Northern Hemi Season Trip Report thingy - Sälen, Sweden
Photo that I forgot about from NYE.
Clearly have to work on my style (push that back leg out!) and grabbing properly but I got a bit of air so i think its not too embarrassing to put up.
embarrassing common cords, i do be happy to do that… lol
Shit yeh! keep at it!
Well on your way to MASSIVE STEEZ 
So today a new character is added to the story…Declan - a.k.a. Dork, Declan the Dork, Dorklan, Dreamy Decs, Decs the Mute, Dork faced killer etc.
Dork is a sometime BW user and youngest sibling of regular user, Crackers. He’s newly 21 and came to Europe with his parentals. Part of the trip was to Sweden to see one of the other brothers, Troutface, who lives up near Åre. He ended up coming back here after the rest of the trip and is off to Oslo tomorrow to apply for his swedish working holiday visa.
When he said he might be keen to stay, we talked to our boss who pretty much said there was a job for him if he wanted it, and a spot in staff accommodation. Staff accommo is quite expensive though, so he’s going to be living with us two old farts for the next few months…and we’re going to be living with him who has never lived out of home before. After 2 days, he is already learning how expensive paying for your own food is!
I think he’s had about 4 or 5 days on a snowboard before, so the next 3 months are going to be an enjoyable learning curve for him, and he’s going to improve a lot!
Our boss was nice enough to say he could start working before the visa comes through, so he starts working on saturday and sunday.
Snow report
Its been snowing heaps! Which is good cos we really needed it. We got about 15-20cm last night, in addition to around 15-20 from the few days before that. This morning was torture, as we were off to work at 5.30am knowing that it had snowed heaps (had to dig the car out) and it was still bucketing down.
I snapped this pic from my phone at about 5.40am during the drive to work….it felt like we doing warp speed!
Where we clean on morning shift is the main public centre below one of the main slopes…sort of like cleaning the perisher centre and you can see out to front valley. I took this pic a few weeks ago while at work, of the main slope looking super tasty - all freshly groomed before opening.
I thought that it was bad enough not being able to ride it that morning, but this morning there was 15cm of fresh lying on top of that groomed perfection. We were absolutely spitting chips! To add insult to injury, all the lazy swedes were in bed and there was about 4 people on the lift when it opened!
After finishing the public spaces, we had a special cleaning mission to do this enormous lodge that some of the SkiStar bosses would be staying in (skistar is the company that owns Sälen resort, as well as Åre, Vemdalen (swedish resorts) Trysil and Hemsedal (norwegian resorts). Together it took us a good 2.5hrs, and this lodge happens to have the other main chairlift in Lindvallen go straight past the massive loungeroom windows, so we were watching everyone make their turns in the soft!
Got home around lunch, ate quickly and went out, hoping there would still be some fresh tracks somewhere for us. We had a place in mind with some tree runs that we’d scoped out a few weeks ago & went straight there…stoked to find freshies still there to be found
....And right there you have a big plus about living in a ‘family resort’....the families mostly stay right on the groomed slopes, and maybe just hit some powder on the sides of the runs, but that is about as adventurous as most people get.
Freddy excited that our area we’d scoped out still had the goods!
I think this was the first proper powder runs I’ve ever taken. I’ve had bit and pieces before, and some of it quite deep, but never whole runs that I was able to do repeatedly. It ranged from calf to thigh deep and it was heaps of fun!....In all honesty though, I pretty much suck at riding powder. My set-up isn’t exactly conducive to good pow riding, but I would have hoped I wouldn’t be as crap as I was!....I spent a lot of time getting bogged and falling over, which then required wasting enormous amounts of energy huffing and puffing trying to get vertical again.
Attempting to show my powder track I’d made, not even close to as deep as it got there, but still got bogged - and that was when I thought to take a picture.
Towards the end I got the hang of it a bit more and did some decent turns, but then we were both so tired after our 4.45am alarm and hard work in the morning, that we called it quits and headed home.
It was bloody fun though, did I mention that?
Dork doesn’t yet have a board & bindings, so he stayed at home and played halo. Freddy helped him buy some boots that fit him yesterday for a really good price though, so that is a good start!
@Jez - I see you’ve played knifey-spooney before.
We do stretch a bit, especially Freddy. His knee pain is from instability in the joint caused by tight muscles. When he stretches them a lot, it improves. I have a back condition (spondylolisthesis) which is ok most of the time but when it flares up I stretch my hammies out and it helps a lot. I’m too lazy to stretch every day though. I think something like Pilates that you have been going to or Bikram or whatnot would be really good for me, but its an expense that I can’t imagine myself shelling out for while I’m earning the pittance I currently do! We have a sauna in our place here, so I suppose stretching in the sauna is pretty much the same as bikram, isn’t it?
Hahahaha
Pilates and Bikram helps me a lot. I do get very tight when I’m not stretching. Personally I always prefer stretching in the heat; I thikn a sauna would do well haha. I even sometimes stretch while having a hot shower. It loosens you up and enables you to get more range of motion, which is a good thing. I’m no expert but I would say the more you stretch, the better.
Stoked to hear you’ve been getting heaps of snow. If you find your board is sinking a lot, set your stance back another inch and see how you go. That should give you a bit more float at least.
Just had the BEST day snowboarding. We went over to Trysil in Norway. Perfect weather, so much fun. More on the day later. Totally exhausted. Gotta sleep now!
Looking forward to hearing about it. Stoked for you!
Sounds awesome cords, more pics and maybe some video please??? 
looks and sounds awesome cords
cant wait for the next instalment 
Sorry for the delay, peeps. Friday was a busy day and saturday and sunday are the two crazy days of work in the week….but now I’m going to talk about last thursday, because it was so damn good!
The story begins with our boss Erik, saying to us last weekend that we should come ride in Trysil with him sometime in the coming week, and that he would try and get some time off to go shredding with us. Erik is around our age and super nice, but everything is so busy at work that we haven’t really had any chance to just sit down, hang out and talk.
Next thing, Dorklan arrives on monday night, without having managed to lodge his working holiday visa application in stockholm. Its a bloody long way back there, and we realised that the swedish embassy in Oslo is actually closer from here….and the easiest way to get him to Oslo was by putting him on a bus from Trysil!
So the plan was formed - drop Decs on the bus at ten to 9, shred trysil all day, then wait until he returned at 7.30pm and collect him. The weather looked like it was going to be good, too! In making it extra awesome, Trysil is owned by the same company as Sälen and with our season pass we get a free day at one of the other skistar resorts….so the lift pass was going to be free, too!
We got up a bit late and drove the 50kms, getting there about 2 minutes before the bus did. Erik rang and said he wasn’t able to get the whole day off, but that he would try get out for a shred in the arvo. Conditions looked super good, we’d had the powder day the day before and there was a top up of a few cm over night and bright blue sky. Only thing was, it was a bit windy up above the tree line….25 metres per second windy.
If you don’t have any idea of how windy that is, then you’ll learn after watching this video:
Once you were down in the trees though, you couldn’t feel the wind at all. Trysil has SICK slopes. Really wide, not tooo steep and there was powdery stashes off the sides for doing big cuttie turns in. We spent the first 2.5 hours just exploring the slopes and different parts of the mountain. We went up the highest T-bar that was open. It was super windy up there but we had spied a chute a bit off-piste that we thought might have some pow left. Entering the chute, it was like a massive wind tunnel but it calmed down not too far into it. The pow was mostly already shredded, but there was the odd stash left.
Freddy got this shot of me in that chute:
It isn’t going to win any competitions but that is definitely a photo I will look back on and remember the stoke of the day!
We stopped for a break and some food, got some more cheap food from the supermarket to be our dinner later and then studied the piste map a bit more. We went out in search of the top of the park and it took us a little bit to find it, but boy was it worth the time! There is a chairlift that services it, which we realised later, really made a difference in prolonging the time we were able to ride, as we could have a proper rest on the way back up.
This pic shows just the middle section of the park (and the awesome view).
There are another 4 jumps and some jibs in the bottom section, and the upper section has another 3 jumps, a wallride and loads of boxes and rails.
The reason that I loved Thursday so much was that I finally hit what I would call some decent sized jumps, both in terms of the size of the kicker and the distance between kicker and landing. I wasn’t doing any boxes, as my board is badly in need of a wax and I’d been having some trouble riding them the last few times. With some coaching and confidence building from Freddy, I made up my mind to try the first jump in the red line. Easily the biggest kicker in terms of size (intimidating when you’re riding at it!) that I’ve done since we did the season in Åre at the start of 2009.
Taking flight on my first effort!
I made it first go, even though I got a bit scared in the air because of all the extra air time and how high I was, as the landing is quite steep. Was so stoked! Then Freddy helped me get keen to try two other jumps in the line.
We’d kinda given up on hearing from Erik, but he rang at about 2.45 to say he’d be out for the last hour of the day. The sun was gradually disappearing and we were getting tired & nearly ready to call it quits, but got keen again then. He arrived 1 run after the sun had gone behind the mountain but the conditions were still really good, and he was frothing!
His excitement rubbed off on us and re-charged our enthusiasm. It was fun to be able to chat to him properly in the lift. We’d never ridden with him before and had no idea of what level he was at, but assumed he was decent as he’s been doing seasons for the last few years.
First run down with him and BOOM:
haha so this super nice boss of ours is also a rippo!
The next hour was rad and we fit quite a few laps in. Freddy had been encouraging me to try one of the other jumps, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I was definitely getting more comfortable on the others though. I was just frothing on the feeling of getting that much air again, and was starting to push off a little bit for extra height, and throw in the odd shifty:
3rd last lap of the day and I got the guts to try the last jump that freddy reckoned I could do. I totally trust his judgement of my abilities, but I also know that I have to be in the right frame of mind myself. I made it and it was the best feeling! The hang-time was like nothing I personally have ever experienced…it was so fun just being in the air for that long (not long for anyone else probably, but long for me.)
I was sooo stoked and would have done another million laps if I possibly could. Unfortunately we didn’t get any video or pics of that jump - but that is as good an excuse as any to go back there, right? We rode right until they wouldn’t let us on the lift anymore and then had a fun play around run in the green park on the way back to Erik’s car. He drove us back to our car and said he had to go back to the office to get some stuff, but that we were welcome to come round to his pad and hang out for a few hours until Declan’s bus arrived. We did just that and really enjoyed it.
I asked Erik if he might have an old board & bindings that he could lend to Dec for the upcoming week or so until he can get another board and borrowed bindings sent down from his brother in Östersund. Erik said yes and beginner Declan now has a Smokin’ Superpark 156 & Flux TT30 binders to ride on! Such a good set up for him.
We got Declan from the bus, but not before we got worried as hell because the bus didn’t turn up and we couldn’t find him. He had no functional sim card either, so we had no idea what to do. The bus ended up being an hour late…which was a better outcome than it having been early and we missed him and then couldn’t find him!
So that was my thursday! Such a good day! I was so over-excited and hyper that I couldn’t sleep properly and I woke up about 5 times in the night and couldn’t sleep again because I was playing the feeling of being in the air on that jump over and over again!
Enough outta me. Sorry for the long post. Gotta sleep now!
I’m sorry but what the heck is a cuttie turn??
dont apologise cords, everyone is loving the posts!!
Looks like you’re having a sick time over there. The parks over there look so good! Can’t wait ‘til my next snow holiday. Only a little bit jealous