Yesterday was so fun. I went up to the local ski hill and had a little shoot with my friend Daniel who is staff this year at NORTHSTAR. We were shooting on this little quarter pipe in the park. The feature is super fun and looks pretty good too. I just wish I had a full frame camera so I could get the real 16mm frame on my 16-35 f2.8.

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Yesterday I got to go riding in the backcountry with some great friends, Dan, Ken and Ani. We left the lodge at 8:20 and took the fist lift up to about 2000m where we started our hike. The weather was actually not all that good when we left but by the time we got up mountain it was sunny and beautiful. The first thing we all did before leaving the ski area was activate our Avalanche Transceiver which in the event of an avalanche could help us locate a person who was buried in snow.

We took about 3hrs to hike up and then dug an avalanche pit to check the snow pack for safety before going above the timberline. I am starting to learn more about avalanche safety and getting this kind of experience was really cool for me. Learning how to read a snowpack and seeing the layering and bonding between the different snow types is so interesting. 

I will post again soon with some video that I shot yesterday.

Norikura Backcountry

Dropping

Norikura Skyline

Hiking Up

Fresh Tracks

Shadows on the snow

Hiking together

Hiking

Wrist Watch

Dan Junker

Winter Trees

At the timberline

Dan Junker with his Gentem Stick snowboard

Ken making a nice turn in the power

Copy that

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Cruzing

Getting some freshies

Today was such a beautiful day, blue sky, 2 feet of new snow and no lift lines. It doesn’t get much better than that. Here are a few photos and a little video I made. 

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There is this cool waterfall about 20 min from my house called Zengoro Falls. It’s really beautiful in the Spring and Summer and I had heard it was cool in the Winter also but had never gone. So I finally got a chance to go with some of our guests the other day at about 8pm and it was really cool. You could see the water flowing behind the ice and when I would fire the strobe it would light up the entire bowl that we were standing in. 

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So a few days ago most of our winter staff arrived and the next day we I all went riding together. There was about 25 of us all riding around our little home mountain. It actually didn’t feel at all like a staff ride day, if felt more like a camp. 

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