Last Winter: Gavin Reid’s snowboard film proves that no man is an island
A cancer diagnosis made Gavin Reid re-think his priorities - and go all-in for the snowboarding life. Interview by Roger Cox
One of the highlights of this year’s Backcountry Bash, the annual pre-season get-together of Scotland’s off-piste skiing and snowboarding community taking place in Edinburgh next weekend, will be Last Winter, a new film from Glasgow-based snowboarder Gavin Reid. The film’s title is double-edged. In a literal sense, all the footage it contains was recorded during the 2025/26 ski season, from a windswept midwinter descent of Ben Lawers, spindrift swirling around the summit, to an epic, sun-drenched spring day on Stob Coire nam Beith. However, the title also alludes to the fact that, back in January, Reid was left wondering if the winter of 2026 might turn out to be his last winter full-stop.
In September 2024, Reid was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Following an operation and a course of chemotherapy he was eventually given the all-clear, but then, on 9 January this year, while enjoying the first day of the new ski season at Cairngorm with three friends, he received an unexpected phone call.
“As soon as I saw my phone I thought ‘I know this number,’” says the 48 year-old. “I answered it and they were like ‘Hi Gavin, it’s the Beatson [West of Scotland Cancer Centre].’ I said ‘What is it?’ They said ‘Look, something’s come up in your bloods, you’ll need to come in.’ They wanted to do a secondary blood test on the Monday, so I went to bed that night in my camper and didn’t really sleep.” Reid rode Meall a' Bhuachaille the following day, but “on the skin track up I just boosted on ahead – I didn’t really feel like talking”. Then he returned to Glasgow on the Sunday in time to do the tests on the Monday. There then followed an agonising two-week wait.
“I just had such a scare,” he remembers. “For the two weeks I was waiting for those results I was just like, ‘I’m done man’. I wasn’t sleeping, you think the worst and nobody can tell you any different. But luckily it was OK, so I just was like ‘Right, cool, I am on one this winter.’”
It turned out that Reid had Coeliac disease – “not ideal”, as he puts it, but better than cancer. His response to this reprieve, as he says in the film, was a promise to himself “not to waste any days”. If the snow was good and the weather played ball, he’d be on it.
Reid could hardly have picked a better time to commit fully to the snowboarding life – Scotland’s hills were enjoying their snowiest winter in a decade, and, as his film attests, he was able to pack more memorable descents into a few short months than most people manage in a lifetime.
Ask Reid what kind of message he’d like people to take away from Last Winter and you might expect him to say something like “live for the moment”. But while he clearly had a blast wringing every last drop of fun out of the 2025/26 season, his response is: “Just check in on your pals, and put the effort in to get your pals out when you sense they need it.”
Unexpected, perhaps, but when when you learn more about Reid’s snowboarding journey it’s an answer that makes perfect sense; because, at various key points he has been helped on his way by people checking in on him. In his late teens and early 20s, in the wake of a knife attack that very nearly left him paralysed, he admits to having been “a lost young guy” before a friend’s father, Fergus Ferguson, took him to one side and urged him to turn his life around. Then, at 22, he met mountain biker and snowboarder Greg McGinty, eight years his senior. “He just said ‘Look, stop doing what you’re doing, get a bike, come out,’” Reid remembers. “So I got a bike, I went out with him once and that was it. Then I got to know his friends through him, and they were all snowboarders. They were like ‘look, come snowboarding this winter’. They were like big brothers to me. I went once and by the end of the day I was hooked.”
Another snowboarder, John Rowan, gave Reid his first introduction to serious backcountry snowboarding. “He took me to Tignes in 2009 and said ‘Right, we’re going to hike this line called the Grapillion,’” says Reid. “It was a 45-minute hike up the back of a mountain. We got to the top and we dropped down this line and I just nailed it – deep powder. I got to the bottom and I was like ‘Now I know what you’re talking about.’ I’ll never forget that. John was probably my biggest inspiration – if it wasn’t for him and Greg I wouldn’t be where I am now.”
During his cancer treatment, Reid remembers how his friends Graham Henderson and Ollie Stairmand were “just by my side through all of it... Graham was running me backwards and forwards to the hospital and Ollie was on the phone every day.” Then, when he was recovering in the spring of 2025, he credits backcountry guides Paul Shirley and Polo Verdier of Rider Social with giving him the confidence to take on a once-in-a-lifetime snowboard adventure to Greenland.
“I’ve had plenty of dark times in my life,” he reflects. “I’ve been through a divorce, that stabbing, I’ve been through the wringer. I’ll never give up, never, but that doesn’t mean to say you don’t have your bad days, days when you’re not feeling like it. But you have no idea the difference just getting out with a friend can make.”
The Backcountry Bash, featuring a screening of Last Winter, is at Central Hall, Edinburgh, 14 November, www.tinyurl.com/2s4ebs9f. To watch Last Winter on YouTube from 14 November, visit www.youtube.com/ @gavinreid78
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