Last night was the meet and greet, but today was the shred session with various sierrasnowboard community members. Bruizzapalooza is the Steamboat meet this year for sierra snowboards and so far it has been quite fun hanging out with everyone. I was up at 8am for the breakfast in our meeting room at the Grand Hotel where everyone is staying and where I could figure out who/what to ride today.
Walking over to the base area from the Grand Hotel
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Burton and Forum were set up with the 09-10 demos so I ended up trying out the Burton Joystick V-rocker to try for the morning. I only made a couple laps on it and was ready to make the switch back to the sierrascope for park & pipe riding.
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We headed up the gondola and went to Storm Peak to see what conditions were like for the 4 of us: Joel, Zoe, JR and myself.
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We ducked into Shadows/Closets and found that despite the new snow, the icy crusty stuff underneath wasn’t as fun when you could barely see through the flat light and visibility. There were some good spots but definitely some more sketchy spots as well on the mountain. The groomed runs with new snow ended up being the best than riding in the trees.
Joel getting some snow
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Zoe coming out of the trees
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After a couple laps on upper mountain with low visibility and some foggy goggles in the group, we headed to the base area to get the goggles changed out. As soon as we rode near under the gondola, the clouds lifted and lower mountain was clear and fun to ride.
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A bunch of us ended up just lapping the parks and pipes for the afternoon since the lower mountain was not in the clouds and it was a lot of fun. I ended up meeting with other members: Keith, Matt, Jenni, Andy and many others to get our fun schralping time in.
Classic group shot!
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On one chairlift ride, we hooted at Matt who rode the chairlift with a cougar and they ended up hugging for us!
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Keith and Jenn at the bottom of the pipe.
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Keith’s noseslide over the rainbow box in Bashor Park
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I definitely had some of my best crashes today on the mountain and a couple head slams (wearing helmet!). I’m finally trying more park/pipe so stepping up the riding there. I tried the flat down box in the medium park and didn’t make it to down but also ate shit coming off the rail. Then for my last run in the pipe, I had good air but I caught my edge when I came back in and also ate shit pretty good.
Mike who runs sierrasnowboard on the mountain doing some park laps with the crew
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One of the last run down, captured some of the riders coming down on the cat track.
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At the end of the day we headed to Slopeside Grill to drink some sunshine in the last sunshine of the day on the patio and finished with food inside. Keith was thinking hard about the fun day so I snapped this shot of him.
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What a day! I had a blast shredding with everyone and now it’s off to more excitement tonight!
