Dominique Vallée

17.06.2011 | comments [0]

Seemed like the season was never ending this year.
After the Ski and Snowboard Festival in Whistler I jetted to Finland, up to the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi. I visited the real Santa Claus and his reindeers that just run wild everywhere, sort of like wild cows. No, I'm serious, he's the real Santa, the one that get's all your mail when your a kid. Was so great!
Then it was Wappu time, which is in Finland, the biggest party of the year almost, to celebrate Spring time. There was a huge yearly Festival/party at Ruka resort where they do a 3 day snowboard contest. Was so much fun. Lots of jumps, friends and good times.

Took me days to recover from that event and I wasn't sure if I was going to make it out alive but all in all maybe one of the most fun contests I've ever done. I won the overall title of Wappulounas so I guess that gives me extra Finish points.
Check out the link.
http://www.wappulounas.com/info.php

From there we pack-up the car and drove from straight North to Tamok, Norway where we stayed in a sweet caravan in the middle of the majestic mountains at the bottom of Fjords.
We would split board up a different mountain everyday. For middle of May we had incredible conditions from snow storms, to sweet powder to slushy sunny rides.
It was the first time that I ever went splitboarding and I really loved it. You're so alone in the middle of the mountains and it's so peaceful, except when you hear some distant avalanches, that's not so relaxing. Some terrain was pretty hard to hike when it was steep and sheer ice from being wind-blown, but getting to the top is so worth the whole journey.

Home now in Vancouver/Squamish, working for RBC and taking some nutrition courses by correspondence. Winter was way more fun.
Here are some photos from Norway and of Santa of course.

Ciao
Dom