After months of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Kevin Pearce, Olympic snowboarding hopeful who was critically injured during a December halfpipe accident in a Park City, Utah, has finally returned home to his family in Norwich, VT.

“Pearce walks without assistance, a little gingerly but sturdily enough to navigate the stairs to the familiar bedroom in the barn. He looks a little different now, too. His hair, after being shaved to one length, has grown back to the top of his ears. He wears bold, dark-rimmed Oakley Frogskin frames with prismlike lenses,” reports John Branch of The New York Times.

“‘There is little use thinking about the past, what could have been, or what may be in the future,’ Simon Pearce, his father, said. ‘He has stayed focused on the present moment. And it feels like it is working.’”

Vermont’s Sugarbush ski resort is looking for ways to deepen its on-mountain adventure experiences, offering cat-access skiing, in addition to camps and clinics focused on snow evaluation, shelter building, and backcountry rescue and first aid.

“‘People want and respond to new adventures,’ said Win Smith, the owner of Sugarbush. ‘So, yes, the snow and the terrain is your essential core appeal, but you see people’s eyes light up when you offer something unexpected.’” Bill Pennington of The New York Times reports.

As the nation’s top halfpipe snowboarders were greeted by President Obama at the White House last Wednesday to celebrate America’s recent success at the Vancouver Olympics, Christina Crapanzano of Time wonders about the “extreme risks” being pursued on-mountain, the eroding “esprit de corps,” and the “seemingly endless dollars being spent.”

“The pace of change quickened last year when leading halfpipe snowboarders, with the assistance of corporate sponsors, sought new equipment to break performance barriers and set a new bar in the sport.”

“‘It has gone from being something that was just fun to do to it being something that has life or death consequences,’ said two-time snowboard cross gold medalist Seth Wescott.”

Terrain Parks–winter playgrounds for younger rail-riding, half-piping skiers and snowboarders–have slowly worked their way into the ski resort zeitgeist, offering opportunities to build upon aging demographics, and also ways to “shrewdly” design ramps, jumps, boxes, rainbows, and rails “that segregate the populace, although not necessarily in an overbearing way.” Keep the snow tribes apart, and keep them happy.

But to feed the economic and cultural on-mountain continuum “resorts have to find ways to nurture park beginners so that they will progress to an advanced level. This is good business: no one will keep at a snow sport without becoming at least somewhat proficient. So operators need a large, experienced park tribe to justify the cost of building and maintaining the complicated, outsize terrain parks now common at large resorts.” Bill Pennington of The New York Times reports.

Christopher Solomon of National Geographic Adventure spends a few weeks exploring Norway’s Lofoten Islands–a “70-mile-long archipelago built from some of the oldest rock on Earth”–in search of untrammeled telemark terrain, the Norwegian’s “self-effacing,” but self-reliant, spirit, and easier ways to navigate amongst the country’s mostly remote alpine ski resorts.

“[F]or all its domestic popularity, skiing in Norway has historically drawn few outside visitors. Part of the reason for this is simple geography. Norway is all mountains and water, a pinched spine of peaks fissured with deep fjords. And while this should be a skier’s dream, it can make getting from one ski resort to another a logistical migraine.”

Travis Rice, professional snowboarder from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, talks with Nate Deschenes of Snowboard Magazine about camping in Glacier Bay National Park for 25 days, his latest film project Neverland, and the risks and rewards of exploring Alaska’s backcountry.

“Honestly, the craziest part of it all was the hiking and stuff that you are under without your board on. Clawing your way up chutes and climbing around crags and stuff was WAY scarier than the actual riding, that’s for sure. So that was a big part of the trip, the hiking aspect. But it was a great experience. Being on a slope for two hours versus just getting dropped off on top and riding something for a few minutes was really cool. It’s such a longer experience.”

Produced by Absinthe Films

Inside The Timberline Lodge

Built in 1937 as a Depression-era “jobs project” for nearly $1 million dollars, Oregon’s Timberline Lodge at the base of Mount Hood has been a site for iconic movie sets–like The Shining and All the Young Men, remains an epicenter for skiing and snowboarding enthusiasts (spawning the popular High Cascade Snowboard Camp), and has been home for the Kohnstamm family for nearly a half century.

“‘There are museum aspects of this place, and I suppose the government could say, ‘let’s make it into a museum and have ropes and glass and charge admission,’ but we’d rather it be a ski lodge than a museum,’” owner Jeff Kohnstamm tells Thom Patterson of CNN.

“Since its birth in the late 1930s as a New Deal project to create hundreds of jobs for Portland workers, craftsmen and artisans, Timberline has dug out its own place in American culture.”

photo credit: K. Kendall

Photographer/noboarder (snowboarding without bindings) Jenna Low’s slideshow submitted to Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine’s photo face-off. KMC describes Jenna’s documentary work this way: “She lives up in the tiny outpost settlement of Trout Lake, where noboarders inhabit turn of the century hotels and shred some of the deepest, character-laden powder in the Kootenays.”

Produced by Mitchell Scott

Burton Snowboards has decided to close U.S. board production operations–located in Burlington, Vermont for nearly three decades–and transition its remaining production to Austria. CEO Laurent Potdevin cited  “labor costs,” “real estate and utility expenses,” and “health care benefits” as key factors in determining the decision.

“‘When I started Burton Snowboards in 1977, all we did was make snowboards in Vermont. … We’ve excelled at prototyping and developing product in Vermont, which is why all four Burton Olympic halfpipe medals were won on snowboards coming out of our local factory,’ [Founder Jake Burton] said in a written statement. ‘But simply put, it costs us significantly more to produce a board in Vermont than we are capable of selling it for, and sadly, this is not sustainable in the current economy,’” reports Dan Mclean of The Burlington Free Press.

photo credit: Nevada Tumbleweed

David Page of Men’s Journal articulates the wonders and hard work required in scaling Telescope Peak, Death Valley’s tallest mountain, with his brother-in-law and a handful of big-mountain skiers:

“We’ve been at it for five hours already, eight tiny specks, skis on our backs climbing up and out of the desert in the dark, on the scantest of game trails. We’ve watched the moon rise and the distant glow of Vegas 100 miles away give way to the dawn. We’ve had blood drawn by the local flora. We’re nowhere near the halfway mark, and yet we’re exactly where we want to be: on our way to ski something that none of us—and who knows, maybe no one in the world—has ever skied.”