A little bit of everything

A little bit of everything is what we've had this week on our second freestyle camp of the year. The week started with a little new snow, which is a big thing this winter, but there is no denying spring has sprung, but that means sunshine. Normally.

We did start the first day with clear skies and warm weather and the usual assessment of riding technique, break it down and build it up, but seeing as this was a freestyle camp we pretty soon headed to the park to see what was there to play on and get the landing gear back on track.

Day two was also bluebird and hot, after the day before though we were better prepared and the spring gear was out as we headed straight for the pipe. With the pipe walls, ,all 16ft of them, re-cut the week before it made perfect venue to progress on the lessons of the day before and how to maintain speed up the pipe wall. Considering there had not been much pipe experience before this day, the guys were getting to the lip and the space beyond, with some spins and more technical trickery going on below the lip. The afternoon brought in some grey weather that turned to snow at the end of the day, which although didn't last for long gave us a little bonus.

The skies obviously cleared during the night allowing the ridden snow to freeze and gave us a proper spring start on Tuesday morning. For which we headed straight to the park and working on kickers. Although everyone had their own ideas of what they wanted to achieve Dave from Mint kept a strict hold on the class making sure all the basics had been reworked and ironed out the old habits before, everyone was let loose. Although 1's, 3's and front flips were being worked on the little kickers, we moved onto some of the larger ones by the end of the morning and it was obvious that a bit more work could be done getting used to airtime, as the extra speed and challenge to confidence brought back some of the old habits. So in the afternoon we headed to the airbag and the hip. The airbag is a great tool for learning and what was tentative goes at Ollie frontflips on the smaller kickers before lunch became charging at front and back rodeos, barrel rolls and a lot of hilarity in the afternoon. Funny what taking the risk out an exercise does for freeing the mind and letting people concentrate on what they are doing, and can thus learn a lot. We finished that session by taking on the big hip and pushing the comfort zone with big straight airs.

Wednesday saw the weather close in again with the lesson moving back to the pipe in the morn and trying to search out freshies in the afternoon. Of which we found plenty, which at the top were good to ride, but still in the cloud and as we got into the trees and on some runs looking down at these un touched lines thought the trees, discovered that below a certain point it got a bit sticky and added another element of learning to the riding skill set, especially as we were all on short freestyle boards, with centered stances, legs had to work hard. But either way we scored freshies and that was plenty of an excuse to hit the Kinkearn for a couple of après. Between it all we had some fun with Dans gopro camera and a 'rescued' ski pole.

Unfortunately the grim weather carried on the next day, but as we were aware of this had a few jars with dinner out the night before and took a lazy morning before heading up for a play about and a few more runs on the airbag.

But unfortunately everything has to come to a last day, for which we hooked up with Damien our tame photographer and made the most of the returning sunshine. An all in one day tour of all the places from during the week, and a now or never motivation saw great achievements and a whole load of high 5's.