Monday, July 23

No Tent Required

By Brooke Geery
EXPN.com

High Cascade Snowboard Camp is like snowboarding heaven. Whether you are a seasoned veteran or strapping into a board for the first time, you will have the greatest week of your life there. If this isn’t convincing enough, read on to see why.

On hill, High Cascade has incredibly complete facilities. Three halfpipes--super, regular and mini-- a ton of jumps and rails. The setup of the snow changes from session to session, and even day to day. One day you’ll be enjoying a jump with a perfect takeoff and landing, while the next day the same jump will be a giant rut. This is pretty standard with Mt. Hood’s summer conditions though. High Cascade’s extensive digging staff does a good job of keeping everything in good commission everyday.

When pro snowboarders show up, which they do from day to day, new uses for old terrain are often realized. Check out Bjorn Leines gapping into the halfpipe or any number of coaches and counselors hitting the super rockstar kicker made will all the snow from the superpipe. Think you’re man enough? All of the camps terrain is open to anyone with a camper ID. Your talented member of the coaching staff should be able to give you some tips on how not to land on your head or perfect your backside rodeo.

Once you come down off the hill, there is a 3:30 meeting to make sure everyone got down alright, then you are basically free to do whatever you want until the 9:45 p.m. curfew. This might seem early, but it isn’t really once you realize that there is nothing to do in the town after dark anyway. If you are over eighteen, however, you don’t have a curfew, and on occasion groups go down to Gresham to see movies. You could theoretically view a movie sequel (for it is the summer of sequels) every night if you so chose.

As far as activities other than snowboarding go, there are plenty. Skateboarding at the new Vans skatepark, white-water rafting, mountain biking, wakeboarding and paintball, just to name a few. There are soccer and dodge ball games all the time, and if you’re really lucky you can hang out and watch Peter Line play pool, Jeremy Jones skate the bowl or Jim Rippey play basketball. Want to learn to crochet or speak Japanese? You can do that too. The newest activity this year is fly-fishing, and if none of this sounds interesting, the camp has every snowboard video known to man and big screen TV’s to watch them on.

The camp provides two cooked meals a day: breakfast and dinner. For lunch they provide all the fixings to make yourself a sandwich to bring riding with you. The food is pretty standard mass-production style. Pizza, burritos and pasta are all reoccurring choices. There is also a daily salad bar, as well as vegetarian and non-vegetarian selections. Campers can also elect to eat Japanese dinner, although the sushi is slightly frightening.

High Cascade is located in Government camp, just a hop, skip and a jump from the Timberline base lodge. Gov’y is a quaint little villa, which, when camp is in session, it is virtually taken over by campers, who have free reign over all it has to offer. This includes great ice cream at Volcano Cone, over-priced-and-not-that-great meals at Huckleberry’s, cheap tacos from the Taco Stand, Ramen Noodles and videos from the Village Store and sucking down Otter Pops by the dozen.

So if you never thought snowboarding in the summer was possible, High Cascade is making it happen, and managing to make it better than it already was. Enjoy.

Check out the photo gallery from High Cascade.