Motivation Quote by Craig Kelly

Powder is the drug, and Craig Kelly delivers the line with the offhand certainty of someone who helped invent the craving. On its face, it’s a rider’s preference statement: fresh snow feels better, floats better, forgives mistakes. But Kelly’s phrasing makes it cultural: “always” frames powder as identity, not conditions. “That’s what I like riding” is almost comically plain, the way athletes often talk when the emotion is too physical to intellectualize.

The turn is the real point: “now you’ve got to go farther to get it.” That “now” carries an entire history of modern snowboarding in two syllables. Kelly came up during the sport’s wild adolescence and became one of its first true stars, then watched the industry and the mountains change around him. Resorts expand, backcountry access gets popularized, lift lines grow, and the very thing that once felt like a secret becomes a commodity. Powder becomes scarce not because snow stops falling, but because more people know where to look and how to get there.

Subtext: progress has a cost. The same culture that celebrated freedom and untouched terrain also accelerates its own erosion, pushing riders outward into riskier, more remote spaces. Kelly isn’t grandstanding; he’s noting a shift in reality: desire creates distance. In hindsight, with Kelly’s death in an avalanche, the sentence darkens. “Farther” isn’t just mileage. It’s exposure, consequence, and the thin line between chasing purity and being consumed by it.