Nitro hit me with a tonne of rad photos and a story from the team trip to Mt Hood and their visit to High Cascade. Tobi Strauss from the Nitro Europe team has the run down on the trip below! Check it out!
(Photos by Bradley Husick)
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Written by Tobi Strauss.
After a 12 hour bus ride from Whistler B.C. and the craziest cab ride of my life I finally arrived at the House of Nitro Team Photographer Mark Welsh in Portland, Oregon. It was late and quiet, I was the last one to arrive while my fellow Team buddies from all over the world already had an amazing barbecue at Mark’s house and were downtown exploring the famous nightclubs of Portland. After a good night sleeping on the tiny couch, I got to meet all my Team buddies Marc Swoboda, Basti Rittig, Dominik Wagner, Nils Ardvisson, Anton Bilare and Benny Urban as well as our team managers Tonino Copene and Andy Aurhammer in the morning.Thanks to Mark and his wife for their warm welcome and having us all in their house to stay!
Sober, and our stomach filled with classic American ham and eggs we headed together to the local skatepark for an amazing reunion Skate session and Soccer tournament waiting for Bryan and Austin to pick us up so we could continue the trip to our destination of the infamous Volcano, Mt. Hood. The drive from Portland to Mt. Hood took about 1.5 hours crossing one of the most beautiful landscapes Oregon has to offer. Local Bryan Fox showed us around in town and took us to our Team House close to Government Camp where all the magic of High Cascade Snowboard Camp happens. This little village consisting of approximately 40 Houses offers a few restaurants, and bars a HotDog and Pizza Place, an Ice Cream Pavillion, a Grocery Store and probably the most insane Skatepark I have ever seen. After another 2 hour Skate Session we were all tired heading back to our house. We ended the day with a cold beer and got some rest for our first day up at famous High Cascade Snowboard Camp at Mt. Hood.
After Tonino and Andy were organizing our tickets and access to the HCSC area in the morning the whole crew headed up the mountain together and we couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw this huge Snowboard Playground of HCSC in real life. We all had only known it from those many online video podcasts or pictures of our Idols in famous American Snowboard Mags. HCSC offers two Snowboard Park Areas. One is a long lap, accessed by the Palmer chair lift, consisting of 5 small to medium sized jumps, small sized hips, and ending in 4 small rails. The second, main park consists of 2 Halfpipes (one Superpipe), a medium sized jump line, a big jump, quarter pipes, wall rides, and countless different boxes and rails. This area has two 200 m long private Rope Toe Lifts, so you can take more runs a day and hit the features over and over again. The first day we were shooting on the bigger jump and I ended up with a little concussion. I had to take a break for the following days and decided to explore some off mountain activities such as hiking one of the many trails up to Mirror Lake which mirrors Mt. Hood completely in it’s clear water. My Team buddies killed it the other days in the park. They had so much fun riding those creative park lines and we could get a lot of sick shots for the new Nitro Team DVD.
During the last two days we also got the chance to shoot at Windells camp. That camp is located exactly next to HCSC and allows also skiers to spend their summertime in the park. Also that park offered an amazing variety of park obstacles. We went there to shoot some bigger kickers. All in all we had an amazing week up there and could ride any kind of freetyle snowboring you could imagine. We all ejoyed it a lot and will for sure come back! Mt. Hood and HCSC is an amazing place to spend your summer vacation, if you love to snowboard and can’t wait for the Winter Season to begin this would be a good choice… on or off the mountain, two thumbs up for Mt. Hood!
Ed Note: Tobi is a team rider for Nitro in Europe and has featured in some of my favourite snowboard films like Isensevens 2009 release, ‘ Let’s Go Get Lost’. See his part below.
