Heyo,
I just finished off the most intense, progressive 4 weeks of snowboarding of my life! I'm exhausted but I feel great! This was the first summer that I stayed in Whistler to ride the glacier at Camp of Champions. Camp of Champions is a private (read: very expensive) camp with debatably the best snowboard park in the world at this time of year! In order to afford such an amazing camp, I was lucky enough to get a volunteer job salting the park for the first week, organizing the salting crew and putting up banners for the last 3 weeks. Thanks to my outstanding support from the NWT, I was able to afford to have my coach come up for the entire 4 weeks to help me reach my goals for the summer.
We had "the worst weather ever" this summer but I didn't let that stop me from making as much progress as I could. They had a sweet air bag setup with 2 sizes of jump bags and one halfpipe bag. Air bags are relatively new in the snowboard scene so I'll explain why they are useful. Air bags allow riders to try tricks without worrying (as much) about the consequence of landing, say, on your head for instance. I used this opportunity to learn several inverted tricks, these tricks will be crucial in my riding as a competitive snowboarder. I now feel a lot more comfortable going upsidedown in the air than I ever have before. I did my first frontside and switch frontside inverts in the halfpipe; landed my first backside rodeo (backflip 180) on snow; landed first ever backside 270 onto a box; made progress on my jumping fundamentals - you get the picture yet? I made some serious progress!
Below are some photos from my 23rd birthday which just so happened to fall on the last day of glacier riding. It was one of the rare sunny days and such a fun way to spend my birthday. A big thank you goes out to my girlfriend Frida for taking these awesome pictures! To see more of her photography click here: www.fridaberglund.se.
