This August, The Progression Sessions returns to the Southern Hemisphere with Steep-N-Deep Powder Tours. Two trips, an 8-day and a 10-day offer unique ways to experience the Chilean Andes and get a snowboarding fix while the temps are hot at home. Snowboarding, surfing, city exploration, amazing food and apres make these trips incredible!
For more information and to register, check out Sndtours.com.
For the better part of the past decade, The Progression Sessions presented by Oakley has been a staple of the spring event calendar at Mammoth Mountain. Mammoth Unbound, the resort’s prolific park system, is a legendary oasis of transition and metal and with parks of all sizes for all abilities making Mammoth the perfect place for TPS to gather a group of boarding ladies for a weekend of jumping, jibbing, and everything in between. Every year since the women’s snowboard camp touched down in the Eastern Sierra has been epic, but this season’s edition of TPS may have been the best one yet as 2017 has been a megalith of a snow year for the Eastern Sierra. Main Lodge is so surrounded by snow that downward steps have been carved in order to reach the first floor of the building. Want to get an apres drink at Tusk’s? Put your board in the racks by the deck and walk directly to the bar–the second floor of the lodge is accessible from ground level. It’s crazy and awesome, and most of all, means that Director of Unbound TJ Dawoud and his cadre of diggers have practically endless snow to play with when it comes to building their pristine parks. To this end, TJ and crew roped off the lower portion of Forest Trail and filled it with a progresion jump line, boxes and tubes, and a tube-topped wallride the ladies dubbed, The Toblerone. There were plenty more jumps and tubes to hit in the upper part of Forest Trail en route to the TPS zone and just to rider’s left of the Progression Sessions park was a freshly-cut minipipe. Continue reading
One of the hallmarks of dropping into a jumpline or pointing your board toward an errant strip of metal positioned squarely in the middle of a ski slope is the confidence to be able to trust that your on hill abilities will get you to the landing in one piece. While a cheese wedge or down rail often looks more intimidating than a steep and narrow trail, for most of us looking make turns into the terrain park, the foundation of board control is there–we can hone in the nuances as we ride this type of terrain more and more–but the main hurdle is the nervousness of just dropping in the first place. A perfect way to overcome the intimidation of riding park for women looking to take their riding game to the freestyle oases at their home mountains? With a like-minded group of snowboarders who are knowledgeable, humble, and there to offer support every step of the way. Continue reading
