Since my last entry from the US Open I went on an amazing trip to Mexico.  I went with my girlfriend to Puerto Vallarta for a wedding/vacation.  Two of my good friends from home (minnesota) had a destination wedding down in PV.  This was an unbelievable time!  We stayed at a resort called Playa Fiesta which is just south of “old town” in a really cool boutique hotel.  Coming from a long shred season this was just the perfect little break to a long winter.  My lady and I were so happy to get away from the snow and cold weather of Breckenridge and everywhere else I’ve been all year.  The weather was perfect, sunny and 80 degrees every day.  The ceremony was just great, outside and all of my friends and people who are close to me.  This was an amazing week!

I just got back to the states on the 3rd, and I’m already back on snow.  I had to come straight form the airport to Silverton, CO for the annual SIMS team shoot.  Silverton is one of the coolest mountains I’ve ever been to!  All backcountry with one lift and you have to shred with a guide.  The team had already had a day under their belts and I showed up a day late, due to my little mexico excursion.  My drive was pretty grueling since it was snowing pretty hard my whole drive from Denver, with a stop at home in Breck and all the way down to south western CO.  This was my first backcountry trip and shredding of the year, since I had so many contests this winter.  So I was super pumped to get to some of the best freeriding in all of Colorado!  However Silverton is a very rocky mountain with a lot of cliffs and rocky features all over the mountain.  So as freestyle snowboarders we wanted to find some stuff we could drop or jump off of and ended up hitting some nice little drops and lines to start off the day.  All went well and myself, Colin Langlois, Erich Dummer, and Gaetan Chanut got some pretty cool shots all on the first run.  Next we headed back up to the top to catch a heli ride to a different portion of the mountain.  This was my very first heli ride so I was really pumped!  This was awesome!  So much fun!  We headed up to this pretty mellow area where there was ONE area our guide told us not to go…  Sure enough DISASTER!  Colin and myself were slashing this wind lip where the backside was a very large cliff drop, about 200 ft to be exact.  We were all milking this little spot for slashes and Dummer was up to slash just below colin and my slash.  Dummer didn’t quite understand what we meant, I guess, and sent the 200 footer!  OMG!  We all absolutely froze and didn’t really know whether he would be alive, okay, severely injured or what.  So we pointed around and down to where he launched and found him deep in a landing hole and was unbelievably, for the most part unscathed!  He totally cart wheeled down a huge rock face and landed pretty hard on his ass, and only received a pretty nasty bruise!  So after that, we obviously were pretty rattled and didn’t want to shred any more.  Though on our way back from the mountain to our house, Colin, Gaetan and I ended up doing this pretty sick pillow line on the side of the road.  The photos turned out pretty well and we were all pumped on a pretty bad day turning out okay, for most of us.  The next day we all were down to ride a little more mellow lines and features and ended up killing it on the day!  You’ll just have to wait and check the shot on the simsnow.com website and all of the ads for next season!  I can’t spoil the surprise already.  Now it’s Monday the 6th and the team moved from Silverton to Telluride for some park features.  They built a pretty rad step up gap jump which we haven‘t hit yet, but looks pretty good for some nice sunset shots.  Again, you’ll just have to wait to see the photos.  Then from here I head to Aspen for some private pipe riding with the US team until the 20th of this month.  I guess I’ll probably write again when that session is done with.  Until then enjoy and see y’all later this month!  Take care.