Bomb Hole Does High Cascade Words & Photos
There was a day back in December when Chris texted our work group chat to tell us that we had bought a limo. Said group chat is comprised of me (general manager), Danny (shipping guy), Drake (graphic designer), Silk (editor), and Holden (social media man). Everyone was responding as if it were a Christmas Miracle, but honestly, I didn't get it. Uh, a limo? Maybe bump my salary instead.
Fast forward four months or so… “We’re taking The Limo to Mt. Hood,” Chris told us. “Team bonding.”
And she (The Limo) has become our spiritual guide. Her government name is Soft Log but I like to just refer to her as The Limo; it feels more dignified. (I don’t think our crew would agree with my calling The Limo a she, but I’m the one writing, so I’m claiming her as a she, suckers.) Anyway, the answer to team bonding is always yes, because while we’re all coworkers, we also all love each other, so we took The Limo to Hood.
Bomb Hole week at High Cascade happened to align with Capita week, so to everyone’s delight, we teamed up. We, as office dogs, love to skateboard and snowboard but admittedly, as office dogs, it’s probably nothing that anyone would want to watch on a screen. (We tend to shine in the golf, art, music, fashion departments. We’re well-rounded.) So we took Austin Vizz and Benny Milam on the road with us, and thank god we did, because Benny and Vizz are awesome to hang out with and they’re also really good at what they do, which made it fun for us and also easy.
We got our coffees and hit the old American highway.
The first stop was Idaho – skateboarding at Glenns Ferry and Rhodes and Chris’s friends backyard, making chalk art, getting pizza, swimming, and camping. A quintessential summer road trip. Each car (we had four) was communicating via walkie talkie to coordinate bathroom and snack breaks because, true to our road trip mantra, ducks fly together. I liked the walkie talkies.
We arrived to Oregon the next afternoon, skated Hood River, then settled in. The next five days were a rosy glow of snowboarding and summer camp activities. We filmed our friends doing awesome tricks and we even did some tricks ourselves. I’ll list some of the highlights:
1. A 12-year-old driving the limo. She was fantastic
2. The carnage of the Capita shotgun race (shotgun a beer then run through the woods to be the first to find the Capita snowboard, hilarious)
3. Adult camp kickball and Danny’s Sports Center Top 10 catch
4. Meeting campers and people who listen to The Bomb Hole (thank you so much, we love you, meeting you is so special)
As for the snowboarding and skateboarding highlights, well, you’ll have to wait for the video to see those.
People think Mount Hood is amazing enough just standing there like that, with its big trees and waterfalls and huckleberry milkshakes, and they’re right… but you can find the find the real spirit of the place within the people… if you look carefully beyond the unrelenting decision makers, the jaded shit talkers, the ski racers, and into the parking lot hang at the end of the day or the twinkle in the eye of the adult campers when they learn their first trick.
On the final night, Chris, Finder, Holden, and I were eating dinner at Koya Kitchen in the silver evening light, enjoying saucey noodles and each other’s company. They were talking about the impossibility of quantifying the equity capital of a snowboarder or something like that, and I finally begun to understand why we bought a limo.
So Chris and I drove to the coast, and Danny, Drake, and Silk drove The Limo back to the motherland, and we all had a pocketful of inside jokes to bring back to the office for when the fall starts and snowboarding (work) picks back up again.
Thanks High Cascade, Capita, Union, Sun Bum, campers, staff, everyone who was awesome and excited and hung out.
And none for you Timberline.