A few weeks ago I was invited to a North Face athlete summit in Schmidts back yard! Even after all I've been through the past few years I was still so excited that I would get to hang out with Scot Schmidt again! I know, Im a huge dork.

My adventure started with an early departure from Kings Beach on my way to Oakland to pick up fellow team mate Rob Kingwill along my way. We arrived to the site just in time for the group bike ride Zellers had planned. It had been pouring the whole drive and Kinger and I had been wondering if this ride was still going to happen. I'm not sure why we questioned if it would happen, it was a Zellers trip! Of course it would go down! After a few miles of climbing in the rain and some epic DH with some carnage of course it turned out being one of the best rides I'd ever had!

Back to Schmidts, just in time for the rain to stop. This place was amazing! He had set up a teepi, leveled out some ground for a camp fire and set it all up for us.

The RD&D team, myself and the rest of the athletes spent hours around this camp fire discussing new ideas and getting to now some of the new team mates. It was great to meet a few vets that had been around as well as some of the new X games athletes. Mike Riddle, Kaitlin Farrington and Nick Martini had recently joined the North Face crew!

We were all asked by the desing crew to come up with inspiration boards or songs or anything that we found inspired us. Kaitlin, Ingrid and I had the boards along with a few of the other guys. However some of the guys like Sage, Dave Short and Kinger took it to a whole new level. They had a lot of interesting things to say. I have to admit though I wasn't able to follow the whole time.

At  night the party started, after having an amazing meal cooked by my favortite chef Billy, who also happens to be the owner of Dragon Fly the restaurant in old town Truckee things got interesting. I'll just leave it at that. Ha, it was a great time. A few of Schmidts friends were awesome enough to play some music for us as well!

It was another great North Face camping trip, with great people and great food! And it would'nt of happened without the help of Zellers and the man who invented the color yellow, Scot Schmidt!

Thanks guys!