Carving New Paths: How Hoods to Woods is Changing Mountain Culture
How Brian Paupaw and Omar Diaz are introducing inner-city kids to new horizons on the slopes.
by Lizzy Briskin:
Brian Paupaw was well into his college career at Parsons School of Design when he slid off a chairlift for the first time at Hunter Mountain. Gliding down the slopes with a board under his feet, he felt as carefree as a five-year-old.
“As an adult, I had never felt that free. I totally forgot about life stress and I was hooked. I never looked back,” Paupaw told City and Slopes.
Growing up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Paupaw was teased for his interest in skateboarding and gave it up to escape the stigma of “trying to be white.”
In his early twenties, when Paupaw was reintroduced to boarding–this time on powder–he wasn’t as easily swayed by peer pressure. He felt the same joy of his teenage days sneaking off to skateboard.
“That was my introduction to belonging in these spaces,” he said. “I realized that this is not a white thing. Even within our community, we can have a certain level of ignorance because we don't know anyone doing these things.”
One day on the slopes changed Paupaw’s life trajectory.
Omar Diaz, a Dominican Republic native who lived in the Caribbean until 11 years old, was introduced to snowboarding while working in the kitchen at a New Jersey hotel after high school. Diaz loved to skateboard as a teen in Jersey City and he had read about snowboarding in Thrasher Magazine but didn’t know there were mountains in his backyard. Diaz’s coworkers set him up with the right gear and he quickly took to the sport, thanks to his skateboarding background.
Like Paupaw, Diaz was hooked. Years later, when the northeast’s blustery winters send most of his Dominican friends back home for a break in the sun, Diaz drives north to hit the Vermont mountains.
In 2008, at a friend’s urging, Diaz attended a Times Square screening of Hoods to Woods, a short film about a Black snowboarder’s life-changing outdoor exploration. As it turned out, Paupaw had created the film to show how snowboarding opened his worldview.
Diaz stuck around after the screening for the Q&A session. A lightbulb clicked on in his brain when Paupaw described a dream that Brooklyn kids like himself could experience snowboarding earlier in life. “Brian said he would love to give this sport back to the community,” Diaz remembered.
“My whole life, I’ve always been about giving back, but the one thing that never dawned on me was to give back using something I love, which is snowboarding.” In that moment, he says, “I realized that if I was going to make a change, I had to be the superhero to my people. The message wasn’t getting through to kids like me when it was delivered by people who didn’t look like me and didn’t grow up like me.”
Paupaw and Diaz connected over their similar backgrounds and shared passion for the outdoors. Snowboarding changed their lives as adults and they knew it would be an even more powerful influence on kids. “It’s harder to change a grown person's perspective. But a kid is moldable, and the kids are the future,” says Diaz.
In 2009, Paupaw and Diaz founded Hoods to Woods, a non-profit on a mission to “promote awareness of the outdoors to inner-city children through snowboarding.”
Every winter, dozens of students from the tri-state area submit transcripts and application letters to vie for a seat on buses headed to the mountains outside New York City. They get suited up with donated gear and learn to carve from Paupaw, Diaz, and volunteers.
In the program’s first year, the program took four students to the slopes for a four-day session. This year, Hoods to Woods will host 120 students with plans for further expansion. Diaz’s son Sebastian joined the program as a sixth grader and now, at 23, is a dedicated boarder heavily involved in day-to-day operations.
Since Paupaw and Diaz started snowboarding in the ’80s and ’90s, the mountains have become increasingly diverse and inclusive, and there’s no doubt they’ve had something to do with it. The two feel the most fulfillment when their students’ lives expand beyond the neighborhoods they grew up in and even the East Coast.
“Kids that have gone into our program merge themselves into the snowboarding community,” said Diaz.
“And when a 20-something-year-old kid is out West FaceTiming you and saying, ‘Look where I’m at. I would never have been able to have these friends or this lifestyle if it wasn’t for you.’ Yeah, it works.”
Lizzy Briskin is a New York City-based freelance travel, outdoors, and food writer. She contributes to Business Insider, People, Bon Appetit, Shape, Self, and other outlets. Previously, she was a print editor at Real Simple and Food Network Magazines. She grew up skiing at Mount Snow and Stratton in Southern Vermont, where her family now lives. She spends as much time as possible outdoors and is an avid marathon runner, reader, cook, and eater.
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