By the early 90s, Plake and Scott Schmidt were on their way out as snowboarding took shape and became associated with the youth movement.
So it wasn't until later in the decade that two strains of freeskiing started forming. The first, big-mountain skiing, started in the mid-90s with Seth Morrison, Shane McConkey, Kent Kreitler, Jimbo Morgan, Dave Swanwick, Jeremy Nobis, The Gaffneys, Wendy Fisher, etc. They were skiing the extreme comps in Crested Butte and AK, and slowly getting around to shaped skis and fat skis (late 90s). Aside from Warren Miller who was far and away the biggest film company, TGR, MSP and Scott Gaffney were really the only dudes making movies for the most part. It was mostly all big-mountain, powder and cliff-hucking. Sprinkle in a few backflips from Shane here and there.
Coming out of the mogul scene around 1997, skiers started spinning, flipping and grabbing. Watch Scott Gaffney's movie that came out in 1997 (it may be called BREATHE), and you'll see Jonny Moseley doing 1080 mute grabs, backflips and McTwists in the halfpipe at Squaw Valley. Squaw was USA's ground zero for modern newschool skiing. Shane Anderson, Evan Raps, CR Johnson and Skogen Sprang were the Americans pushing modern twintip skiing at Squaw around 1998 and 1999.
At the same, 97/98-ish, up in Canada, JF Cusson, JP Auclair, Vincent Dorion, Mike Douglas, and Shane Szocs started filming with Johnny Decesare's Poor Boyz Productions, and all those dudes were on the Canadian Ski Team and skiing world cup moguls. (Frenchman and World Cup mogul skier, Julien Regnier-Laffourge, was also spinning and grabbing - he also did a 360 w/mute grab at the 1998 Nagano Olympics.) It wasn't until 1998 that Salomon put out the first true twin-tip, full-length ski, the TenEighty.
Even though Jonny Moseley essentially blew the ski world's mind by throwing the 360 mute during his gold-medal run in the '98 Olympics - it was the shot heard round the world - JP, JF and Vinnie ushered in the true newschool ski movement with their punk attitude, style ad Salomon 1080, which allowed them to take off and land backwards. Despite Moseley's talent, which was undeniable, his image was really cleancut - The New Canadian Air Force pretty much had the monopoly on the youth movement: they were young and fucking cool.
And boom - there you go - fucking freeskiing. Newschool skiing. In 1999 Philou Poirier won the US Open Big Air with a switch backlfip. In 2000 Candide Thovex spun a D-Spin over Chad's Gap. In 2001 Tanner Hall set the world on fire and dominated every single competition out there with switch rodeo 720. I think it was 2003 that CR Johnson and Candide fucking boosted out of the pipe and finally showed the world that skiers could actually go huge. Around that same time, Dave Crichton was slaying the urban jib scene with Level 1 Productions. Then by the mid-2000s, Jon Olsson and Mike Wilson started doing double corks, and there ya go.
