This summer Burton decided to switch up their event roster and instead of hosting their usual New Zealand Open (a regular Open series contest) they hosted a new kind of event. The Burton High Fives was a team snowboarding event with a bunch of off hill activities like jet boating, winter driving, archery, ATV racing, skeet shooting, knife throwing and few other things that you can only get away with in New Zealand.


Team selection party with helicopter rides and fly bys. Welcome to New Zealand Mate.

Since snowboarding isn’t exactly a team sport it was really fun to add that element to a contest especially since I was one of the team captains and got to pick my team. Here’s how it worked, the top 6 men and top 6 women on the TTR rankings were named team captains and then we had to select two women and two men, one whom was a rookie to compete in each of the off hill events and of course pipe or slope or both. I picked a pretty heavy pipe team, Scotty Lago, Roger Klivedal, Kaitlyn Farrington and Kyle Mack.

Once the teams were picked we had to decide who would do which off hill event and for my team, named the Low Fives, we were pretty stacked. Scotty’s a hunter so naturally he competed in the archery and skeet shooting. Kaitlyn owns two MINIs and has been driving in Idaho snow since she was 15, so she did the MINI Winter Driving Challenge and Roger is a gnarly Norwegian driver so he also did that (fastest time). I have my captains license and grew up on boats so I raced the Jet Boats and Kyle Mack rallied the ATV.


Kaitlin getting a little push from Roger, Scotty and I.


Kaitlyn speeding home for the win

We ended up winning nearly every challenge and then Kaitlyn and I took first and third in pipe and Scotty got 6th so we ended up winning the whole event and having the most fun ever at a snowboard contest. Not a bad way to kick off the 2012-2013 contest series. Can’t wait for next year’s event!


Kyle Mack warms up for the knife throwing contest.


We got to rally around in this Dune Buggy ATV car. So much fun!


Oh yeah we did a little bit of this too. Snowpark NZ