So I drove from Vancouver to Nelson last month to meet some snowboarders for a filming mission at Balface resort. I film snowboarders snowboarding for a living. The drive was pretty mellow compared to the last few times I’ve driven to the Kootenays except for the fact that I was stressing because I realized I’d forgotten the little plate that mounts my camera to the tripod. Just so you know, there’s no decent camera stores in Chilliwack, Osoyoos, Castlegar, or Nelson. Should have waited til Leo’s opened before leaving Vancouver. My bad. Upon arriving in Nelson I realized it was hockey day in Canada and Don Cherry and crew were broadcasting all day from town. The town was buzzing with sports fans and the pubs were packed. Unfortunately the only room I found was located directly above one of these sports bars. f*ck it, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
The next morning I drove to the Prestige Lakeside inn to meet the boarders around noon. I arrived before their shuttle bus came in from Spokane (or as Eddie Wall calls it, Spokanee), so I chilled in the lobby with Doug. Doug was there for the cat skiing too. Doug was an avid kite boarder from lake Erie and a one time Ski patroller at Big White. Doug and I discussed board sports for a while before the Baldface office opened at 1:30 and we met or hostesses Tessa and Adriane. My crew still hadn’t arrived yet and none of their cells were working so I signed the waiver and got ready for the Heli ride with Doug. Tessa and Adriane were great at there jobs by the way, very hospitable. And thorough. I finally heard from the crew about 5 minutes before I had to board the helicopter, turns out our other filmer got stopped at the border and held back so the boys were en route sans filmer. shi*t. He was the one with the backcountry filming experience, like 30 years of it. I’ve only shot street stuff, you know, urban booters and smith grinds.
“The boys”, I should mention, ride for an outerwear company called Foursquare. The boys are in fact, a team. This team consists of Eddie Wall, Pat Moore, Jake Blauvelt, Jake Welch, and some guy named Peter Line. The team was accompanied by Cole Barash, an excellent photographer who happened to have a plate that fit my tripod. Thanks Cole. The boys were late, so I heli’d up to the lodge with Tessa and Doug while Adriane waited below to greet the Foursquare team. Cole ended up meeting OG Pipeline Master Gerry Lopez while boarding the chopper for his ride up. Gerry was leaving baldface while we were arriving. Turns out our trip was scheduled 5 days late, we could have been surfing pow with a surfing legend. Instead we’d be surfing pow with a boozing legend, Sean Kearns. Sean flew in on day 2 to replace Kurt, our filmer who Canada doesn’t like.
Sure enough, my comrades arrived with enough time for a few matches of pool before dinner. This was to become the daily après ski ritual, pool, then dinner, and then usually a few beers with the other guests, Tessa, Adriane, and the rest of the staff. Dinner is held in the main lodge every night at 6pm and is always very tasty. The staff at Baldface all pitch in to help serve meals so quite often your guide from the day will hand you your dinner plate. We were greeted by Jeff, the owner of the resort, during our meeting around the pool table. Jeff built the resort from the ground up 7 years ago, and is still expanding it every year. He scouted the location with Craig Kelly who was an integral part the operation for the first two years before he passed away. There is a cross on a ridge overlooking the lodge which was built and placed there the day that Craig died. Jeff gave us a little history and welcomed us to his home. Our first night of after dinner shotguns with the staff set the pace for the next 4 days. We liked Jeff’s home.
The next four days consisted of daily doses of the best powder runs of my life. I remember Eddie proclaiming that he was done with rails after his first run of the trip. We were always hitting a new stash and on one of the days we ginea pigged a couple runs that had never been ridden before. Kearns took the honor of naming these new runs for Jeff. If you ever ride some runs named Spreado and Licko at Baldface, we were there first. Needless to say that most of our runs were followed by plenty of laughs. We didn’t actually get much serious filming in at Baldface, I mean we tried, but no one wanted to waste pow laps on building jumps or searching for cliffs. in the end most of our shots ended up coming from one session in particular where the whole team decided it was time to learn double backflips. Again, plenty of laughs. On the last day, to make up for lack of filming, we built a few features around the lodge with the help of the cat drivers for the guys to jump around on. All in all, I was stoked to ride about as much as I filmed, it doesn’t usually happen like that. I usually don’t even pack a snowboard on filming trips. And to get to follow Peter and Blauvelt through the trees in perfect conditions was an experience that I’m pretty sure made me a better snowboarder. Or at least I think it did. As a matter of fact most of my laps were done paired up with Kearns though. I definitely heard some trail yelling coming out of that guy every now and then and when I did I’d look over and have pink floyd flash backs of whiskey 2.
Like I said before our days ended back in the lodge having dinner with our guides and the other guests. Doug always had had a couple funny stories at the end of the day from his crew. Kearns always made a few shocking comments that scared Doug’s crew. Dinner was always followed by shotguns of kokanee, shotguns followed by pool, and a couple times pool was followed by drunk jenga and dancing with kate the bartender and tessa. The chef had magic fingers with those jenga blocks man, very nimble. I tried to impress the girls with my jenga fingers too and knocked the whole stack down in our last game. Blowing it. Lanny, one of our guides, was the nightly dj. The guy has enough soft rock on his ipod to run one of my parents favourite radio stations. Easy listening. Cool hits. The music fit well with the family vibe in the lodge though. The vibe stayed positive the whole time.
I wish I could tell you more about the actual snowboarding but there’s not much to say about doing amazing pow laps for 4 days straight that isn’t obvious. Its very simple. The only thing I can compare it too is surfing a long, mellow wave over and over again, or bombing a smooth hill on a skateboard that gets you going just fast enough so that your going really fast but still in control. The riding we did wasn’t too challenging or sketchy, there were no bad situations that anyone got into except for maybe Jake Welch the tree hugger running into like 4 trees. He was ok though. Hopefully we’ll be able to edit an exciting little segment out of the footage for the 4square video. I have a feeling it’ll be a lot like kearns’s pink floyd video part; pow turns, couple ollies, no grabs, just pure soul riding bro. We’ve got 3 more trips to do this year for the video. The concept for it is 4 trips, north, east, west, south. I guess baldface was north. Next stop is Russia so that’ll be the next story. Should be a pretty interesting trip, the focus will be more on urban booters and smith grinds I think.
