Kiwi Bound

Hello,

As MBM Camp comes to a close next week, it will be time for me to trade in the mountain bike for my snowboard... I've decided to head out to New Zealand this September to get some tricks dialed in for next season. Thanks to support from Northern Canada Ventures Corp (parent company of Ryfan Electric) I will be able to afford to get in some great riding in this September! Thank you very much NCVC!

Here's a video of what I'm flying halfway across the world to do:

Snow Park Triple Line Opens from Snow Park NZ on Vimeo.

Summer Camp is Awesome!!

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.

Season Kick Off - Ante Up!

Starting my season off BIG

Greetings!

On Canada Day I kicked off my summer season on snow with the 5 Star TTR Billabong Ante Up Big Air Contest. I was lucky to even have a chance to compete in such a high calibre event where they only took 30 of the top riders in the world. I snuck in as an alternate with my results from last season. The competition was an 80 foot gap Big Air jump, one of the biggest jumps I've ever done. Despite having a bad fall in training I was able to have a solid performance in the competition. I landed a frontside 1080 but wasn't able to stop my rotation so I lost some points for that. I was leading the competition for a few riders and ended up 16th out of 30 riders, a solid result for such a stacked field! The contest was an amazing experience to see the best riders in the world perform, and to see what I need to do in order to get to that elite level.

Here's the video from the event. Guess who is the second snowboarder in the video?!




Thanks for stopping by,

Andy

Summer is here!

Hey everyone,

I've been really busy lately setting up MBM Camp and enjoying all the awesome activities Whistler has to offer in the summer like mountain biking, hiking, climbing and skateboarding to name a few. This is the first year I've stayed in Whistler for some of the summer and I must say this place is awesome in the summer too! We filmed a day where we went to Squamish for some skateboarding, climbing and hiking. Edit dropping.... soon?

I only have a few days left before the glacier opens for the summer! I've decided to stay here to train at Camp Of Champions for the entire time its open. This has been a dream of mine since I attended the camp for the first time when I was 13 years old. I can remember thinking 'Imagine how good you would get if you could snowboard everyday  for a month here!' Well now that dream has become a reality and I'm stoked!!

With all the outdoor fun lately, I haven't had a chance to go through my footage from the year yet but here's a teaser, well its actually a couple years old but I stumbled upon it on my friend Chase's vimeo so boom! Here it is:

I also found Chase's new teaser, it looks pretty sweet!