Terrain Park All the Way     By: Duckboy

   Sparks flew as my Liquid snowboard scraped across the rail, screeching with the sound of composite against the rusty iron rail. My board was sliding, but only horizontal to the rail, so that both sides of it hung off the ends of the rails. It was a 50/50 rail boardslide. I maneuvered my board, just as I slid off the end of the rail, and smacked down on the snowy hill surface.

   "That… was… AWESOME!" I called out, and a lame little skier stared at me, his eyes bulging with obvious amazement.  

   Yeah, you probably have no clue what I'm talking about, so let me clear it up for you. Last Friday, when most of you people were at ILAME, I mean… ILITE, My family and I took a stupendous trip to Snow Valley- an amazingly huge ski/snowboard resort in Barrie. Though, I didn't spend any time checking out the rest of the resort- only a fragment of it, the Terrain Park. A Terrain Park is, ultimately, a park where you can perform tricks on. It contains regular ramps, as well as boxes (plastic 3-dimensional shapes, mainly rectangles, laid on the hill that tricks can be done on), and awesome rails, though mostly rails. Altogether, the Terrain Park isn't something to miss.

   My snowboard flew 5 feet into the air with a sudden jolt, and I looked down at the ramp that had just hoisted me up. I swung my board around, the back facing forward, and landed, with a large thud, onto the ground, snowy mist flooding the air. YES! AN 180˚! But that wasn't a great achievement- I had already done an 180˚ about a thousand times before. But on the trip I finally jibbed my first rail- quite an amazing boardslide, indeed. Yeah, I'm just naturally that awesome. What am I talking about? I guess you're wondering that, unless you're secretly some professional boarder. Okay, well, jibs are anything that is meant for doing tricks on, made of anything other than snow. An 180˚ is a trick in which you twist your board 180˚ around in mid air. With that in mind, it doesn't take a genius to discover what a 360˚ is. Anyway, the snow was amazing, and when you're a pro like me, it's not difficult to learn some new tricks. And I did. From 50/50s to 180˚s, my time at the Terrain Park was like two days in heaven.

   A surge of blinding light spewed from the most fantastic item in the world as I approached it- the Burton Blunt Restricted. Regularly, I hate shopping- in fact, I completely despise it. But when I enter a store containing snowboards, well, that changes things. When I was in Barrie, I dropped by Gates and Boards, an extreme snowboarding warehouse. It was packed chock-full of anything and everything snowboard-based, from goggles to hand warmers. It was two-story, and the second story was all snowboards and bindings (straps that secure the foot into the snowboard), so you can easily imagine that I spent all of my time on the second story. But I spotted an amazing artifact that I will never in my life forget: the Burton Blunt Restricted. This snowboard is the most awesome snowboard ever (well, to me, anyway), and it's definitely worth writing an entire paragraph based on it. On the front, it showed a cacophony of different images (though in a good way), like a superhero with blood dripping from his mouth, a psycho drummer, and a variety of different monsters, while the back showed an epic Burton logo wit ha jaguar around it. Yeah, you can imagine it was pretty nice, and I'm going to get that snowboard if it kills me!

   The trip was amazing- an experience I will… keep experiencing throughout my life, since I snowboard pretty much every weekend, though it was still a blizzard of awesomeness- literally.