were watching. On my very last try, I slid pretty much the whole thing. I just didn’t get the last flat perfectly. But whatever, I was stoked; I tried it, and it was awesome.”

She was now becoming established as a contest rider, with an invite to the 2023 Dew Tour Street Style and her first contest win at the Dogfight in Salt Lake City, a rail jam event hosted by the Bomb Hole podcast. With the goal of gaining independence, she bought a cargo van with the $5,000 prize. “The van had a salvage title and a hole in the roof, but only 16,000 miles on the odometer, like super brand new.” said Iris. She obsessed over plans for designing it all winter and then spent last summer building it out. Iris said of the van build, “I had this whole period of gaining independence. When I finally finished the van, I felt like I had accomplished one of my biggest goals.” She now lives out of her van and relishes traveling freely and having a place to escape to for alone time when she’s at events or filming.

She also spent last summer piecing together her clips from the past winter. She filmed with her sponsors and the Entourage crew on a trip to Minnesota. In past years, she would get a clip or two, but, as Jack said about the Minnesota trip, “she stacked a shit ton of clips.” As someone who has seen her process, I asked him to describe what it’s like to film with her. He said, “It’s hard to compare her to other people. She has this deep-down understanding of what she can do. She gets this tunnel vision in her eyes and locks in. You can see it before it happens that she’s going to commit. There’s a click that happens.” Then he lightened up. “Overall, Iris is a super pleasant person, all about good times and good vibes.”

Iris’ team manager at DC Outerwear, Iikka Backstrom, saw potential in all the clips she had amassed over the year and intro’d her to a talented video editor, Sam Sosnowski. Sam edited her clips into a full part that she dropped on the Slush Magazine website just after Thanksgiving, elevating her profile yet again. Iris’s sponsor list keeps growing, now with DC Outerwear, Crab Grab, Fix Bindings, Smith, Coal Headwear, Connoisseur Apparel, Skullcandy, and World Boards all backing her.

Encore

This was supposed to be the end of Iris’ profile, but then I unexpectedly ran into her yet again, this time on the slopes of the 2024 X Games in Aspen in late January. She was one of six invited women competing in the reintroduced Street Snowboard and the new women’s Knuckle Huck. As she dropped in on the Knuckle Huck, the announcer exclaimed, “Here’s Iris Pham
making her X Games debut—Bozeman, Montana, stand up!”

In the year since I met Iris at her first pro contest in Detroit and thought to myself, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to share Iris’ story,’ she’s made about ten laps around the Earth, getting accolades all along the way. At this rate, it’s anybody’s guess as to what’s next. But one thing’s for sure: she’s definitely making a name for herself in the snowboarding world, and I, for one, can’t wait to see how far she takes it.