Snowboarding

I recently attended the 2011 installment of the World Freeride Festival. This annual festival takes place on Thompson Pass in Alaska, and draws riders from all over the world to tailgate and ride some of the sickest terrain on the planet; hence its name, Tailgate Alaska. A friend told me that the problem with going to Tailgate Alaska is that you end up being compelled to return every year. My response to him was: so what's the problem? As it turns out, he was exactly right.

Tailgate Alaska officially kicked off yesterday (7PM AKDT) at mile post 29.5 on Richardson Highway. The bad news for me is that I'm writing about it while sitting in the flat eastern timezone. However, my official departure for AK is not too far off — less than seven days away — so I'm not too bummed about it either. It will give me a bit more time for some last minute preparations before I leave; like securing a good map for example.

I've often been asked by parents how old a child should be before they start to learn how to snowboard. I usually tell them the guideline set out by the ski school, and the Canadian Alliance of Snowboard Instructors, is to discourage kids from taking up snowboarding before the ages of six or seven. As a professional instructor, I've always accepted this guideline.

The January issue of Backcountry Magazine arrived in my mailbox this week. During my initial flip through to determine which articles would most interest me, I came across an ad for Alyeska Resort in Alaska. The full page ad consisted of a picture of skier Clint Butler riding in fresh pow, presumably at Alyeska resort, with the caption: Alaska, the last frontier.

The snowboarding season is finally on in the North East (North America for you global netizens). With it comes the beginning of the lesson programs offered by the ski school at my local resort; a winter source of employ for yours truly. However, this year is a bit different than in the past because the ski school — which manages both ski and snowboard programs — has a brand new director. With the new management in place, the big question before the season began, was whether or not this would trigger the usual war over uniforms (i.e.

Last spring, while I was "living" on Thompson Pass in Alaska, I got the opportunity to test out some Spark R&D Fuse bindings with my split board. Erik Morrison, Spark R&D Rep. and King of the Hill Competitor, was gracious enough to let me use them for a couple days, so I got to test drive them on both sled accessed and skin accessed terrain. Although I didn't get to log any heli time with them, I still thought I'd share the experience and my thoughts on the bindings.

Last weekend was the Victoria Day long weekend in most of Canada; except for Quebec where it is observed as la journée nationale des partriotes. In either case, the end result was that most of the residents of the Great White North had the day off on Monday. Some of us, therefore, decided to take advantage of it and try to both surf and snowboard on the same weekend. So we packed up the necessary gear, made our way to Mount Washington in New Hampshire to snowboard on Saturday, then to York Beach in Maine to surf on Sunday.

This weekend a group of friends and I, decided to head down to New Hampshire to hike up the Tuckerman Ravine of Mount Washington for some spring snowboarding. Following the recent late April storm, we were hoping to find some good snow to shred without undue risk. Although we did find what we were looking for, we also found much more; sometimes the things you don't plan to see are what make road trips the most memorable. Best of all, now and again you even learn stuff about stuff in the process.

While I was in Alaska for the World Freeride Festival (better known as Tailgate Alaska), I brought along a GoPro HD Hero camera to document the occasion. I wound up taking more than four hours of video footage while I was there — which might have been more were it not for dying batteries and filled up memory cards — so in the last few weeks I've been sorting through it and putting it together for your enjoyment. The following video is the first chapter of the Shred Labs: Expedition Alaska video series.

Friday was a cold, bluebird morning which was as good a day as any for my last full day in Thompson Pass. Although my heli budget was completely exhausted, I was planning on making use of the Big Mountain Taxi service as much as I could since I had to return the Spark R&D bindings to Erik, and I was too lazy to put my Betas back on the plates (and frankly not interested on going back to riding plates after trying the Fuse bindings).