Hey team. Hope Life is good for all reading.

I have been back snowboarding plenty. Rode all semi decent days last week which didn’t include either of the weekend days as they were rubbish. I have hung round in Christchurch a little longer than I thought I would. But that paid dividends today when I got to go shoot with up and coming photographer Jake Mein.

Mount Hutt had a wopping 50 centimers of new sound which as it turns out is very different to 50cm of fresh. It was real hard and windblown. I’m not usually much of a hater in my blogs but Hutt did a really bad job of getting the mountain open today – they put on their website that there may be delays in opening the six, well I dont think that was fair advertising for the four and a half hour delay which eventuated. They took so long to de-ice the summit six it was disgraceful.

But anyway back to the love, Jake had an awesome idea for a shot. He wanted to set up a pretty high kicker so we could wall ride on plank of a wind fence. Luckily for me it was backside which is the easier wall ride direction. We initially set it up to hit the seccond to top plank but I got that reasonablly easily, so we moved on to the top plank which was damn difficult. I think in the end the better shots came from the lower plank but I landed both a few times. I think I had eight hits and landed six so I thought that was pretty good. As is usual for wallride shots the hardest thing was keeping my board horizontal and parralel with the plank. It was way more noticeable than in most wall ride shots if I wasnt doing this as you could see part of the wood under neath my board whivh should have been covered if my nose were a little lower. Anyway we hopefully got a few shots. Definitely didn’t get anything from my last hit where I tried to gap over the fence. I think this is a possible shot for the future but the kicker we built definitely was not designed for doing that and I got slammed pretty hard, my front foot made it over but my back foot caught and I ended up landing where I had packed all the snow down landing the wall rides, ouch. Benny Comber tried to have a few hits on the wallbut it was pretty tricky without much experience on wall rides so he didnt manage to make it.

We ended up having a great afternoon riding after the photo shoot, went and road laps on the six till 4:30 (extended close time hardly made up for a 1:30 opening of their main lift). We found so many cool wind lips, cat track gaps, pole ollies, fence ollies and the like to do.

It was a really big day and I am absolutely shattered now. So yeah I am having the next two days rest off my board. But will catch you up at the first night time rail jam ever up at snowpark, sponsored by none other than Mountain Dew of course. I have also just confirmed that I will be attending the Mountain Dew and Alta rail jam in Frankton this Saturday too so check out the MD website for more details on that. Make your way down and say hi if you see me cheers Tim

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