The Only Snowboarder's Hotel: MFM's The Block
Apr 16 2007 / Los Angeles, CA
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Where a snowboarder goes to sleep (for a few hours) in-between riding and partying
THE BLOCK Hotels are "The World's First Snowboarder Hotels," created by Professional Snowboarder Marc Frank Montoya and Las Vegas Hotelier Liko S. Smith.
The hotels feature the most inventive rooms in the hotel industry, "Signature Suites" by companies such as DVS Shoe Co, Jones Soda Co, Zoo York, SPY Optic, Napster, Nikita clothing, Bear Mountain Resort, Boost Mobile, Vestal Watches and others. There is also a "Liberty Lounge" by Liberty Board Shop of Southern California in Big Bear and the NJB Lounge in Lake Tahoe by NJB Clothing. Poker rooms exist at both hotels created by Delta 9 and Season Five clothing companies respectively.
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And just this past winter, The Block debuted its own reality tv show on the new cable TV channel G4. The show featured Montoya, Smith, plus the snowboarding employees of the hotel and their antics working at the hotel, riding when not working, and the partying that takes place in-between.
Thanks to the world-wide reputation of pro snowboarder Marc Frank Montoya and other BLOCK partners, including fellow pro snowboarders Travis Parker, Mikey LeBlanc, Joni Malmi, Jussi Oksanen, JJ Thomas, Kurt Wastell, Chris Coulter, and Devun Walsh, along with pro skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, THE BLOCK brand is known across the globe.
Since its inception, THE BLOCK brand has only been accessible to those individuals fortunate enough to ride in Tahoe and then Big Bear. With major growth plans for 2007, many new resort communities will have a BLOCK of their own. Plans for growth include Breckenridge, Colorado, Vail, Colorado, Mammoth, California, and several areas in Canada, Switzerland and France.
All guests are well-taken care of, snowboarding style. Each guest receives free energy drinks, energy bars, Pabst Blue Ribbon (21+), popcorn, DVD movies, and PS2 games, as well as free wi-fi access and board waxing in a personal waxing room created by BLUEBIRD Wax. All rooms come equipped with Gravity Suspension Racks, PS2 game consoles, boot/glove dryers, cordless phones and ipod compatible mini boom boxes and 56" Widescreen HD Televisions (Big Bear), as well as original wall art photography by Burton Principal Photographer Dean "Blotto" Gray, Technine Photographer Ethan Fortier, and Snowboard Industry Photographer Andy Wright.
There's still time left in the season to go ride. Be like MFM. Stay at The Block.
Check out the following interview with Marc Frank Montoya about The Block...
Lat34: I've stayed at your hotel a few times, and you've taken good care of me. It is definitely the spot, especially with the girls you've hired to work for you. Besides the themed rooms, it's all about the vibe. It's like a Euro-Hostel. You go there, party, and everyone's cool to meet up and hang out together. How did the whole concept of the hotel start? How did you get it going?
MFM: I'm a snowboarder. I travel around all the time, and we're always staying at these little busted hotels and stuff like that. We don't even like to hang out at the hotel because they're always so uptight, and always nickel and diming us to death, all greedy. They're always looking at us like we're going to break something, treating us like s—t. And I hate that. I'm tired of that. And I had all these ideas about what I'd do if I had a hotel. I was always trippin' on how they always treated us.
So one time at a BBQ, I was with my brother in-law, and he's a full hotelier guy from Vegas (Liko Smith). We were rapping about what he does, and what I do, and we just started coming out with all these ideas. I started rambling about what I'd do if I had a hotel, and he's like “Let's do this! Let's make it happen!” And I'm like, “Alright, sure dude!” And I didn't think he'd really do it.
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Then two weeks later, we found a hotel up in South Lake Tahoe, and it was really a perfect spot for our first one. It's a party town, that's a crazy little town right there. We got a little hotel 50 yards from the back entrance of Harvey's and Harrah's just right there in South Lake. Perfect man.
Lat34: And now you guys have a bunch of hotels all over the place. You opened one up at Big Bear, what other Block hotels do you have coming out?
MFM: We have one at Bear, we're working on one at Keystone, Mammoth, plus prospects all over, like Chamonix, Japan, Switzerland, Whistler, all over the place. Wherever the good party resorts are.
Lat34: You're one of the top riders in the world. I look at the way The Block is going for you similar to the way Tony Hawk makes more money with his video games than he does with skating. Eventually The Block could be your retirement plan!
MFM: (Laughing) No doubt, no doubt. That's the plan! I mean, I love snowboarding. I want to be able to ride even without having to ride pro and all that stuff in a couple of years. The Block's one of my backup plans. I also have a couple of companies coming out, things like that. Look out for it!
Lat34: How did you start? Your roots in snowboarding are different from most others. You didn't really start on the mountain, but on the street, right?
MFM: Well, I'm from Denver, just an hour and a half away from the mountains pretty much. I started skateboarding, and saw snowboarding in a skateboarding magazine and was like, “Damn, I wonder what's up with that? It looks just like skating, but bigger and faster!” So I made it out to the mountain, and my high school, North Denver High School right in the city, they had a program where they'd get city kids up to the mountain for a packaged deal. That's the way I started getting up.
The first time, I just basically caught on real fast, and once I got out of high school, I just did whatever it took to get up to the mountain. And I got hooked. It's just like skating in that I couldn't stop.
Lat34: Before you got into all that, who was Marc Frank Montoya in high school? Were you a trouble-maker, or a decent kid getting good grades?
MFM: (Laughing) Before high school, we were all thugged-out little skaters. We'd go downtown and pick on the rich kids that came out. All the suburbanites that came downtown, we'd kinda mess with them, take their boards and skate off. Stuff like that. (Laughing).
And then, once high school hit, pretty much all of my homies turned into little gang members and all that. A lot of them were bloods, and northsiders, and I don't know. They all went gangster, and I loved skating, I was good at it. So I kinda got new friends, and stayed into skateboarding. It pretty much saved my life 'cause a lot of my homies are barely getting out now, like eight, ten, 12 years later. I'm running into all kinds of them, and they're all happy for me. They could have been where I'm at. I wasn't the best one. Pretty much all of them were the same as me, pretty damn good. Back then, being a little gang member was cooler or something.
Lat34: You also have a myspace page that's huge. (www.myspace.com/MarcFrankMontoya)
MFM: (Laughing) Yeah, I'm trying to work it out, I don't even know how to do it! They built the space for me, and it's cool. I gotta work it out though. (Laughing) Myspace is nuts. I have 6,000 friends already on there, and I don't even know how to click in!
- Cyrus Saatsaz
