There is big news for the East Coast ski crowd: Tom Wallisch is joining the speaker lineup at Snowbound Expo this year.
If you’ve spent any time watching ski edits over the last two decades, you know the name. If you haven’t, here’s the short version: Tom basically helped invent a whole style of skiing, and he did it without ever needing a big mountain to do it on.
From Local Parks to X Games Gold
Tom grew up in Pennsylvania, where the seasons are short and the hills aren’t exactly the Rockies. Instead of treating that as a limitation, he turned it into his whole thing. He started skiing rails and features around local parks and city streets, whatever was around when it snowed, and that’s how he fell in love with freeskiing in the first place.
That East Coast, make-it-work creativity ended up taking him all the way to the top of the sport. Along the way he picked up X Games gold, an AFP Slopestyle World Championship, multiple Dew Tour wins, back-to-back Freeskier Skier of the Year titles, and a Guinness World Record for the longest rail slide ever done on skis (424 feet, if you’re wondering). These days you’ll also catch him calling freeskiing events for NBC.
But even with all of that, he’s never really left his East Coast roots behind. He’s still out there filming rail parts in cities up and down the coast, and it’s a big part of why he’s got such a strong following in this region specifically.
Tom said “I grew up in Pennsylvania and didn’t have a long season or big mountains. I fell in love with rail skiing because of how approachable it was and how little snow and mountain you needed to do it. I would ski in the city when it snowed, at local parks, hills, stairs, rails, whatever I could find, and it’s what led me to love the creativity of freeskiing.
Since then I’ve continued to ski rails in cities all over the East Coast, with tons of great content over the years. It’s affordable, it’s approachable, and it can be done at any mountain. Pretty cool.
I’ve also won X Games, World Champs, gone heli-skiing, all of it. But those days skiing and filming rails with my friends are core, and some of my favorites.”
This is a good reminder that you don’t need a massive mountain or a perfect season to fall in love with skiing, you just need a rail, a set of stairs, or a hill down the street. For anyone learning at a small East Coast resort, that’s a pretty inspiring thing to hear from someone who won X Games and still calls those early days some of his favorites.
Catch Tom at Mohegan Sun, November 14–15, 2026.