Photos: Lucas Ouellette and Oleksander Iskat.

 It's ridiculous how much preparation goes into making Camp of Champions what it is today. This will be my fifth summer as a digger and I've always wanted to show people what kind of work goes into the construction of the park. Here's an overview of what we've been up to so far. Camp opens next weekend.

The park builders, Oleksander Iskat and Steve Petrie. Oleks builds the Highest Level park on Blackcomb in the winter. He is also the man behind the jumps in videos like Sandbox, Standard, Runway, Blank Paper, Matchstick and even Warren Miller. Having Oleks build the jumps at camp is like having Tiger Woods as your caddy. Steve Petrie, owner of Arena Snowparks, travels around world building halfpipe's, parks, boarder crosses and slope style courses. Steve will be busy as shit next year building the half pipe for the winter olympics. 

 Steve probes the snow in front of a large hip he just built, to make sure no glacial ice pops up in the middle of camp.

A view of the park after one week of pushing snow. Even though we didn't get a lot of snow this winter, the C.O.C. zone on the glacier blew in great! Tonnes of snow to work with.

 The other morning, Oleks and I had to go up to the glacier bright and early to bring up rails. The view from 7th Heaven at 6:30 a.m.

How do you bring up nearly 20 rails from the valley to the glacier in under half an hour? This guy!

Here I am waiting for the next load of rails. It takes the heli less than 10 minutes to do a round trip.

Landing the last set of rails. No better way to start a morning than standing under a helicopter.

Check out this little video of how we do it. Look at the pilot Andrew, he's got the door open, and his head out looking down at me. Insane!!!

COC Rail Delivery from john swystun on Vimeo.