Justin Norman Snowboarding in Montreal

Snow Team rider Justin Norman started his 2015 off with a bang. When Dylan Thompson calls and invites you to Montreal you have to say “HELL YEAH!”

Here is how things went down…

“I received a text message from my good friend Dylan Thompson on January 2nd saying, “Hey, what do u have going on in the next week or so?” My response being, “Hopefully snowboarding with u”. He proceeded to tell me that he was going to be hopefully planning a trip to Japan in the next few days and said it would epic if I could join! The initial response in my head was HELL YEAH, but I had to remind myself to get all the details first. When Japan fell through, the next best option was Montreal in north east Canada. The trip derived because Dylan was working on his X-Games real snow street part with videographer Cole Taylor and they wanted me to come help out the process.

 I looked into flights, which were not cheap, and had to book my tickets around when some much needed gear was going to arrive on my doorstep for the trip. Thankfully I made the executive decision to pay a bit more to fly out of Redmond instead of Portland because my gear showed up three hours late. Once I got all packed up for my trip and printed my boarding pass, the excitement really hit, because I grew up snowboarding in the streets of Eugene, OR using ice rink snow. Now I had the opportunity to join a good friend and one of the best urban snowboarders around to snowboard in the streets of Montreal, Canada and get some epic shots. 

 After celebrating the new year, I left a few days after for Montreal and after spending over 24 hours in the airport, I ended up getting a cold and fighting it the entire trip. Once I met up with the crew, being Dylan Thompson, Nick Pooch, Cole Taylor, and Ben Birk, we quickly got to work and started setting up a few features. The appeal was unfinished overpasses, where we set up a rad flat rail to drop and a gap to redirect, as well as a large roof ledge to drop, shipping yard container gap drop to wallride, a handplant feature to wallride, and a down flat closeout rail. Dylan was hyped on the shots he got during the trip which made it nice once it was my turn to get some shots. 

On the last day of our trip I finally got to stack a two shots in one day, but that just wasn’t enough for my satisfaction, so Nick, Dylan and I ended up extending our trip an extra day so Nick and I could hit this down flat closeout. Because I knew he was pretty stoked on the idea of hitting the feature through the down flat closeout, I wanted to mix it up and hit it a bit differently, so I ended up gapping from the top of the overpass down the stair set and over the closeout. This was by far the highlight of my trip because I really had to work for this shot to turn out! 

 In the end of the trip I felt successful and completely run down seeing that I was fighting off a cold the entire time while working hard every day to help the features come to life” – Justin Norman