THIS PAST JUNE, McCall went with a bunch of his New Mexico snowboarding buddies to the Phillips Exeter of all summer snowboarding camps, Windells. With its own permanent campus set among rainforest ferns and giant pines on the lower shoulders of Oregon's Mount Hood, Windells bills itself as "the Funnest Place on Earth," and few of its shaggy-haired denizens would disagree. It has an immense skateboarding halfpipe, a BMX course, an outdoor skate park, and a cavernous indoor trampoline complex (known affectionately as "Bob"), not to mention a bodacious terrain park higher on Mount Hood, where the snows never melt.

When I pulled into the Windells parking lot early one morning to check in on McCall (his mom and I were staying in a riverside cabin not far away), the camp was stirring for a big day on the mountain. A fleet of buses idled in the parking lot while a camp chaperone roamed from dorm to dorm with an electronic bullhorn in his hand. "Rise and shine, campers! Weather report is sunny up there."

The doors began to creak open and the degenerates groggily emerged into the morning glare, with bed-head 'do's on loan from Ozzy Osbourne. I peeked in at McCall's bunkhouse and found him already up and at 'em. He was eating a breakfast burrito and watching Beavis and Butt-Head with his posse—Dillon, Clay, Peter, Kevin, and the rest of the Santa Fe crew. It was great to see them all lounging together in full thrasher regalia, but I dared not go in: The dorm room gave off a heinous stench, composed of the mingled fragrances of boot mildew, pepperoni-pizza grease, and adolescent crotch sweat.

"OK, you shred zeppelins!" the megaphone guy squawked outside. "Hood times, rad times! Move it!"

Soon McCall and his friends joined the other legions streaming into the parking lot. They stashed their boards on the roof grates and piled into the Windells vehicles. One by one, the vans turned out and formed a long badass convoy that moved out smartly. They aimed for the happy white volcano, its sharp point soaring into the red morning sky.

I followed the fleet of vans up to the Timberline Lodge, the great rambling inn built by the WPA in 1937—the same lodge where Stanley Kubrick shot exterior scenes for The Shining. I walked over to the Timberline lift and rode up to the Windells terrain park. It was a crystalline day, and all of Oregon was spread before me—the Willamette Valley, Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters. I felt the vertiginous sensation that I was perched on the roof of the very coolest frat house in America, where the greatest party was raging for the luckiest generation in the long history of fun.

Watching McCall hit the jumps, I realized how much bigger he'd grown since that week he first found rapture on a snowboard a few years ago. He's 14 now and hardly a kid anymore. He's almost as tall as I am, and his voice has dropped a register. His tricks are growing riskier, more dramatic; he goes up higher and comes down harder, and it's all getting more serious. Seven years into this, I can still see he's got the itch to soar.

My wife, an expert skier from Michigan, has a higher threshold for this mountain madness than I. But I'll be honest: I worry that somewhere along the way, all the effort and expense and crazy crashing-through-life logistics will soon make snowboarding just another family vexation. Every half-reflective parent of every half-serious young athlete knows what I'm talking about. Parent and athlete alike reach a place of saturation, where the sacrifices outweigh the joys of what attracted you to the sport in the first place.

If McCall truly wants a shot at the X Games, or those 2010 Olympics he still sometimes dreams about, we'll have to take leave of our family sanity and ratchet everything to a radically higher level. Maybe we'll have to move to Tahoe or some other snowboarding mecca so McCall can train every winter day with a full-fledged team led by a full-time coach (with walkie-talkies!). Or maybe we'll have to start summering on the downy slopes of New Zealand, as a growing number of these kids do. Or send him for a winter term to one of those outlandishly expensive alpine boarding schools.

And that's just McCall. We've got two more young Vikes right behind him—Graham, 11, a sleek ski racer, and Griffin, nine, a fearless freeskier—who will doubtless want their own shots at mountain glory. Thor save us all.

It's the American predicament, the American disease: Specialization! Structure! Overscheduling! Of course, we'll support McCall and his brothers as far as they want to go, but as The Shining's Jack Torrance might type it out, in a thousand terrifying pages, ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES SHREDDER A DULL BOY.

The greatest joy for me on that radiant day in Oregon was watching McCall and his buddies ride together down Mount Hood to the Timberline. They weren't trying to perfect their jumps for the coaches anymore; they were soul riding, just for the giddy fun of it. There was Dillon, McCall's erstwhile rival, a cat-nimble boarder who also competes at the national snowboarding championships, but no one gave a thought to any of that. There were Peter and Clay and the others, all having the time of their lives. I saw them razzing each other, fishtailing, catching gratuitous air, improvising their way down.

I could see Air Mack in the midst of them, carving effortless scallops in the volcano, spraying his buddies with horsetails of slush, leaning so far over that his hands skimmed the snow. I could see he loved being there, maybe as much as life itself. He was a kid again, tickling the tall, strong mountain—and I swear I could hear the mountain laughing back.