Mount Hood is known as a place where progression is amplified and trends begin. Whether it’s double and triple corks, new rail tricks, or outerwear fashion, summer in Hood is the origin for many movements that take flight during the rest of the season.

Last year, building on a legacy that includes the longest running summer snowboard event ever, the Bonfire Pipe 2 Pipe, Bonfire/Salomon brought their team to Windells and they held the First Annual Zeach Invitational. For this week’s Take me back: Tuesday, we go back to this radical day of crooked boardslides and frontboards and get excited for summer 2012!

What is a zeach, you ask? Well, a zeach is a trick named after Zach Leach, who earned notoriety in the early 2000s for doing boardslides and frontboards crooked on rails, as you can see this camper doing in the above photo. Check out Grenade’s movies for some awesome zeaches. So, any boardslide of frontboard that isn’t perpendicular to the rail or box, is classified as a zeach. Zeaches are fun, silly tricks, because they don’t look quite as nice as locked in boardslides or frontboards.

Bonfire/Salomon team riders Scotty Arnold, Harrison Gordon, and Chris Carr put on the First Annual Zeach Invitational during Session 3 at camp last summer and everyone loved it! Zeaches are so fun to do, and the set up was a mellow flat box, so campers of all ability levels were able to get in on the zeaching. Campers that had never done a zeach before got to learn from the best, and campers that were zeach-familiar started doing combos and presses–the event probably saw more zeaches happen at one time than ever before.

Thank you to Scotty, Harrison, Chris, and Bonfire/Salomon for once again creating something new and fun at Windells!

 

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