What Is Snowboarding?

This man speaks the soul of snowboarding.

 

SB4L Revival

I am going to get this blog back in action. For the past 3 years since last updating, I have been busy moving around western Canada, from Banff, to

Vancouver, and now find myself back in Ontario. It’s been a wild ride with a lot of snowboarding. I have tons of photos that I’ll be posting on here from those adventures.

Not sure exactly what it will look like, but my plan is to organize all the great links to a wealth of information out there relating to snowboarding, mountain lifestyle, and sharing the passion that has taken over my life.

Probably will throw up some non-snowboarding related stuff too as I have become a lot more

politically and socially conscious. Snowboarding changed my life once I decided to really pursue it, and continues to do so. I hope to give back something to the community, by sharing my

 

experience and viewpoints. If anything it will be somewhere to look back and reminisce on the

good times.

Banff Mini Park

I had always wanted to build my own park and had tried a few times around Burlington, with a few kickers here and there.  But this season after moving to Banff, there was definitely high ambitions to build something good, especially when our season got off to a relatively snow start.  Well since late November as soon as snow stuck to the ground, we have been working on our mini-park in an undisclosed location around Banff (maybe if you get on my good side you can check it out some time… after we lead you through the forest with blindfold on bwahaha).

Home sweet home...

At first, we just did a lot of prep work as there was no real snow base on the ground to build anything.  This started by ‘borrowing’ some milk crates & pallete’s (and random crap like doors, anything we could find) from some generous businesses around town.  Finding a nice little rolling hill with a tranny for the landing, we picked a spot to build our drop-in ramp and build that for the first day.  After the snow picked up, next was covering the drop-in and runway with snow and building the jump obviously, all aided by using some logs & whatnot to supplement the lack of snow.  After each snowfall more work was done, and as of this past week the setup is looking pretty sick, and is super fun to ride.

Gnarly Log Jib - This one needs more snow to be less sketchy.

Features: drop-in to small kicker, small tabletop kicker at the bottom, 1 small log jib, 1 massive gnarly log jib (yet to be hit, needs more snow), and another small plastic pipe jib which needs work.

Here is some recent pics from December 24th when we had an awesome session, will be putting togethor a video with some footage soon too.

Mike with back 180, as you can see we could use a bit more snow on the landing.

Justin with a back 180 off the tabletop kicker.

Prepping for the next session...

So, not too shabby for now but it’s a work in progress.  It’s currently dumping in Banff as of this morning, so can’t wait for the next session.

World Snowboard Day! ?

Billy Mays & DC team up for "Enjoy the ride MORE" infomercials

Well happy world snowboard day everyone.  Here at Sunshine Village you wouldn’t really know it – they did nothing for the event.  But who cares as long as you were out shredding on something and getting stoked then it was a good day!  Found these hilarious DC infomercials about their new boards with Billy Mays the infomercial legend, they are good for a laugh or two – I was laughing my ass off but that could have been the booze as well.

Stoneham in QC is doing a 200ft rail in an attempt to beat the 179 ft record, that’s about the coolest thing I heard of any resort doing.  Anyone else have something going down at their local hill?

Hoping for warmer temps here in Banff… today was the ‘warmest’ day in the last few week and we hit -15 up at SSV village area.  Cold temp. wax was a good investment to say the least…

What’s Happening in Banff

Well I expected cold when moving out to the Rockies but the past two days redefined the word entirely… Apparently Banff hit record lows set 80+ years ago in the past two days, Sunday waking up to -32 C, and Monday was -41 C, which hit -42 C by 9AM!!!  Luckily there was no wind so if you were properly layered and kept active it wasn’t that bad aside from beards / eyebrows freezing within minutes, not to mention beers turning to slush halfway through drinking them…

And what better way to stay active than to head out to our secret mini-park to continue building the jumps?  Some considered us crazy for doing this in -30 to -40 temps, but there is nothing better than shoveling a ton of snow to keep you warm and energized.  Due to the extreme cold testing our jumps / features wasn’t really an option as they had to set properly, but things are starting to come togethor and look pretty sick… Will post some pics soon of the progression as it’s been a work-in-progress, starting with milk crates and palletes ‘borrowed’ from the industrial area… We swear we will return them in the spring.

With 15 days put in so far including 3 fresh pow days, it’s been a killer season so far and I can’t complain.  Tomrrow we are hitting up Kicking Horse for the first time, so pretty stoked about that and will have a post about it for sure.

Frontlipped has been kicking out some good stuff lately now that Jason has the net again, so check them out – also look for the Lake Louise opening day post that I contributed

Lastly fingers crossed for TJ Schnieder as he took a pretty harsh bail after launching the biggest air I’ve ever seen at Sunshine on Dec. 2nd…  I was up this day but working, and didn’t realize his crew was up there, too bad as it would have been fun to shred with them.  They sure picked a good day as we had 20cm of fresh that morning – it was epic.