LINES The Giving Zone Camel Toe 3.0 went down with an unlikely crew of younger riders: Garrett Warnick, Keegan Valaika, Severin Van Der Meer and Max Buri. To say the crew was uncertain about the spot is a bit of an understatement. Keegan almost bailed on the hike up and Max looked like he was making plans to grab the next plane to Bali. High expectations and rumors of a bench buried on the knuckle certainly didn’t help, and for a while I was fearful that the mission was a bust. But Garrett (pictured) saved the day, stepping up to hit it first and stomping a first-try back 7. Max hit a backside 360 no grab—a standout in his AfterForever (2016) part. 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, ad-mittedly, 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 sick-est 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. 102 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 102
