Photos and Video Danny Kern. Words Keenan Cawley
Boreal altered the global concept of time, announcing their opening on October 32nd. Perhaps they thought they could get away with adding another day to the already exaggerated time line of Halloween (apparently these days the holiday is a week long). Perhaps they wanted to postpone paying bills. Or perhaps they just wanted to claim opening in October. None of these could be true seeing as they didn’t continue on to the 33rd for the second day. Whatever. They did it. Despite the DJ dude reminding us every five minutes, no one cared because everyone was just juiced to be boarding.
‘Everyone’ being those Tahoe locals who hadn’t gotten enough preseason at Donner or Mt. Rose and the entire Sacramento and Bay populations. It was a mess. Some folks opted for congregating ten feet in front of every feature while others went from the top and pinned it. As a member of the latter, I can say that most boards got chipped, every skier got clipped, and no one was left un-snaked.
People were ripping until they turned the lights out at eight and most of those folks were back at the hill when they opened again the following morning. It was a lovely communion of crews, as all preseason boarding should be; Gremlinz, Strangers, Jupiter Peoples, and up-and-coming Boreal loc’s like Matty Britton and Ryland West were all hiking, filming, cutting people off, and having a rip-roaring good time together. I guess what I’m trying to get at with this whole piece is that if you weren’t there this past weekend, you blew it. The next time they’ll be open, there’ll be a perfectly manicured park that you don’t have to hike and there won’t be lines or people to snake nor to ride with on account everyone will be trying to film the next crazy park edit and you’ll be doing lonely solo laps trying to keep up with the rest of the kiddies at snowboard practice. ‘I should’ve gone to Boreal opening weekend when snowboarding was still for fun,’ you’ll be crying to yourself. Oh well. Maybe they’ll just change time again and we can go back for some fun.