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Snowboarder Magazine has hosted Superpark for 16 years now. This was the second year they took the show to Mt. Bachelor, outside Bend, Oregon. It was a pretty good winter at Bachelor, which left more than enough building material for park crews from Loon, Seven Springs, Boreal and Bachelor to get creative with. What's more, the weather could've have been nicer. It was sunny and sick all week. This really could have been the best event yet.Here's Snowboarder Magazine's very own Senior Editor Tom Monterosso to tell you all about it.

Bob PlumbCale Zima, influenced by Nate Bozung in all of the ways that matter.

Cale Zima is a direct descendent of the BozWreck crew, so that fact that he isn't incarcerated or on TMZ doing something embarrassing is as impressive as his snowboarding. Zima is one of the only rail savvy kids in the backcountry progressive Absinthe crew. When your peers are as savage as Bode Merrill and Dan Brisse, you know you will have to prove your worth time and time again to stay in the game.

After taking a year to film for Capita's "Defenders of Awesome" movie, Zima was back at it with Absinthe. However a knee injury and subsequent knee surgery have sidelined the Salt Lake City ripper, so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with him and see what he's been doing with his free time.

Cale, how are you?
I'm good, just doing some yard work.

Do you have your own house?
Well I don't own it, but I don't live with my parents.

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Snowboarder Magazine's latest Superpark mega event has officially been planted in the history books as one we won't ever forget.

Of the many things happening last week up at Mt. Bachelor, Ore., 18 brands with video crews covered the hill to put together their best edits possible. All these videos will be used in a viewer friendly judging contest to determine who had the best Superpark 16 crew.

GNU, of course, decided to take the "weird" approach and had a great time with it. The "Weirdos" (Gnu Team) came through the camp throughout the day to hang out and get, well, weird.

Creative director Tim Karpinski -- aka Dr. Weird -- shows us a little of what makes camp weird so fun to hang out around: crystals, Danny Kass, and ... well you'll just have to watch the video to find out the rest.

I was fortunate enough back in the 1990s to briefly share a house in Whistler with Dave Lee, where he coached at the Camp of Champions for many summers. I say "fortunate" because this was an era when a lot of riders, both pros and wannabes, were trying way too hard to be either gangsters or rock stars and Lee and his fellow Seattle pros seemed like the exact opposite: mellow, humble, down-to-earth and smiling all the time instead of scowling or throwing vibes. A chair ride or coffee with him always made your day a little happier.

Lee's current success with Signal Snowboards, one of the few brands actually building their boards here in the good ol' USA, is no surprise to anyone who's met the man. The snowboard industry has certainly taken notice, as have mainstream outlets such as Entrepreneur, Wired and Gizmodo.

Through Signal's groundbreaking web series, Every Third Thursday, we get to watch Lee and his crew building ridiculous-yet-functional concept boards every month (see above).

In some ways, Signal is a natural outgrowth of Lee's long involvement in snowboarding. Before he turned pro in '93, he was a factory employee at Mervin Manufacturing which, he says, "definitely led to my comfort in building the Signal factory." A nasty back injury slowed down his pro career for a season in '98, and that led to an opportunity to start Supernatural, a boutique Mervin brand that lasted until 2003 and left him wanting more:

"In 1997 I started dreaming of owning my own company," explains Lee. "I knew pro riding wasn't going to last forever and Mike McEntire [Mack Dawg] was always telling me that the pro snowboard scene was a meat grinder and I should save my money and always be looking ahead. Some of the best advice I've ever got back then."

Read on and find out why it matters that snowboarding still be in creative hands such as Lee's.

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Peter MorningTop ski and snowboard athletes are already preparing for next contest season. Launch gallery »

The U.S. Freeskiing and Snowboarding teams have been at Mammoth Mountain, Calif., this week for a spring training camp at one of the few ski areas still left open for the winter season. Both halfpipe and slopestyle skiers and snowboarders have been sessioning Mammoth's park, pipe and airbag with coaches to get a jumpstart on tricks for next winter's contest season. The first events of the 2012-13 season start this summer in New Zealand, where FIS World Cup ski and snowboard events at New Zealand's Cardrona Alpine Resort in August will serve as some of the first qualifying events for the 2014 Winter Olympics Games in Sochi, Russia.

"After a long season of competition it's so nice to be out here in Mammoth just hitting perfect jumps," says skier Tom Wallisch. "This season couldn't have gone any better for me and I am stoked to have some chill training time just riding spring conditions and working on tricks."

Adds snowboarder Kelly Clark, "There is a three hit pipe with the end cut off where we can drag the airbag from the front side wall to the backside wall every other day. There is a lot of progression going down, and we are going to see great things come out of this camp.

A young Norwegian named Jørn Simen Aabøe has stomped his way into the history books by being the first snowboarder to land a toeside triple cork 1440. Tom Copsey of Onboardmag.com stated on the magazine's website that he was landing a double rotation of this trick at Nike's Chosen contest, however this is the first video evidence of him taking it to the next level by adding in another full rotation.

"I learned the double frontside rodeo in March this year," explained Aabøe, "and I have thought about doing the triple ever since. So then we got the chance to build the perfect jump, together with Billabong in Norway and my local resort, I went for it. It turned out to be an epic session with some friends, and I landed the triple third try. Luckily."

Different variations of this trick have been done, but spinning off the toes adds another degree of difficulty for some riders. Once this trick has been added to the repertoire of every major contest pro you can count on it being tweaked and looking much different then the backside variation. Let the games begin!

Chapter seven of Jeremy Jones and Teton Gravity Research's Further Unplugged Series digs into Jones' backpack and takes a look at the super food he carries with him on big days in the mountains. We're not talking about his mom's secret meatloaf recipe though. To fuel Jones' dawn to dark splitboarding missions he passes on the cold pizza and turkey sandwiches, choosing instead to eat like a competitive triathlete -- strictly energy gels and energy chews.

Watching Jones climb nearly every line he rides these days it makes perfect sense why finding the human equivalent of Jet-A heli gas was so important to him. The exhausting multi-hour approaches and gut wrenchingly steep descents were enough to deal with, feeling queasy from eating the wrong food only made matters worse.

"I used to eat a sandwich in the middle of the day but I would feel too full and then get a crash a couple hours later," said Jones about his pre-DEEPER diet. "So I talked to a bunch of trainers and other alpinists about the food that worked best for them and everybody agreed that energy gels were the most efficient and easiest to digest fuel you could eat."

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Hakuba Haiku:
Went to Hakuba
It rained two nights and a day
They still built a bowl

This April I got to be a part of one of annual spring snow-bowl riding fun festivals in Japan, the Holy Bowly. I met the some of the most respected bowl diggers over there, and even got to dig myself some. Well, really, I just raked -- but believe me, it was something else to witness. The whole experience really opened my eyes to an entirely new type of riding... and being.

I wasn't alone. Everyone was mad for the bowl -- all they could talk about was building their own, doing it themselves. Hakuba's holding, man. Here's proof.

On Friday, when the news that Adam Yauch passed away hit, it hit hard. For many of us, the Beastie Boys were part of the soundtrack of our adolescence -- ever present, playing in the background at parties, in videos and on the radio as we went about our daily lives. Their music is entwined in our histories, and so the loss of one of the people who made it feels very personal.

A friend told me that you could hear the Beastie Boys blasting out of apartment and car windows throughout the streets of Brooklyn this weekend. It is a beautiful image, one that I've been holding on to as I sit here with heavy heart, sifting through words unspoken, trying to pull out the right ones to say.

Adam was a friend of mine. Or I should say he was a friend of many, and I was lucky enough to be one once, back when he was a snowboarder and spending a lot of time in our world.

The articles so far have been skipping over that part. I imagine that, from the outside, the time he spent chasing snow in the mountains seems like a strange transition period between eras when he was breaking ground in hip-hop and when he was pushing to raise awareness of the Tibetan people's struggle for freedom, and probably doesn't seem that significant. And maybe it isn't.

But people like Adam live 100 lives in the span of time it takes most of us to live just one. When they go, they leave behind a lot of stories. You can't just tell the big ones. You have to tell them all, even the little stories that don't seem to mean much of anything, because details are the breadcrumb trails we follow when we're trying to find our way back to the people we've lost.

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Peter Morning/MMSAParker White and Chas Guldemond reveling in the winner take all 10 G's.

Set beneath the brightest full moon of the year, Mammoth Mountain hosted the West Coast Invitational (WCI) on Saturday night. With an entirely new format, this year's event pitted randomly chosen pairs of snowboarders and skiers against one another in a single elimination bracket. Not surprisingly, it was the duo of snowboarder Chas Guldemond and skier Parker White who laid waste to the competition's 90-foot big air jump.

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Peter Morning/MMSAScott Blum gets inverted on the 12-foot high wall ride.

The mixed sport, side-by-side action was not the only change that the WCI saw. "We moved the event from the Village up to Canyon Lodge this year to accommodate a new format," said Mammoth's Brand Content Manager Eric Meyers. "The Unbound Terrain Park crew has been moving snow for almost two weeks building a massive transfer kicker and jib park." No insignificant task considering the fifty percent below average snow pack the Sierra received this season.