Saturday, 23rd of March we celebrated for the third time in history of go-shred at Crystal Ground, Kleinwalsertal I Vorarlberg. Btw this is Martin, go-shred founder writing for you.
The park is based at the bottom station of the Kanzelwandbahn, which is in the city center of Riezlern. For those who don’t know, the park exists since 2005 and will celebrate its 20-anniversary next season. So, you better mark this highlight for 2025 in your agenda. But know back to the story I wanted to share with you.
I arrived on Thursday at Kleinwalsertal and checked in at Camping Haller, which is just beside the park and mark the perfect spot for all those, who want to do camping or more precisely winter camping, close to a snowpark made by real shred heads. I arrived in the late afternoon, so the park lift was already closed, but it was still daylight so I could get myself an idea of how the setup looked like. Luckily there was still some snow left and compared to the other parks in the area, they could run the park just till we finished our event. ON POINT!!!
On Friday, during the day I meet an old friend from Stuttgart and we made a little trip to Ifen, which is a very attractive resort in terms of side hits, natural halfpipes and in general to explore the terrain. Surprisingly, there was so much snow left, that we had a wonderful day, full of fun, sun and laughers. End of the afternoon, I transported with the generative help of the owner of Camping Haller all the event stuff to the park. Mission of Friday was completed.
Saturday morning, the sun was shining and it seemed like there would be another wonderful day to run our GAME of go-shred at Crystal Ground. With the help of the park crew, the setup was pulled up in about an hour, when the first guest showed up and were ready to register. Meanwhile the weather changed. It started to rain and a little wind came up, which made it all in all not so cozy. But as you perhaps heard before, there’s no bad weather, there just bad clothing. And as the show must go on, we opened the registration and, in the end, we had 22 participants. Youngest participant was 5 years old and the oldest shredder 46 years, which shows us again: The GAME is for all ages, all kind of levels and all kind of genders.
We started the GAME at quarter past twelve, meanwhile the rain transformed into snow and the park was full of shredders who were fully into working on the different challenges. The last group finished at 15.15 and at 15.30 we’ve run the price giving ceremony. With goodies from Volcom, Stance, Giro and Salomon Snowboards we made every winner happy and with the free barbecue and drinks all the rest of the participants. Long story short, Crystal Ground is a hot spot for shred heads, where find a huge shred tradition and a traditional community which keeps the motivation high of creating regularly new setups, doing little clips and having fun together.
I want to say thank you to all the participants who showed up, all those, who are involved in park building, designing and managing and last but not least to all our partners, Volcom, Giro Snow, Salomon Snowboards and Skatehalle Innsbruck, who strongly believe in the power of the shred community.
