The snowboarder who reshaped backcountry competition gave the discipline its own league. In 2019, Travis Rice co-founded the Natural Selection Tour, a contest series built for wild, un-groomed terrain and later extended across four sports.
A contest that began with its creator winning
The tour’s roots reach back to 2012, when Rice created Red Bull Supernatural at Baldface Lodge in British Columbia. He invited the world’s best — Nicolas Müller, Gigi Rüf, Mark McMorris — to a format judged on line choice and trick execution across natural features. Rice himself won the inaugural gathering, proving the idea worked at the highest level.
From a local name to a global series
Even earlier, in the 2007–2008 season, Rice had won a Quiksilver Natural Selection event at his home mountain, Jackson Hole. The name and philosophy were already present. What 2019 delivered was the structure and scale to carry them into skiing, surfing and mountain biking.
By 2023, Rice was still riding inside the tour he built, taking first place at the Yeti Natural Selection Tour stop in Revelstoke, British Columbia. That late victory drew a long thread tight: the founder remained a contender on the courses he conceived.
A career built on rewriting the possible
Rice arrived with the credentials to command such an enterprise. His 2011 film The Art of Flight set a new production benchmark for the sport, and a sweep of Rider of the Year awards followed. Snowboarder magazine later placed him 13th among the twenty most influential riders of the past two decades.
The Natural Selection Tour formalised what his riding and filmmaking had long pushed forward: a belief that contest snowboarding belonged away from manicured parks, down faces shaped by winter alone.
