RIDING A GONDOLA is like going to Vegas: Business deals are made, affairs blossom, or you run into a celebrity like Cher, except she's wearing Kjus instead of a feather headdress. Most icons come with paparazzi, so I didn't suspect anything extraordinary when, one evening in December 2007, a lone wolf in a puffy North Face jacket jumped into the gondola as my friend Rosie and I were on our way up to Mountain Village, above Telluride, Colorado, for dinner.

We shivered in our street clothes while stealing glances at the incoming stranger: He was about 40, had a little chin stubble, was approximately five-eight, attractive, and appeared to be very fit. Taking advantage of the 2:1 ratio, Rosie and I struck up a game of 20 Questions. Lone Wolf, who seemed shy and had a soft twang, stepped up.

First question: Skier or snowboarder?

Both. But a few years ago, Lone Wolf told us, he tore his Achilles tendon, so he did yoga to alleviate the pain. He liked yoga because it helped him deal with injuries and demons. In his free time, Lone Wolf raced motocross. He also had a few Cadillacs. Turns out Lone Wolf wasn't just a snowboarder; he happened to be a world-champion snowboarder. Not only was he a world-champion snowboarder; Lone Wolf had been in a punk band called Fungus in the early nineties. But Fungus was no longer. Now Lone Wolf was completely focused on one goal: winning boardercross gold, at the age of 41, at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Shaun Palmer," he replied.

"The Shaun Palmer?"

"None other."

That shut me up for the rest of the ride. Shaun Palmer is a legend—snowboarding's original bad boy. In addition to winning six world championships from 1985 to 1999, Palmer, a.k.a. Palm Daddy or the Palm, has been a world-champion downhill mountain biker; a video-game hero (in Activision's Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder); the only athlete to win six Winter X Games gold medals in four different disciplines; a professional motocross racer; a skiercross competitor; CEO of Palmer Snowboards; cover boy for more than 25 magazines; and, according to USA Today, the world's greatest athlete in 1998.

If this soft-spoken, self-aware yogi was the same punk Outside had featured in 1997—the guy who'd had a "flamingly rude, crude flamboyance combined with a blatant devotion to the black arts of partying," who used to shave his head down to two clownish tufts of red hair, who once defecated on a woodstove to break up a party, and who almost died of a drug overdose in 2005—then he was living proof that people really can change. But if you strip away his dark side, what's left of Palm Daddy?