Today is my second day of riding since Park City! For all of you who wonder what we snowboarders do in the “off season,” it’s this: Photo shoot, product meetings, photo shoot, photo shoot, product meetings … photo shoot! And when I say photo shoot, I mean the kind where I’m not riding!

After NYC, I went to visit K2 in Seattle for a week. The first half of the week consisted of hanging out with the K2 team and shooting seven ads for next year’s marketing in the magazines. The ads are hilarious and involved a lot of costumes, scenarios and fun (let’s just leave it at — I rode a mechanical bull).

That crew came and went, I stayed, and in came the K2 Women’s Alliance, a group of six women who cover a wide range of personalities, professions and ages who have been brought together to create the best women’s products out there. Check it out at www.k2snowboards.com. We spent our days together shooting (it would just be weird at this point if there wasn’t a photographer around!) and nitpicking every single last detail about the look, fit and performance of all of K2’s women-specific boards, boots and bindings. This is an amazing group of women, and even though we all have totally different lives and backgrounds, we all have a common love of snowboarding. And when we come together for these meetings, we have an amazing time.

Then, it was off to Santa Cruz for a mix of business and pleasure. It just so happens that Giro, my helmet sponsor, and Chris’ (my boyfriend) family are both based in Santa Cruz. So after spending the weekend enjoying the warm sun and the below freezing temperatures of the surf, I headed into Giro for product review meetings, a few photos (imagine that!) and also got started working on graphics and color ideas for my signature helmet next year! All I can say is that it’s going to be hot, so keep an eye out for it next winter!

Now I’m in Oregon with the U.S. Snowboarding Team, which brings us back to why I’ve been snowboarding for the past two days! We will be sessioning our very own 22-foot transitioned halfpipe for the next week at Hood Meadows. The weather is perfect, the pipe is perfect, and the conditions are soft. This is the best camp that the team has ever put on, so I know we’ll be seeing a lot of progression taking place all week. I’ll be sure to fill you in with pics and the latest!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 12:14 pm and is filed under gretchenbleiler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.