Here at ACM, we are proper board sports history geeks. So it was with no small measure of chin-stroking delight that I found myself in Vail’s Colorado Ski Museum (skimuseum.net) the other night. The place tells the story of skiing in Colorado, but also has a section dedicated to the history of snowboarding, and what [...]
Tourist boards have a pretty cool job: they have to make their destination look so good you’ll instantly book a holiday there. Early attempts were simple, beautiful poster images, that are still highly prized. The recipe seemed too easy to mess up: get a creative agency in to use their best artists and typesetters to [...]
Tuaca Men’s Longboard final Relentless Energy Drink Boardmasters 2011 from Boardmasters TV on Vimeo. I just got back from Boardmasters in Newquay. It was the usual carnage – late nights, old friends, and a stay at the swanky four star Headland Hotel (thanks Vans and Canoe pals for that one). The best bit for me [...]
This has nothing to do with action sports (or adventure travel), but Werner Herzog’s new documentary about the lost cave paintings of Chauvet in France sounds amazing. Discovered in 1994, Chauvet contains the earliest known cave paintings – hundreds of artworks dating from around 32,000 years ago. This site is so fragile that tourist are [...]
It was Kelly Slater who first informed me of the giant swell that was about to hit the Fijian island of Tavarua. By Twitter (his handle is @kellyslater), in fact, when he announced that instead of travelling to South Africa to compete in the Billabong Pro in Jeffries Bay, he was going to chase a [...]
Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo. The tourist promotional video is one of the oldest tricks in the film case. Get it right and the tourists come thick and fast, spending their hard earned tourist dollars with reckless abandon. Get it wrong and a country’s reputation is besmirched and government money [...]
In this recent blog my colleague Ben Mondy wrote about how we get bombarded by PRs looking to get mainstream coverage for their one-off event, or mid-level athlete who happens to be in Britain. Ben pointed out that for many action sports brands – or adventure travel brands – trying to get column inches using [...]
PURE BRONTE from Marcus O'Brien on Vimeo. Homesickness is a funny thing. Hard to describe, harder to capture. It’s a constant nag that tugs away as an unrelenting background force. Watching this video, though, sure brought the abstract pang of homesickness into short, sharp focus. As background, last week saw a seven day run of [...]
I’m heading out to Tignes next week for the Euro Winter X-Games. It promises to be the usual snowboarding circus, with the entire Euro industry seemingly decamping to the resort for the week. A project run by our friends over at Made Up (www.thisismadeup.co.uk) promises to be far more interesting however, and it is that [...]
Just got back from three days in La Thuile (thanks Aosta Valley and Crystal for that one), to write a story for the Evening Standard. I don’t think I have seen the Alps this bare at this time of year since 2003, and the heliboarding trip we were supposed to do was canned because of [...]