Wednesday in Thompson Pass turned out to be a down weather day. Even though it looked promising when I woke up, which compelled me to get my gear together and walk over to the helipad, it didn't take long for the window to blow over and for clouds to roll in. When I got the official word from the ABA guys that Wednesday was going to be a day for “window shopping” (i.e. waiting for windows in which to fly), I decided it would be a good opportunity to drive the RV into town to get gas and a few supplies.

I woke up on Tuesday morning to what looked like overcast skies. Even though I didn't think the helicopters would be flying, I decided to get geared up anyway. I put on all my snowboarding stuff, my climbing harness, avalanche transceiver, and loaded some Clif Bars and water into my pack and made it over to the village area. This was a good decision as it happens, because what looked like clouds was actually valley fog which was quickly burned off by the sun. By 9AM, the skies were starting to look bluebird and the helis were getting ready to fly.

I woke up early on day two of my Tailgate Alaska adventure, but since Anchorage is a whole four hours behind Ottawa, it felt a hell of a lot later than it was. First on the agenda was to finish the paperwork that I needed to do to get my rental motorhome on the road. While I was at it, I met up with a few other tailgaters that were renting their own RVs and also making the drive to Valdez later that day. Paul, Rob, and George from New York in one RV, Justin from parts unknown in another.

Earlier this week, I went to Mont Tremblant for the third try at passing the freeride teaching component of my CASI level 3 instructor's certification but didn't meet the standard yet again. The reason this time was that it was judged that I hadn't pushed the students hard enough during my lesson. Whether or not they left as better snowboarders was irrelevant; apparently the alliance has become more about creating return customers than about making better snowboarders.

In the “Blown In” column of the February issue of Backcountry magazine, Colin Whyte wrote about the recent growth in popularity of splitboarding. Fueled by significant advances in gear, and the impending release of Jeremy Jones' new film Deeper, splitboarding seems to be benefiting from an increase in public visibility.

Last weekend I took a whirlwind road trip to Mont Rigaud just west of Montreal. Those of you who know of Mont Rigaud might be wondering what the hell makes this event so significant? Reaching the heights of Mont Rigaud will not exactly induce high altitude pulmonary edema or cerebral edema, and the views are not exactly spectacular. However, even if you have the raddest terrain on the planet, what does that really mean without a good crew to share it with.

On the weekend of February 20th, I was in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to do the AIARE Level 2 avalanche course. It wasn't that long ago – December to be exact – that I had done the level 1 and I was keen on becoming an even bigger snow geek. This time, as I understood, we would be spending a bit more time in the field looking at snow grains, making weather observations, and just generally playing in the snow. I was also hopeful that this time I'd have the opportunity to do a little backcountry snowboarding while I was at it.

The Burton Supermodel is one of those boards that everyone has heard about, its been around for a long time. However, I'm not certain a whole lot of people have actually ridden it... I decided to take her for a ride and see how she felt (wow, apparently I'm just as dirty as I am polite...)

On day four of the SIA tradeshow, we decided to skip out on the commercial aspects of snowboading and focus on what's really important: the snow, the mountains, and the fun. Brian and Steve of the Sierra crew volunteered to provide us with rides in two senses of the word: a means to get to the mountain, and boards to get us down the mountain (we didn't bring our own snowboards to Denver). We then set our bearing west in the direction of Keystone for a day of riding on Sunday.

Burton was at my home mountain recently to allow people to demo this year's gear. While they were there, Adam let us take some boards out to do some tests. One of the boards that we tested was the 2009/10 Burton T6. I've never actually ridden the T6, although a few years ago one was offered to me as a loaner when I found pressure cracks on my APO Family 58. My APO lasted the weekend, however, (and incidentally the rest of the season) so I didn't get an opportunity to try out the T6 until now so I was looking forward to seeing what it was all about.