If you haven't watched the new Laax movie, "Tales from the Crap" yet, put this shitty report on hold, download the video from the banner on our homepage and spend the next 40 minutes devising a scheme to get up to Laax. Not that you needed another reminder, but damn!! This movie really drives the point home: Laax rules on all sorts of levels.
ADT and I started started our mission from Annecy to Laax early Friday morning with a succession of two trains and two buses—about seven hours of bumming out fellow commuters. Though we remembered to pack a head of leftover lettuce and a couple blocks of questionable cheese, we forgot the snowboard I was going to ride, just the first misstep in a series of small blunders that led us to our new moniker, "Team Zero."
Despite our best efforts to completely blow it, and my arriving In Laax with little more than a duffel bag of sordid clothes and a pair of Method bindings, we made all of our connections and the Laax locals hooked us up with (more than) everything we needed to make this 36-hour mission a wild success.
With some board assistance from JJ and a boot loan from park-shaper Matthias, we were on hill early Saturday morning, snagging a series of Gondola rides up to the glacier park.
P60 isn't open quite yet, but the lap up on the glacier is still a good time for early season. Rider's left has a line with a few small jumps, a good handful of rails and a couple of hips. On the right there are a ton of natural gaps, quarters, bumps and trannys to be scored. Though we are just easing into winter, there is still some good shredding to be had in Crap Country.
By 10 pm Saturday night, the club at the Rider's Palace was rocking with what seemed like every human within a reasonable bus ride/train/car mission, including the gal we met on the train to Chur who leant me money for a midday tall can, for the follow up to last year's "Laax the Movie." To match the enthusiasts, all the featured riders and then some were in attendance and "eager" for some proper partying. Pat Burgener and his band opened the gig up for the partiers on the inside while a small army burned down cannon-sized joints just outside in preparation of the main event.
Full resort movies can be tough to pull off but Blume and crew nailed it, with a heavy lineup, incredible camera work, ripping of all varieties from every corner of Laax, and some mega tweaks by the hands of Severin Van Der Meer, David Djite, James Niederberger, Lucas Baume, Max Buri and so many others, which stand as a personal favorite.
As is the Laax tradition, the emphasis was put on style (the way it should be) overall in this movie, especially on the jump shots, and that's one thing that remains clear in my muddled mind as I sit here in the lobby struggling to string a sentence together. Kas Lemmens crushes the park in a guest section, in the addition to the onslaught brought by Jeron Lohner, Alex Tank, Gido Gfollner, Niederberger, Luca Kuppelwieser, the Oilers and the rest of the regulars. There's doubles action cameos from the BYND MDLS dudes Kevin Backstrom and Tor Lundstrom, appearances by all sorts of Laax legends, a proper ladies segment and ya know...no sense in trying to describe it all, watch all the goodness for yourself and take a quick gander at a few photos I shot before my camera was confiscated and the last shreds of my dwindling self-respect obfuscated in a haze of house music, club cigs and Calanda.
Huge thanks to Roger Heid, Blume, JJ, Matthias, Rider's Palace staff, Oilers and Friends and everyone else for the hospitality, board, boots, party favors and good times. 
