With the weather being the cruel and capricious mistress she often is the tentative schedule was scrapped early on, and Thursdays comp was written off due to high winds and a gigantic dump of late season snow. This meant that Friday saw the Halfpipe contest abandoned to make room for Slopestyle, with snowboard and ski joining forces like one happy family with a penchant for jumping around in the snow.
Seeing as the weather was kicking up a fuss on Thursday we made the executive decision to head into the Laax Freestyle Academy. If you’ve not been before, imagine Disneyland meets Tony Hawk’s house. Laax have this state of the art facility available for anyone after an induction and you couldn’t have a better place for aspiring snowboarders. With airbags, snowflex, trampolines and airtracks it’s the ultimate place to try and stomp new tricks.
The park crew had managed the behemoth task of clearing all the fresh snow and shaping the slopestyle course back to its world class condition. A layer of cloud had hidden the sun from the bottom of the gondola, but as we ascended we punched through and were treated to a blue bird sky, with nary a cloud in sight.