The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4
THE GIVING ZONE
Words: David Vladyka. Photos and Captions: Ahriel Povich 2023-01-24 09:36:42
JP Solberg on the Camel Toe gap in 2010. JP shut it down with a frontside 540, cab 900 and this backside double 1080. For quite a few years, the Camel Toe was considered dead. How could anyone hope to do more than JP had done on that perfect day?
Oh, Big Bertha. Multiple factors directed us toward our first session at that specific jump, the most prominent being that it’s a relatively short hike to get to it from Avoriaz, a resort in Morzine, France. It’s nestled in a zone we call simply “La Zone,” which has served as the stomping grounds for some of Europe’s most impactful backcountry freestyle snowboarding.
La Zone covers roughly two and a half square miles and, when you consider its home in the Alps, that’s a relatively small area. Still, within La Zone I’ve counted more than 20 jumps we’ve shot at regularly over the years. Many of those jumps have grassy landings, meaning that with only a little bit of snow we can usually make something work. On top of those favorable aspects, La Zone faces northeast and works well with the wind. Snow often piles up and stays fresher for longer there. Nearly every one of Absinthe Films’ movies, from Saturation (2003) to Isle of Snow (2019), features footage from La Zone, and we weren’t the only ones there. I’ve seen Halldor Helgason filming for the old TransWorld Snowboarding videos, as well as Torstein Horgmo and Werni Stock for ShredBots. But before all that, we had to figure out how to best access the place.
On our first attempt to reach La Zone in 2005, Romain De Marchi, Trevor Andrew, Jules Reymond and I took a route that was needlessly long and sketchy. Then we tried another way, this time from the top of the Ripaille T-bar at the resort. Our plan was to get off the T-bar and traverse over a mile to the bottom of La Zone. That was the theory. But reality was much different. On good powder days, the traverse is rough. The bigger your crew, the better your chances are to reach the bottom. It’s best to leapfrog in, putting down a path for the person behind you, having them ride by and then do the same for you, then repeating this over and over until you get to your desired spot. That said, this can be really tiring. And the first time we shaped the Bertha, it was one hell of a snow year. Getting to the bottom of the zone would take forever.
En route, we stopped for one of our regular breaks. That’s when we decided to work with the spot in front of us. We were all tired and, admittedly, a bit lazy, so we decided to give it a shot on the kicker that would be dubbed Big Bertha. Romain landed a cab 1080 during that session, as seen in Absinthe Films’ Futureproof in 2005. That was the beginning. Gigi Rüf and JP Solberg came back to build it again a few years later and landed double corks, the former landing on a TransWorld Snowboarding cover. Mat Schaer got shots on it too.
It’s funny to look back on that day when we were all just a bit too lazy to reach our intended destination, then ended up making one of the sickest jumps I’ve ever shaped and filmed. It was the first taste of a zone that kept on giving, year after year, and still does to this very day.
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THE GIVING ZONE
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