It certainly seems a little odd that ESPN have held off with their Real Backcountry contest until the middle of July – when viewers are more likely to be thinking about which ice cream flavour to choose from Mr. Whippy’s than which snowboarder they should vote for in some X Games contest thingy. Maybe their thinking was that most snowboard fans will be growing more and more tired with all of the slushy summer camp edits and gagging for an actual reminder of how rad winter is, or perhaps they just shifted the date so riders could get the sort of bluebird backcountry shots that are only really possible to shoot in the spring time.

On Tuesday 16th July, parts from Travis Rice, Pat Moore, Fredi Kalbermatten, Jussi Oksanen, Mark Carter, Mikey Rencz, Mark Landvik and Andreas Wiig are set to drop and by the look of the trailer (we’ll pretend we didn’t see the cheesy ‘no lifts, no parks, no problem’ tagline…), they’re gonna be off the chain.