Summer shred scene at Copper Mountain takes Hovland Snowskates by surprise

COPPER MOUNTAIN – Imagine being a kid who loves snowboarding, and being able to get on snow in the summer at Copper Mountain Resort.

The excitement of this possibility was once thought to be unmatched in the July snowboarding scene in Summit County, until this year.

Arriving with three or four snowskates apiece, Minnesota-based Hovland Snowskates workers took the opportunity to get a session together at Copper Mountain in July, not knowing what to expect.

Copper Mountain’s summer snowboarding experience is available to kids who participate in a summer camp through Woodward, and industry teams also show up with pros to use the magic-carpet-served patch of snow to shoot videos and keep the stoke levels high for the kids.

Instead of pros, Hovland brought Bobry, ZGriff, and Dan the Wrench, a crew of locals who are proud to embrace the stereotype of snowskate bums despite the fact that they actually paid their entry fees to get in. Whenever there’s a local snowskate jam, those three are pretty much guaranteed to be there.

Hovland Snowskates owner Dan Russell said when the campers saw the snowskates and the masters of the craft, he was blown away by the stoke levels of the kids.

“They all wanted to ride snowskates,” he said.

Russell would prefer to say he was simply offering a teaching tool which is known to improve the very skills those campers were there to seek. By focusing on the binding-free version of the craft, the skills are improved once the bindings come back on. It’s a well known fact about the developing shred brain.

“I had no idea what was going on,” Russell instead offered. “Kids were buzzing around everywhere, at one point I set down my skate to take a pic and I turned around and it was gone.”

By the end of the day, when coaches started making the kids give back the skates, Russell said he had no choice but to give them away.

“The circumstances demanded it,” he said.

While Hovland Snowskates participates in some 200 events per year around the globe, no one from the company brass had never been on snow at Copper Mountain in the summer.

“I knew it would be good, just because it’s Woodward,” Russell said. “But that absolutely blew me away. What an amazing setup they have there.”