Percy teen carves up West Coast snowboard scene

Mother Kim is a California girl through and through, but dad John grew up on the family farm right here in Stowe. Whether it’s due to something in the SoCal water or something in the Weeks Hill milk, Hanna’s snowboarding pedigree is pureblood.

She competed two weekends ago in the Snowboard Junior World Championships in Passo San Pellegrino, in the Italian Dolomites. It was her first significant taste of international competition.

“I had only gone to Canada before, so this was my first time going to Europe, and it was crazy,” she said. “The mountains in Europe were just crazy different. Everything’s above treeline, and so it was just huge mountains with no trees.”

The world championships capped off a successful domestic race season. Hanna was dominant on the slopes for her North Tahoe high school racing team, winning four of her six regular season races, and topping it all off the state championship in slalom at Mammoth Mountain last month. She almost made it a double — she was leading the giant slalom portion of the championships after the first run but had her second run disqualified after missing a gate. Her hometown Sierra Sun newspaper reported “it came down to video analysis to determine that Percy’s run wouldn’t count.”

Hanna will attend Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine next year. The college preparatory class also boasts a highly regarded snowboard training program and is only a mile away from Sunday River Resort. Hanna knows it well, having snagged three top-10 finishes there on the FIS and NorAm circuits this season, including a gold medal in March.

Farm to tabletops

Hanna’s mountain shredding DNA starts on Weeks Hill in Stowe, where her grandparents — Paul and his former wife Barbara — ran the family farm. Patriarch Paul was no slouch on the slopes, either.

“He actually was an excellent, excellent skier but he skied very infrequently. He always had a hard time ripping himself away from farming to do anything, and I think that’s mostly still the case,” John said. “But, yeah, he definitely had a tremendous amount of skill on skis, and every once in a while, when he’d come out, you could certainly tell that.”

John and his brother Ryan got their start snowboarding at Stowe Mountain Resort when just about everyone else did.

“I guess, technically, we started on Marshall Hill,” John said, referring to the still-popular sledding hill behind Stowe Elementary School, right in the middle of the village.

But soon, by the last full winter of the 1980s, the resort started allowing snowboarding.

“As long as you had a snowboard certification. They would make sure that you were safe enough, and then you could ride the lifts and snowboard,” John said. “Except on the Front Four. That took a few more years.”

Hanna’s mom, Kim, also got her snowboarding start around the same time, but the California native grew up in the southern part of the Golden State, where year-round board sports like surfing and skateboarding already had a rich tradition.

“I moved to Tahoe in ’91 and the minute that Alpine opened up to snowboarders, both John and I got on it,” Kim said.

The winter after Stowe first welcomed riders, in 1990-91, the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club added a snowboard training program to its offerings. That very first season, John won a spot on the U.S. Snowboard team, which is where he met his wife.

There’s also this Percy family nugget from that season, via the Mt. Mansfield Academy highly detailed timeline: “The Cow Chip Bingo event brought $1,000 for the plop on Ginny Chenoweth’s square, $300 for Courtney Arnot’s, and $500 for Henry Timball’s. Paul Percy’s bovines performed beautifully.”

Generation next

Although Hanna excelled at the slalom and GS races for her high school, her future rests in boardercross, in which four riders race side by side down a course that involves a series of elements like rollers, kickers and banked corners resembling exaggeratedly large luge corners.

John and Kim met on the U.S. team in the 1990s, when slalom and GS were the primary racing options, and they took their daughter onto the slopes at the ripe age of 2. She joined her first snowboard team when she was 5, but still would duck off to ride with her parents because that was more fun and more challenging.

Of course, even when your parents are trailblazing pros, eventually, they’re still, you know, your parents.

“I’d go ride with them until I got older and then I just wanted to ride with the team and didn’t ever want to ride with them,” she said.

John added, “It’s way more fun to ride with friends than your parents.”

Joking aside, though, Kim and Hannah entered plenty of early competitions as mom and daughter, events organized by the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. Kim said it was fun to do together, even if she was often the only one in her older age bracket. After a while, though, Hanna entered more and more races, and it just meant double the expense.

“Actually, I have more fun watching her now,” Kim said.

Added her daughter in the most teenaged way ever, “They don’t ride with me anymore because they can’t keep up.”