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Sixty-four-year-old Chuck Janisse can boardslide a box both frontside and backside, never mind 50-50--which, for the uninitiated, is one of the first things you learn to do on a box. It involves sliding straight with the board or skis aligned parallel to the feature.

It was at a freestyle clinic at Killington Resort in Vermont, after clinician Bill Spaulding had elicited teaching tips to be used for the whole range of learning preferences (thinkers, watchers, feelers, and doers), that Janisse jumped on the box and pulled off a frontside boardslide (body facing up the hill and board perpendicular to the feature) before stomping the landing like it was nothing.

A motley crew of instructors, we ranged from ages 18 to 64, 2-year to 25-year veterans of the sport, "sick" park riders to timid newbies--and Chuck had just upped the ante for us all.

"For some reason I have this facility with rails," says the sexagenarian. After re-embracing an old passion and becoming a snowboard instructor two years ago, he signed up for AASI-E's "Old Farts" Park and Pipe Clinic, which has since been renamed to the more politically correct "Low Key It." In the capable hands of AASI clinicians, he was surprised at how easily park skills came to him.

Snowboarding is not always easy. For instructors who like to push themselves, it's usually a challenge. And sometimes, it can be downright scary.

If I were to pick one term to describe my first run at the 2008 Rider Rally, held April 20-25 at Mammoth Mountain, California, scary is it. The last stretch of the Panorama gondola ride is breathtakingly high, and if that weren't enough to take one's breath away, the steep, impenetrable boiler plate on Cornice Bowl certainly was. Fortunate was the rider with a finely tuned edge; less fortunate were the rest of us.

March 15th-16th turned out to be another weekend of variable Vermont weather as Killington Resort played host to the final stop of the 2007-08 Chevy Grand Prix following contests at Breckenridge and Tamarack earlier in the season. Featuring halfpipe and slopestyle competitions, an overall tour purse of $300,000, and a Chevy Avalanche for each of the tour winners, the Grand Prix drew riders from the USA and abroad including contenders for the 2010 Olympics. The event also made Killington history as one of the biggest snowboarding competitions the mountain has ever hosted.

A long list of instructors signed up to work as slippers, starters, security, and hospitality. A few even labored into the night setting up flood lights on the new Superpipe, an 18-foot tall, 440-foot-long beauty that everyone was dying to hit. In the process, they got to see the event through from practices and qualifiers to finals, mingling (and sometimes riding) with the competitors, and gaining an appreciation for life on the pro circuit.

Encouraged by my boss--eastern division AASI examiner and development team member John Hobbs--I spent three days traipsing around investigating what the Grand Prix has to do with snowboard instruction.

On Sunday, January 28th, the skies opened and dropped five inches of fresh snow on the ill-fated June Mountain, which would close for the season by the end of the day. The slopes were packed with school groups floundering happily in the powder. Local poachers ducked furtively in and out of the trees, quickly shredding up the new snow along with the bases of their boards. The weekend would prove to be one of the busiest of the short and bittersweet season.