Say hello to Harley Ruffle, a Killington toddler who is already a snowboarding phenom

Four-year-old Harley Ruffle has become a mainstay in the parks at Killington. (Jill Ruffle)

Opening Day at Killington this year occurred with something of an anomaly — Harley Ruffle wasn’t there. 

It isn’t often that Killington faithful can roam the trails without the sight of “Lil’ Homie” finding his way into the Woodward Mountain Park. That’s because for three straight years, Harley has been a member of the Vermont resort’s exclusive 100-day club, topping out somewhere around 170 days of riding last season. Over the course of the 2022-23 skiing and riding season, Harley is hoping to earn his fourth-straight century-mark season at his home resort, a remarkable achievement that most of his preschool-aged peers can only witness with wonder. 

Oh, did we mention Harley is 4 years old? 

A burgeoning snowboarding star at such a ripe age, Harley already can claim almost a dozen sponsors and nearly 23,500 followers of his Instagram account (@lilhomie802), where video clips of his tricks in the park cement his expertise on the hill. His passion for snowboarding is evident in the constant excitement that his parents have to deal with and, at times, control. Like Opening Day at Killington, for instance. 

“It’s such a limited area and terrain (the first day of the season) and it’s only like four hours,” Harley’s father, Gary Ruffle, said. “There’s just so many people. And when he’s that little, it’s just really hard for us to protect him. He is the number one thing in our world with him being so little. It takes a lot of people to keep eyes on him and keep him safe.”  

Much of that job falls on his mother, Jill, who has skied along with Harley since he began boarding at the age of 2. However, these days, Jill’s days on the hill with her son mostly consist of just trying to keep with him. 

“He gets a lot of screaming from the chair lifts,” she said. “And you know, like 10,000 questions, which I really don’t have time to answer while I’m flying after him down the mountain. It’s embarrassing when you can’t catch your 4-year-old kid on snow.”

Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that Harley has never had a lesson in his short life. His brother, Colin, the only other snowboarder in the family, would come out and ride with him, but as far as a formal introduction to the sport, he’s had none. 

“He’s completely self-taught,” Gary said. “We’re skiers and he’s done all this on his own.” 

Jill’s instructions, when she can keep up with the kid, essentially boil down to, “No flips, Harley.” 

“Sometimes you even explain to him, ‘No, you can’t try that.’ And he just looks at you like you have 10 heads,” Jill said. “And then the second he gets the opportunity, he just sends it.” 

No flips.

“There’s plenty of that coming. The older he gets, it’s going to be more and more.”

Harley was only 3 years old when he landed his first sponsor, Shred Dog, an outdoor apparel company based in Boulder, Colo. “I think it was just kind of a new company, a company trying to get out there,” Jill said. “And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t change a thing. … We absolutely love them. After that, it just kind of spiraled.” 

More sponsors (Union Binding Co., Darkside Snowboards and Vermont Snowboard Posse among them) came calling as well as coverage in several local publications. His Instagram following blew up. Suddenly, Harley was becoming a name outside his Killington circle. 

Last season, Harley started spreading his wings further than his home resort. In February, his parents entered him into a nighttime rail jam contest at Bolton Valley. He thought it was better than Disneyland, his mother said. He even won a trophy. 

“So we’re trying to get out to a couple of different mountains this year in Vermont,” Jill said, also noting that Harley’s dream trip would be to visit Copper Mountain in Colorado, especially since that’s the site of many competitions he watches online. But Jill and Gary, who used to live in Lake Tahoe together, see his upbringing in the Northeast as an important development for his boarding. 

“That’s part of the reason we’re on the East Coast,” said Jill, who wants to return to Tahoe once Harley is prepared to make such a move. “We’ve bounced around from West Coast, East Coast. But the reason we’re sticking with East Coast is because if you can ride the East Coast, you can ride powder in a heartbeat. My dream is to move back to Tahoe. But we’re not going to pull the trigger on that until Harley has it dialed in completely. When that happens, then we think about that. But I don’t want him to be a powder puff kid.”

In fact, it was a bad crash with another skier on ice that, Jill said, put Harley so in tune to the sound of it. Now, if he hears the sound coming from behind him on the mountain, he knows immediately to pull over to the side. “So now that sound has kind of embedded into his head,” Jill said. “When he’s on ice, he’s learned to react quickly. That, he wouldn’t have learned riding powder.” 

Harley picks his lines very strategically, a process his mother classifies as mind-boggling. “He’ll tell me at the beginning where he’s going and what he’s hitting. And he’ll do it,” she said. “Filming him and just riding with him are two different things. And when you combine both of them, it’s really hard to do.”

Harley is, indeed, something of a local celebrity at Killington, where plenty members of the community are willing to help out. “We’re really lucky that we have so much support from the mountain crew,” Gary said. “All the Woodward Park crew and all the guys that work for the mountain, they just look out for him in general. So if they see Jill up there, before you know it, she’ll have six guys that are helping her out, looking out for him and making sure he doesn’t get hurt.”

The snowboarding phenom is the youngest of Jill and Gary’s four children (Kyle is 19, the aforementioned Colin 18, and Finley 12). Both parents grew up in New Jersey, a state from which the Ruffles uprooted three years ago in order to move to Vermont. It was a state the Ruffles were more than familiar with. Jill’s family spent winters at their home in Stratton, while Gary’s family had a second house in Killington. 

It took surrendering their livelihoods in order to make the move. Jill used to be a senior executive vice president of a pharmaceutical company, Now, “I’m a park mom,” she said. 

“I think that it was a lot harder for Jill because she went from a high-powered, corporate lifestyle to a mom on the mountain, every day lifestyle,” Gary said. “I think the transition has been harder for her, but you know, however much she complains about it, she loves it.” 

The nickname, “Lil’ Homie,” is courtesy Tucker Zink, manager of Killington’s Darkside Snowboards, where Harley’s omnipresence at the shop earned him comparisons to a shop dog. Soon, the whole town started calling Harley “Lil’ Homie,” a moniker that now graces his official website (www.lilhomie802.com) and social media channels. 

Harley still plays the role of shop dog at Darkside, which boasts one of its three Vermont locations in the heart of Killington Road. After Jill brings him to the mountain all day long, they spend their evenings at the “Dark Park,” Darkside’s free terrain park located at the shop. There, Harley will put in two to three more hours on his board, practicing whatever he’s trying to learn. “The kid puts in the effort more than I think a lot of people realize for a little kid,” his father said.”

With Harley’s desire to be on the hill at all times so encapsulating, his parents figure that he will be homeschooled, when the time comes, to maximize his time on his board. Recently, the Ruffles received the endorsement of his pediatrician to do so. “She said, ‘In all fairness to him, him living this lifestyle for as long as he knows, taking him out of that, and throwing him into a classroom and having him sit still is absolutely going to be catastrophic to him,’ ” Jill said. “So as long as he wants to ride and live this lifestyle, let it go and let it just happen.” 

It’s no surprise then that Harley suggests to his parents that he would like to become a professional snowboarder one day. Or, perhaps he would like to design terrain parks at a resort in the future. 

Right now, the goals are a little simpler for Harley. Namely, logging another 100-day season at Killington.

Eric Wilbur can be reached at [email protected].