What happened next i still haven’t seen , but im told i bounced off my back and into the landing , slid to the bottom of the 100 metre landing on my face and stopped.

Until next time…….I’m looking forward to it

5pm on Sunday evening  , Ryan Campbell was taken out and buried two metres under the snow in a size 2.5 slide at coronet peak. Unfortunately Ryan Passed away shortly after being airlifted to the lakes district hospital.

The Back-country wasn’t open when the crew drove into the parking lot at coronet. We rode the Quad chair up and ventured down The Exchange which is on the opposite side of the resort to where the slide occurred. There was a double line [two jumps in a row] that we were familiar with,and some of the crew wanted to build a larger step-down which was  higher up from the double line making a triple line.

Most of the time this would mean a lot of hiking and in most cases you’d probably want a sled to tow you back to the top ,but not the coronet triple line , you can access it from the chair , no hiking required.

  The first larger jump was a step down[the landing drops away ,little hang-time] into powder  .Then you had to ride along the nearby ridge line and drop off a small cornice into a lofty final booter which generally sent us upside down .If you check out the second pic you can see the line .We got a bunch of footage but no riding pics ,you’ll just have to watch ‘Down Under Diaries’

‘Down Under Diaries’        -     snowboarding.transworld.net

We started, out flying into saltlake city spent 2 weeks there building jumps in the backcountry , apparently we brought the snow with us , which decided to settle in and dump for days . We built jumps up in grizzly gulch which is famous for Pyramid gap which is a jump to a mine tailings streching 95-100 feet

we warmed up with a few smaller jumps near by , got some cool pictures and footage , and learnt some new tricks .On one of the jumps I landed a frontside double corked 1080 and then browna followed by landing a backside 1080 , pretty crazy concidering we couldn’t land anything else on it .

We spent 5 days on Pyramid three of which were spent building it as the snow kept filling in the runup which is the hardest part of the jump . After the first day we all successfully flew the fastest any of us had ever flown into a snow wall, it was a spiritual expeariance , i’ve never heard such a weird sound come from inside my head before ,and my vision went green for a few seconds ,is that a bad thing? After day two we’d all got over the jump after adding two more feet to the colossal jump , we all got one trick but it was still a struggle to get comfortably into the landing , we gave it two days then hit it again , this time we found the landing was still hard to get too, but still got some tricks on it .I didn’t quite get my double cork,came real close, but browna stomped his backside 1080.

Now we’re in Seattle ,Washington, once again we brought the snow with us . We’re all staying with friend and well known Nz photographer Greg Roebucks who’s been showing us the sites in Stevens Pass which is near two hours away.Yesturday we jumped a tank , a live firing U.S military tank . They use it to fire at the large hills that look over the pass. After a few too many flat landings it was off to scope out some of the Stevens pass resort ’s terrain.

The place is really cool, a smaller mountain feeling with big mountain .lines all over . There’s some pretty big rockdrops up there which we’re going to hit tommorrow, apparently its meant to dump tonight .Check out the pics from Utah more from washington to come………..

After an 8 foot snow storm, two weeks later this is all that is left. Luckily the mountains are still holding onto the goods…bring on the next snow storm!

Glenmore Dryslope, Aviemore, Scotland.

We got up early,8.00am,early for us,had breakfast and drove out to the Catboarding Operation located roughly 40 minutes from Kutchan. There we met up with Nick Gutry and Cam…Corder , sorry didn’t get his last name.We loaded up the cat and ventured out into the Aza Yamada backcountry

The journey up into what looked like a crosscountry skiing resort with its mellow hills riddled with cat tracks. It was supposed to take an hour ,however it had snowed alot the night before which covered up the remnants of any previous tracks made by the snowcat, so we got a little lost .

I’m not one to hate,but after driving around for 2 hours and not really seeing anything that could be good to shoot i was starting to get a bad feeling. Then all of a sudden it was as if i was bitchslapped by god himself,we pulled up to a gully that was steep,loaded with dry powder and more natural features than i’ve seen since i was in grizzly gulch , Utah. To say we were stoked was an understatement.

The first features we attacked were two cliffs which were about 20 feet apart. After having about three hits each we left the still deep and soft landings for the next zone which had scattered mushrooms of snow and a large cliff with three pillows on it. After bombing out that area we moved to some of the other features which included shoots/rockdrops and pillow gaps. The rest of the day continued on like that , we’d see a feature ride it for a few pics then move on . Perfect day really .

If you’re in Hokkaido you should check this place out. www.go-nsa.com

thanks to nick for the free catboarding.