Loveland 4/26/08

Yesterday I had to make my way down to Summit County to purchase my Vail pass for next year (it’s that cheap that I bought one) which meant I stayed the night in Summit County so I could ride today.

I made plans to hit up Loveland with Jay. I met Jay originally from Snowboard Seattle and saw each other at SIA. He’s now living in Denver and helps out with Lib Tech/GNU.

Jay

He was nice enough to grab a couple of 09 Lib Tech/GNU’s for me to ride today. The boards were the Phoenix, Riders Choice and Boxscratcher (look for reviews to come). He was nice enough to set the boards up for me each time.

The fun board of the day was the boxscratcher…which I got to take on the last couple runs on chair 8.

Jay setting up the 145cm boxscratcher…the soft park butter board

It was snowing this morning at Loveland and windy throughout most of the day. By the afternoon, the sun came out. Conditions were powder turns most of the day, sometimes crust under the powder but for the most part it was really fun to get freshies in late April.

In terms of the mountain, even though the parking lot was full…Loveland never has lines and today was runs to yourself with no lines.

First runs of the day
Jay getting some powder turns in

Usually when I ride Loveland it’s early or late season so you have limited runs open. However since there is so much snow right now, basically most of the mountain was open today. We hit up chair 4 and made our way over to chair 8 which were some of my favorite turns of the day.

Jay with the view of the other side of Loveland in the background

Today was the first day of rocking the L1 Breakdown jacket. I really like the black/purple colors, it’s got a lower mm rating but it’s great for spring riding. Today when it snowing, no problem staying dry in it. I even had one person check it out and want to know what company it was.

I took this photo which obviously has been enhanced with the exposure to bring out the snow, these were fresh turns I got around 1pm on our run. The snow and sky were not that blue…but I like the photo.

Looking up at the top of chair 8 had some of the best looking powder above the chairlift.
By afternoon we still had powder turns to make. It was definitely getting bumpier and more tracked out.

We wanted to take the tunnel to get back since we both hadn’t done it yet. This tunnel goes right under Highway 70 to get you back to the base when your riding on the opposite side of the mountain.

Jay with the GNU Riders Choice in the tunnel…the left side was pure ice and luckily the right was easy to walk on with a nice rope on the side just in case.
The bitch of the day was my rome binding baseplates. Rome gave me an extra set of baseplates to make up for my broken baseplates on my madisons. These new ones are the convertible ones that you can put with any board. However mounting these really suck…I mean you really have to line them up perfectly and it’s more the new washer they use that is the issue. It was a bitch each time setting them up on different boards.