Ashbury demo in Bear mtn.

The reason was simple. We wanted to find snowboarding where you would least expect it. Following a year in search of shred, the Rome SDS set out this past season to look even deeper into the possibilities of snowboarding. We chased snow to the streets of Kazakhstan where snowboarding is young and on the verge of booming; we sent it to the frontier of North America and the summits of active volcanoes on Alaska’s wild Aleutian Islands; and we hit the road for a month-long road trip to experi...

After countless pitches, explanations and justifications to the Kazakh consulate about how three snowboarders were looking to ride in their streets and not the nearby Himalayas, they finally agreed to let this motley crew in. The result was something far beyond our expectations—a rail mission that became an adventure. The crew bartered with locals for a van named “Rick”, continually bribed off corrupt officials, visited the Kazakh healthcare system and fought off bums or stray cows while t...