Weekend Snowboarding Links

Some weekend link love on an otherwise slow weekend:

How to engineer the ultimate downhill mountain bike: find out here.
Shanty Creek named best terrain in the Midwest: that has to count for something.
Alltracks Academy expands to Revelstoke: we’ve covered Alltracks before.
What happens when shredding and Google Earth get together? Check it out.

Back to the Blog: Whistler’s Sea to Sky Highway Closed

Imagine if this happened during the 2010 Winter Olympics: The only route between Vancouver and Whistler will be closed for about five days thanks to a gigantic rock slide yesterday. Some stories estimated the slide contained 16,000 cubic feet of rock. It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt.
The net result is that tens of thousands [...]

Happy Canada Day, Britain. Now Move Here and Snowboard

Today is Canada’s 141st birthday, which means I get to write this at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, instead of hopping on the bus to work (which is what I should be doing right about now). And in honour of all things Canadian, including hockey, beavers and snow sports, I present quite a large [...]

CDC: Snowboarders Lead Emergency Room Visits

Here’s a dubious honor recently bestowed upon shredders. According a recent study by the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, snowboarders lead the dubious category “outdoor recreational injuries” by a long shot.
According to the study, detailed here, almost 26 percent of the nearly 213,000 people [...]

China Gets in on the Ski Resort Action

Recently The Globe and Mail ran a piece on the growth of ski resorts in China. So did Frequency, the quarterly snowboarder’s journal. The story in the Globe is more focused on the development of the real estate market as it relates to ski areas; Frequency’s story is much more about improvements within the resorts [...]

Kadenwood: The Other Whistler Blackcomb Gondola

Much has been made about the new Peak-to-Peak gondola currently under construction in Whistler. The gondola, which is scheduled to be completed later this year, will link the tops of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains.
One project that hasn’t made too many headlines, though, is Whistler’s other planned gondola, which will connect Whistler Creekside with Kadenwood, an [...]

Updated: Shred In Your Living Room With Wii Fit

Wii Fit, the new action game from the folks at Nintendo, is now available. The game, which comes with a pressure-sensitive “balance board”, allows players to do yoga, aerobics, balancing and — wait for it — snowboarding. It looks like players lean back and forth, just like on a board, and control the destiny of [...]

When Sport and Family Collide: Shaun White Snowboarding

My sister is an accomplished writer and journalist in, among other topics, video games. So I nearly crapped my pants when she told me she was flying to Montreal in order to preview a new video game, Shaun White Snowboarding, that was being developed in part by White himself. The preview appears in the June [...]

Snowboarding: Tips on Balance, and Picking Your Lines

There’s an interesting article today in the Rocky Mountain News by Gavin Ehringer, who’s been covering the shredding beat for 15 years. In the article, he talks about the riding “style” a shredder brings to the mountain, and details the proper way to ride:
 ”In general, the ideal of snowboarding style is to keep the upper [...]

A Snowboarding Controversy, Canada Style

Despite living in a country that’s got plenty of snow and mountains, Canada’s medal haul has sucked ass more than once at the Winter Olympics. When we hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics, for example, we didn’t even win a gold medal. So, once Vancouver/Whistler was awarded the 2010 Winter Olympics, it was decided a national [...]