One spring afternoon in 1999, during a magazine shoot at California's Mammoth Mountain, snowboarder Tina Basich was asked by the photographer to throw her signature backside 720 -- a trick in which she would fly off a snow-covered jump backward, spin around twice in the air and land on the other side.

But instead of landing on the down ramp on the other end of a 45-foot-long, tabletop of molded snow, she wasn't going fast enough and came up short.

Basich snapped her tibia and her fibula -- the bones that run between the knee and the ankle -- and was carted away by ski patrol.

At the time, she was 29 and at the top of her game. She was the first woman to achieve the backside 720, which won her the 1998 X Games Big Air event and put her on the athletic map. She was one of the first two women to have their own pro board models -- a snowboard designed with their particular style in mind -- plus she had a mantle of medals and enough sponsors to pay her way at contests around the world.

Basich's leg eventually healed, and she was cleared to return to competition. But her competitive mindset, she discovered, was broken. Three years after her injury, she entered a nighttime big-air event at Whistler, near Canada's west coast, with the rest of her SIMS-sponsored team.

"I did my 720," she said. "I got second place. After I landed my last jump, I took my board off and thought, 'I can't do it.' I couldn't get it back, into the game-face zone. I wanted out."

Everything from injuries to industry changes to redirected passions to pure biology leads snowboarders to set aside their competition singlets and cultivate their second acts. For many, a lack of experience beyond the slopes can make the transition bumpy.

For Sladics, it was a physical cue that convinced her to hang up her jersey and seek new opportunities. Kjersti Buaas

"It's not like we went to college and learned to shred and then have all these skills," said Chanelle Sladics, who competed in seven winter X Games, winning a bronze for Slopestyle in 2007. "A lot of us barely finished high school, so after competing, it's like, 'What the f--- do I do now?'"

Mentors, books and spiritual thinkers were just a few of the lifelines that Sladics, as well as her business partner, Kjersti Buaas, and fellow pro Tara Dakides sought out along the way. Dakides looked for stories of other athletes who transitioned from the competitive stage to a more routine daily life but didn't find much. In the absence of a blueprint, she decided to be more open about her own process, from the initial pain to the eventual perks.

But before the introspection starts, sometimes curveballs -- such as injury, in Basich's case -- impel the process. For Sladics, too, it was a physical cue that convinced her to hang up her jersey and seek new opportunities.

Sladics woke up one morning in Mammoth Lakes, California, too weak to compete in her event that day and, after a hospital visit, was diagnosed with an adrenal condition. Not long after, she suffered a compression fracture in her spine in Breckenridge, Colorado, the same year her specialty -- Snowboard Slopestyle -- was approved for inclusion in the Olympics.

"I thought, 'This is my warning,'" she recalled. "My ego wants to go to the Olympics, and I'm not healthy enough."

Sladics ended up moving to Bali and began a wellness journey that built on her lifelong spiritual studies. The trip also helped plant the seeds for her current project, Prsnt ("present"), which she launched in 2016 in partnership with Buaas, who has won X Games medals in both Slopestyle and Halfpipe and a bronze in Olympic Halfpipe. Prsnt offers mindful, backcountry retreats for women and corporate groups.

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Besides injuries, the sudden loss of a major sponsor can mark the end of the trail. For Dakides, who, along with Basich, is among the pioneers in women's professional snowboarding, losing her sponsor felt more like abandonment than a competitive catalyst.

According to Basich, pros like her and Dakides were sponsored from head to toe. Their expenses were typically covered, so contract salaries, merchandise sales and contest earnings were additional income. Saving and smart investments could allow them to, as Dakides did, float her career for a while and take time off. But that didn't soften the emotional blow when she was dropped.

"It came unexpectedly," Dakides said. "I think what was most difficult was that I wasn't ready to retire, but I couldn't bleed slowly."

She competed in her last X Games in 2008 and officially retired from snowboarding in 2011. Afterward, Dakides refused all interview requests and didn't want to take phone calls for at least a few years.

During that time, she did some serious soul-searching. After leaving home in her early teens, suddenly she was in her early 30s and faced, for perhaps the first time ever, the task of finding an identity outside of pro snowboarding. She spent a winter at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, freeriding with and seeking guidance from icons of the sport such as Bryan Iguchi and Kevin Jones, and she spent another few months on a horse ranch in Nebraska, where she found solace in saddling and riding, far from the snowbound spotlight.

Of that time, Dakides said, "I had two roads to pick from: a downward spiral or rise to the new chapter of my life and make the most of it, with a new perspective. It's like having a breakup from the love of your life and not really knowing what life was like before. And then letting them go with grace."

Still, other former pros leave snowboarding for the same reason lots of women leave their careers, temporarily or permanently: to have children. Shannon Dunn-Downing, for example, had been married for several years already before she decided to trade traveling the world for the ostensible domestic bliss. She, too, had been globetrotting and stacking up trophies for years -- including multiple gold medals from the X Games and a bronze at the 1998 Winter Games, where she became the first American woman ever to win an Olympic medal for snowboarding.

When she did decide to fold up the snow pants, in 2004, Dunn-Downing's husband still traveled extensively for his job with Burton Snowboards. So for her, being a stay-at-home mom seemed like the natural next step. As it turned out, going from Shannon Dunn-Downing, globetrotting pro snowboarder, to being known as "mom" was easier said than done.

"It wasn't like I missed the actual act of snowboarding, but I realized that motherhood is really hard, and there are no people cheering you on," she said. "I had two babies, because they were close together in age. And I didn't even know how to cook meals. I was fighting motherhood -- not motherhood itself, because I love that -- but the monotony of that."

Like her former-pro peers, there wasn't a roadmap from competition to what felt, at first, like a more mundane existence. But with compartmentalization, processing and time -- plus some catharsis, such as when she laid down on the kitchen floor one day when her kids were small and sobbed -- she eventually settled into acceptance.

"Some guy stopped me recently and asked what I was doing," she recalled. "'I'm a mom.' He was like, 'What else do you do?' 'Well, I go grocery shopping. I go surfing.' It sounds so lame. But to me, I'm the chauffeur. Working friends call me to pick their kids up. I know when our kids leave, I won't have a problem figuring out what to do. But I feel so thankful that I don't have to work, financially, so I love what I'm doing. I get time to work out, go surfing, go out for lunch. Who wouldn't love that?"

For Dakides, in contrast, embracing domesticity has also meant diving into new professional projects, such as sales, building design and permaculture. New pursuits, however, weren't a panacea for a painful time. Like Dunn-Downing, motherhood forced her to confront herself, and her identity, in new ways.

Over time, Dakides said, "Letting go of ego -- connecting with my why -- is what got me through the bumps. You have to figure out what your why is -- so that every day, through the little things, you can reconnect with it and go, 'I'm exactly where I am supposed to be. Beyond the poopy diapers, where nobody wants anything from me, other than food and cleaning.' My why to me is my family.

Prsnt ("present"), which Sladics launched in 2016 in partnership with Buaas, offers mindful, backcountry retreats for women and corporate groups. Nikol Herec

"I call it the ABCs -- awareness before change: You have to become aware of your issues and your ego before you can make a change, and your choice and how you want to deal with it. I dealt with depression -- the definition of turning against yourself. It takes a lot of self-love, a lot of surrendering, knowledge of what your ego can do to you."

One of the keys, according to Basich, is having a clear idea of what life after the photo shoots and shiny medals could look like. When she decided to retire, in 2002, she bought a commercial building in the foothills of Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and opened a store there. She named it "My Favorite Things" and filled it with her own glittery, vintage-inspired creations. Now, she travels more for trade shows than for snow, setting up accounts for stores across the country to stock her distinctive pieces.

"During the transition, it was a little hard," Basich said. "But it wasn't as hard as it would have been if I hadn't had this vision for my next step. I would have felt very lost if I didn't have my artwork or my music or this small town. All those things were in me, so I didn't have a dead end at the end of my snowboarding career.

"It was not an end for me by any means; it was a transition."