The Protest Snowtour with Jonas Hagström and Miikka Hast has just kicked off for this season. Here is what Jonas had to say about their first trip to British Columbia, Canada.
"After spending two winters in the European Alps we decided to to expand our pow search on a global scale. Now the radar reaches over the whole Northern Hemisphere and where the snow falls, we will go. The idea remains the same and we will go around the mountains to find the best snow and terrain.
Frustrated by the very dry season start in Europe we turned our attention across the Atlantic. North America still had some snow left over from a record breaking last season and when the new storms began to hit the Rockies this year we decided to go and ride there. La Nina seemed to come back again. As Europe was suffering from a heatstroke, the Rockies were being covered with the white powder.
We watched the continuos fronts hitting B.C. and booked flights to Vancouver. We persuaded Antti Autti, his filmer Teemu Lahtinen and photographer Rami Hanafi to join us and soon we had a crew ready to explore the B.C. mountains. Snowtour and Antti's projects joining forces with a common goal to ride some early season pow! We drove from Vancouver, then six hours east to the interior of B.C. and Revelstoke Mountain Resort just to make the opening day of the resort. We opened our Snowtour straight into a familiar knee deep pow all day. It had snowed already over three meters in Revelstoke and the base felt comfortable to hit some decent size cliffs and pillowlines. The conditions were completely different from back home where the black ground was slowly sucking the little light that was left during the daytime in the Arctic Circle. During the next day's we were trying to get our legs use to the sideways movements and cruising around the resort that revealed it's terrain to us. We came across familiar places from several movies and the snow felt really good for early season. We even saw the long awaited yellow light phenomena in the sky.
After few days in the resort we decided to open the splitboard season too and drove to Rogers Pass, which is a world famous touring area. We picked a nice looking tree run to start off with but not the easiest way up. We were struggling in steep (around 40 degree) woods. The easy two-hour hike turned into a tough three-hour struggle but the ride down was all worth it. A 700-meter vertical tree run in waist deep snow! We had never ridden or hit pillow lines in such conditions in early December. Our legs were definitely surprised with the best and the fastest season start ever. Our snowboarding muscles were still hibernating but we want more!
Here is a few videos and pics of our trip. Stay tuned for more adventures and hopefully deep powder runs as the season continues"
