Last day at Moonlight

It started with a ride on the tram


Then hanging out on top waiting for a few minutes


admiring the views of cedar mountain


Then we got to ski real powder for quite a while




Alan and I managed to find something a little sketchier to sneak down


We went right down the middle. This ends at the top of the lifts, so it's a long run all the way back down.


Then we got first tracks in one of the whitewater chutes



Right down the middle, you can see 1 set of snowboard tracks and two tele tracks.

"Seasons"

"Seasons" Mountain Bike Film Premier April 24th at

The Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman

Salad Days Productions presents "Seasons", the new mountain biking film by the Collective. The premier event will take place on Thursday April 24th at the Emerson Cultural Center at 6:30pm. Tickets will be available at the door for $8. Proceeds will go towards the Montana Mountain Bike Alliance's efforts to keep Montana's trails open to mountain biking.

Seasons is the Third release from the group of filmmakers, photographers and mountain bikers known as "The Collective". Their second film "Roam" was released two years ago to rave reviews and has since collected numerous awards. Seasons is the story of several of the world's best and most interesting mountain bikers, told through the course of four seasons of one year. The film starts in the winter and shows the activities of the riders during the off season. Some are training, some are building trails and stunts. Spring rolls around and all the pent up energy of the winter is released on the trails as their riding sets the tone for the rest of the year. As summer rolls around some riders are racing and competing in competitions. Others are off in the woods on their custom built lines. As fall rolls around those that are still standing have reached the peak of their form. Tricks have been perfected. For the grand finale, the stories of all the riders come together as one.

Salad Days Productions is proud to bring another creative masterpiece by the Collective to the Emerson in Bozeman. This years premier promises to be bigger and better then Roam was two years ago. Proceeds will benefit the Montana Mountain Bike Alliance whose goal is "To preserve, protect, and promote mountain bike access and diverse riding opportunities on Montana's public lands through education, communication, and unified action." For those who don't know, hundreds of miles of trails in this great state are in danger of being closed to mountain bikes and these hard working and passionate riders are working together to protect them. The premier event will include head to head roller racing courtesy of the Bozeman Fix, a Live DJ and an expo of local bike related businesses and organizations. There will be tons of raffle prizes from many of our gracious sponsors including helmets, Camelbaks, coffee and gift certificates. When the show is over there will be an after-party with bike videos playing all night long to stoke the fire for the season. Don't miss it.


More information on the film is available here:
On the web: http://www.thecollectivefilm.com/
Email: Info@thecollectivefilm.com

More information on the event:
Email: saladdaysproductions@gmail.com
John Parker (406)370-5048

Montana Mountain Bike Alliance
On the web: http://www.montanamountainbikealliance.com/
Greg Beardslee (406)586-8357

Building a Snowboard

I finished with most of the work on the snowboard i've been building off and on for the last year or so. All that's left is mounting hardware. Here's a link to the picasa album with all the photos.


Core. Maple and Doug fir. The wide center strip will be the inner sidewalls for the splitboard. The core is 1/4" wider then the board so there will be 1/4 inch that needs to be cut out of the board after lamination.


Cutting out the base. There is a template underneath and a folliwing router bit was used.


Edges bent by hand and tacked in place with superglue. Epoxy during layup will more firmly attach them to the base and the layers above them.


Router Bridge for thickness profiling the core. The core goes from 2mm at the front to 7.7 in the middle then back to 2mm at the tail. The bridge worked ok but next time I will use a planer jig instead.



Core with sidewall. There are a lot of insert holes that need to be cut in a splitboard.



Dowels were used to align the core with the base during layup. The two base pieces were spaced at 1/4" with pieces of basswood from the hobby shop. The dowel system worked very well. I had to cut holes through the fiberglass and VDS before laminating too.


rubber vibration damping strips that go over the edges and some kevlar veil. Kevlar is very hard to cut so hopefully it will deflect some core shots in it's life.


Me fixing a leak in the bag. No pictures from the layup unfortunately.


My high tech heating system. Kmart heating blanket with a space blanket on top. Got it pretty warm inside, no idea how warm. Epoxy cures much faster and stronger with heat. The weights make sure that everything lays flat on the camber mold.



Out of the mold. Lots of flashing that needs to be trimmed.


Finished board. Cotton cloth graphics and a couple of carbon tows for show.

More pictures of the finished board in picasa. I'm mounting hardware now, hopefully take it out for a test ride tomorrow morning or this evening.

Mount Timpanogos

Skied timpanogos with Marshall. Icy crust for 4000'. Our route selection left something to be desired too. At least the views of Utah lake and surrounding areas were nice.

Cooke City

It's a pretty amazing place for backcountry snowboarding (and listening to snowmobiles). I got to do my first rappel into a couloir on Mount Republic and then descend it on excellent, stable powder. This season has been really good in Montana, a nice change after the last couple years.





More Here

Now in Color!

Not much different really. This is the next shot from the sequence. I like it.

Face shot

Illustrated

Panoramic

The Catamaran that brought us to Glover's Reef

Mount Ellis

A short approach and a good run when the snow is fresh. We got up and down it right before the previous nights snow started melting.

Scrubfest

I went to a splitboard festival in Wyoming this weekend. It was fun riding with a pack of snowboarders. The Grand Teton is a big mountain.

North Bridgers

Here's a couple pics from a snowmobile rescue/snowboard morning trip Patrick and I did a week or so ago. In typical Bozeman ski-scene fashion we ran into my friend Bob the skier on top of the line we wanted to ski.

Update

It was a busy weekend. I did the King of the Ridge at Bridger Bowl on Saturday for the 5th time and managed to win again with 26 hikes and got the very useful prizes of $250 cash and a pair of sunny day goggles. I got rested up that night and then went and did some shooting of guns with Marshall on Sunday, who was visiting for the weekend and now owns nothing less then an AK-47 (that came with a bayonet?). Yes, it's completely unnecessary and ridiculous to own such a gun. It is also quite fun to shoot.

I went on a long and arduous ski trip up to the Mount Cowen cirque on Monday in celebration of President's day. It is a really cool area, and the sunny weather got me caught up on my vitamin D for the next week or so. I was worried I was going to run out of food, but fortunately I remembered I had some Gummy Bacon Jesse had given me for Christmas and it saved the day.


That night I went to the Maxey Cabin up Hyalite with Marshall and others. Now I'm watching the lunar eclipse and getting ready to scrounge up some dinner.

Massive weirdness

Oh, there's the Tobacco Root mountains, off in the distance. . .



And then I looked closely. . .

They aren't actually giant, 11,000 foot mesas. It was what's known as a superior mirage, as opposed to the inferior ones you see on the ground. It was really, really, exceptionally strange. There was no shimmering, and it looked like this the whole 15 minutes or so we were up on top of the Bridgers looking at them.

The Bridger Bowl Cloud

Commonly referred to as the BBC. It sits over Bridger most of the time. On exceptionally windy days it can look like this:
(click for larger)

Which kind of resembles an alien spaceship once you get under it. The day I took this there were 60mph winds on the mid-mountain and several lifts had to be closed.

Elephanthead Mountain.

It was a long ways in with 6 pounds of wet snow stuck to each ski. At least the temperature eventually dropped below freezing and there was some windblown crust and powder to ski on the top. It definitely built a lot of character.




EDIT: And the snowboarding was pretty good on a lot of it. And I've managed to forget about the bad parts already.

North Bridgers

It was good. Miraculously the sun was out for most of the day. The vast majority of my North Bridger time has been spent inside a cloud so it was great to see what was going on. Conditions allowed us to snowboard a particularly prominent face that has been tempting me for several years. On top of that the snow was excellent powder with a somewhat solid base and provided excellent riding.

More photos here