Northstar 11/20/11

One of my goals this season has been to explore and ride a variety of other mountains in California. Tahoe received new snow yesterday just in time for Northstar’s Opening Weekend so we packed up the car and headed to Tahoe last night so we could get first tracks this morning. The best part was waking up this morning near Northstar, seeing new snow on the ground and watching the snow still coming down this morning.

I had never been to Northstar before so I was really excited to finally check it out and ride this popular resort. We found parking, wondered through the Village with the help of hosts and ended up at the season pass office to pick up our tickets for the day. Huge thanks to Jessica and Adam for the tickets and great time.

The park offered up a lot of fun. I kept it to a minimum just hitting the easy box while the skier went for the harder rails and boxes. There were a couple lifts open this weekend and the new snow definitely made for some great powder turns on the runs that were open. We rode a couple trails off of the Vista lift for most of the day. It felt great to be back on the snow and getting my legs back into riding for this winter.

Adam joined us for mid morning laps and we had a blast getting powder turns together. I’m personally stoked that Adam is back in the mountains and in Tahoe. It means many more ride days with him this season!

Pretty excited to be back on the snowboard and trying out new gear again. Today I got to rock my new Oakley jacket with 686 pants, Smith helmet with Smith I/OS goggles on the Capita Totally Fk’n Awesome and Union Atlas Team bindings. The board took a couple shots from hidden rocks under powder but held up pretty great for the day.

One thing I was really amped to experience was EpicMix to see how it works on the mountain. It was pretty incredible to be able to track the mountain, get photos taken and add it to my social media. I really liked how they handled the new photos this year, it completely took the experience of photographers on the mountain without being hassle and making it fun. It’s not like your normal mountains where you have some unhappy photographer trying to sell you on a couple shots. This was much cooler and a better vibe, so we got a couple shots taken. Then when we came home, logged in and checked out the stats for the day.

Since we had been riding since 8:30am, the mountain was getting busier and we had a long drive ahead, we called it a day at noon so we could get home before dark. Definitely planning to head back to Northstar this winter and ride more of the mountain. It was an awessome day with friends and the snow was much better than expected.