Big Waves and Cold smoke on April 27th
April just keeps on dealing up the goods. A foot and a half of cold smoke was on the menu for today. The toughest thing today was deciding where to shred. When EVERYTHING is good above 8000 ft (no sled tracks and nobody around) and so much to chose from, it is like overload on the senses. After driving all over the place trying to find the best situation possible for shooting and riding in good light, we finally settled on a zone.
I found a perfect little “Ghost ride” on the way to our zone. Bomb dropping from the seat of a moving sled, spraying it with my slashes on the way down, and jumping back on while it was still moving was a pretty entertaining warm up run.
Tandem powsurf/Ghost ride
“The Knob” offers around 2000 ft of N facing steep avalanche terrain. We were a bit nervous with a fresh 18 inches on the top so we eased into it, riding the “safer” lines first. I’m not sure if safer is the right word…. would you rather get flushed down over numerous cliffs and buried at the bottom or get shredded by trees and buried at the bottom should something break loose? Anyways, we picked what we felt was safer at the time and worked our way into the more gnarly terrain throughout the day.
Behold, “the Knob”
One of the first slashes made on this fine april afternoon.The day started of with a couple of powsurf runs down “The Lawn Mower”. The conditions were simply unreal for this time of year (or anytime of year for that matter). 2000 ft of blower cold smoke pow.
In between the pow slashing you could find rollers and lips to pop ollies off of. Our boards are built the way they are so you can ollie them… if your current bindingless device does not allow you to pop an ollie you are pretty much blowing it – it’s time for you to upgrade to a Grassroots Powdersurfer and enter a new world of bliss and endless freestyle possibilities! :-)
Ollies! One of the HUGE benefits of riding Grassroots Powdersurfers.
Backside 180’s are hard enough without a stupid pole in your hand
A view of “The Knob” from the bottom
After we’d had our way with “the Knob” we moved on to a new sector. We strapped into our snowboards and sessioned some jumps we had previously built a few days ago. I know some bindingless dudes out there hate on snowboarding… I am not one of them. Snowboarding is fun as hell and there is a time and place for it- there always will be. (like hitting giant kickers) I get bummed on the corporate blasphemies and the dorky trends of the snowboard industry, but that is easily ignored- especially when you’re shredding fresh pow in the backcountry and not paying attention to the fads and the bullshit. Enough about snowboarding – this is a powsurfing blog.
When the jumps were bombed out we bomb dropped a tree on our powsurfs, milked a couple of late afternoon powslash shots and bailed. Another epic day in an epic season.
Jeremy slashin – Photo Craig Stevenson
Craig slashin – Photo Jeremy Jensen
Grassroots Powdersurfing
