Snowboarding

I woke up early on day two of my Tailgate Alaska adventure, but since Anchorage is a whole four hours behind Ottawa, it felt a hell of a lot later than it was. First on the agenda was to finish the paperwork that I needed to do to get my rental motorhome on the road. While I was at it, I met up with a few other tailgaters that were renting their own RVs and also making the drive to Valdez later that day. Paul, Rob, and George from New York in one RV, Justin from parts unknown in another.

Earlier this week, I went to Mont Tremblant for the third try at passing the freeride teaching component of my CASI level 3 instructor's certification but didn't meet the standard yet again. The reason this time was that it was judged that I hadn't pushed the students hard enough during my lesson. Whether or not they left as better snowboarders was irrelevant; apparently the alliance has become more about creating return customers than about making better snowboarders.

Last weekend I took a whirlwind road trip to Mont Rigaud just west of Montreal. Those of you who know of Mont Rigaud might be wondering what the hell makes this event so significant? Reaching the heights of Mont Rigaud will not exactly induce high altitude pulmonary edema or cerebral edema, and the views are not exactly spectacular. However, even if you have the raddest terrain on the planet, what does that really mean without a good crew to share it with.

On the weekend of February 20th, I was in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to do the AIARE Level 2 avalanche course. It wasn't that long ago – December to be exact – that I had done the level 1 and I was keen on becoming an even bigger snow geek. This time, as I understood, we would be spending a bit more time in the field looking at snow grains, making weather observations, and just generally playing in the snow. I was also hopeful that this time I'd have the opportunity to do a little backcountry snowboarding while I was at it.

The Burton Supermodel is one of those boards that everyone has heard about, its been around for a long time. However, I'm not certain a whole lot of people have actually ridden it... I decided to take her for a ride and see how she felt (wow, apparently I'm just as dirty as I am polite...)

On day four of the SIA tradeshow, we decided to skip out on the commercial aspects of snowboading and focus on what's really important: the snow, the mountains, and the fun. Brian and Steve of the Sierra crew volunteered to provide us with rides in two senses of the word: a means to get to the mountain, and boards to get us down the mountain (we didn't bring our own snowboards to Denver). We then set our bearing west in the direction of Keystone for a day of riding on Sunday.

Burton was at my home mountain recently to allow people to demo this year's gear. While they were there, Adam let us take some boards out to do some tests. One of the boards that we tested was the 2009/10 Burton T6. I've never actually ridden the T6, although a few years ago one was offered to me as a loaner when I found pressure cracks on my APO Family 58. My APO lasted the weekend, however, (and incidentally the rest of the season) so I didn't get an opportunity to try out the T6 until now so I was looking forward to seeing what it was all about.

I recently purchased some new camping equipment in anticipation of winter camping/snowboarding adventures this season. This past weekend, I decided that, in addition to going snowboarding, I would also take the opportunity to test out this new equipment in an area where, if something went wrong, I could easily make it back to "civilization" without freezing to death. The area in question: the woods around my home mountain of Mont Cascades.