Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Snowboarding, continued

Sunday, Stevens' Forecast: Rain
Well thank goodness for inaccurate forecasts!
I've never had a stellar day at Steven's. Bad timing I guess. This time we had a triple certed(Skiing, Telemark, Snowboarding) level 3 instructor at his home mountain.
Needless to say it was fun. We had to kill 20 minutes to get our lift ticket coupons so we practice on some pvc pipe for freestyle. 50/50s and a couple mediocre FrontSide board-slides.
Third day out of four I ended up in a natural half pipe created by a deep cut creek bed. That right there made the 10$ lift ticket worth it. Then we dropped another run with warning for cliffs through the trees(jeez this weekend was fun and tough!). More chutes/ double diamonds. Some food after 3 hours of leg burning laps on some of the best/hardest terrain at Stevens. Time for some freestyle.
Got our park passes and hit it. Rusty at the pipe. But hit the mid-sized hits cleanly with just straight air. BS 180s off random hips. Need to work on bringing the A tricks to the bigger terrain.
Got some credit on my riding again for fellow instructors. It's nice to here from peers or people I consider better some props. It's been a lot of work over the last 3 years to unlearn and relearn snowboarding on challenging terrain.
Got some good pointers too.
Over all this week I rode thousands of vert, lots of diamonds and double diamonds(WA double) at three major resorts. Did some huge drops, free style, 3 different natural pipes, three different tree routes. It felt great to slay to three resorts in Washington. Some great narrow lines including the middle stretch of Chute.
One of my best weekends or riding, in terms of fun and in terms of quality of my skills. Rode a ton of terrain.
Now time to bring it for the exam.

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