JUNE 22ND: DEPART FOR PORTLAND | HOOD

An early morning departure found us heading north on The 5 from Lake Tahoe to Portland. Not much excitement today as we hammer down and arrive in Portland at the crack of 1 AM. We roll into one of the largest 24-hour Wal-Mart’s we have ever seen in our lives. We park the beast and head inside to freshen up, do some shopping and get our bearings. As I am walking around I realize I’m lost, literally lost in a Wal-Mart, the place is so retardedly big you can buy anything from car tires to a head of lettuce. We roll back to the RV and grab some winks.

June 23rd: A DAY IN PORTLAND

We get the beast back on the road and head in to Portland to meet with some team riders and visit our good friends at Legitify Design www.legitify.com. Their office is literally right next to the Burnside Bridge, so we hang out and watch the scene for a bit and Limoge drops in and pushes around for a bit. Good strong skating is seen as always. We geek out for a bit, have a gi-normous burrito for lunch and plan the evening. We get in touch with Sara Phillips and decide to meet at Chopsticks around 9.

Chopsticks is an Asian karaoke bar and there are tons of shreds in the house tonight. Sara shows up and we knock back a couple of beverages before calling it a night. Back to the Wal-Mart parking lot and an early start tomorrow as we roll in to Portland to meet with the team and hold it down on the hill for the day.

June 24th: HOOD HERE WE COME

They’ve been working on Govy camp for the past couple summers and although Huckleberry’s is still a fixture, a freshly paved main street and fancy light posts class the place up a bit. A couple hotel/condo’s are going up so the face of Govy may be changing, only time will tell.

First stop for me is Huckleberry’s and a Maple bar. If you’ve never had the pleasure of a maple bar, let me tell you about the goodness that is the Maple Bar. A maple bar is like a Cruller on steroids, a massive log shaped donut dripping in juicy goodness and slathered with maple frosting. They go about 3” X 6” so knocking one down is more than likely to equal the daily caloric intake of a normal human. I kid you not, knock down one of these and a large cup-of-coffee and you are
good to go until dinner. Game on.

After destroying my Maple Bar, we hook up with Wayne Dills our New England rep who’s in town for a Northwave / Drake roundtable, we also get a chance to hang with our new Colorado Rep Walter Lacey. Kirk Stinbaugh one of our AK shredders hops in and we’re off.

We roll up to the mountain, gear up and hit the hill. There’s plenty of snow and it’s between sessions for both camps so only the public park is open. We take a lap through the public park and enjoy the fact it’s possible to ride down to the lift instead of hiking for turns.
We get a couple shots of Stinbaugh and Limoge hitting the wedges and various rails, mostly flat-downs or flat-ups. The sun is baking and a couple hours later we finally decide to pull the pin, tired, sun-baked and stoked to have spent the day on the hill making turns in June.

As we gear down in the parking lot, we bump into Patrick McCarthy, up-and-comer from Bellingham, Washington and give him a quick run-through of the line and next year’s development. We part ways and head down to Welches for a bite to eat with our Northwest rep Keith Gardner super chill on-point dude who’s holding it down for us in the NW.

After a long day on the hill getting destroyed by the sun, we head back to Stinbaugh’s crib and meet up with Luke Mathison to review the line. The boys are stoked and give plenty of solid input into the direction of the 08 collection.

JUNE 26TH: Windell’s, Pop Rocks and Pepsi

We spend the morning prepping the RV for our trip to Whistler and plan to head down to Windell’s after lunch for some more rider round-tables and to stoke out the campers. We meet up with Tucker Watson another Vermonter and he gives us a tour of the campus. Windell’s has really been putting work into the place and it shows. A new indoor-skate park with foam pit, half-pipe and street course. A larger bmx course, a new outdoor cement bowl and the standard half-pipe, mini and horseshoe bowl with spine.

We meet with the campers and hold a pop-rock/Pepsi eating/drinking contest. Basically people had to eat pop-rocks and proceed to shot-gun a Pepsi. But first the contestant’s must spin around until they are dizzy and then run down to the RV, touch it, run back, eat the pop rocks and then down a full Pepsi. Anyone who’s ate pop-rocks and Pepsi can tell you they don’t mix well at all. After many campers step-up and a couple get served because they are so dizzy they can’t run straight and end-up casing into the bushes we head back to the RV to meet with Sara Philips, Jaqui Berg and a couple big name riders we can’t mention due to contract lock-down.

The Women review the line and give solid reviews on the direction. Working with the women is great because they are very particular about what they like and don’t like, which simultaneously makes our job easier and harder. We finally pack it in around 10 PM and head north to Whistler.

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Shred on,

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