riding with a posse

i really did forget over the past few years how much i love snowboarding. you'd think i'd remember since i spent every spare minute of my high school years hiking up a gravel pit for the 6 second ride down. afternoons were spent building kickers, weekends were spent jumping off the kickers under the dark night sky or occasionally to the light of a bonfire if we could pull ourselves away long enough to make one. you don't subject yourself to that much frostbite and spend that many hours in the cold riding on ice for something you don't really love.

but it wasn't just the snowboarding, it was the crew i did it with. the hard work of making the jumps perfect, the numerous laughs thrown into every conversation, the cheers when you landed a jump, the louder cheers when you didn't. the stories we'd come into school with each week of brutal bails and the bruises we had to back them up. it was plain and simple fun.

so i was stoked to hit up kicking horse this past weekend for the riding, but little did i know that what i would end up with was experiencing that sense of community and camaraderie all over again. eight of us shared a room, seven of us were seasoned vets of the sport. there was fresh powder, there were trees to weave in and out of and there was steep steep terrain. 

we rode like a wolf pack, howling the whole way down, stopping every once in a while to make sure we were all together or to watch the success of each rider taking a random jump or dropping a cliff along the way.

the mountain was perfect, the snow was fantastic and the posse was incredible. we rode hard, we played hard, and we may have even gotten the entire hillside bar engaged in an impromptu game of limbo on the dance floor that night...that i may or may not have won.

i don't really know what the phrase "off the hook" means, but i'm pretty sure this past weekend was that.