When Momentum Camps owner and director John Smart got the go-ahead to return to the Horstman Glacier to run his annual ski and snowboard camps, he wasn’t sure what to expect.
After being in business for 29 years before the pandemic shut them down for two, Smart thought he might see a bit of a drop in registration numbers as the camps started to gain traction again.
However, that wasn’t the case, and 2022 is on pace to be Momentum’s best year yet, with 900 different campers expected across the five-week camp schedule.
“It’s been kind of a shocker at the same time that it’s awesome. The shocker being realizing how much is involved in what we do up here,” Smart said, adding that after two years off, getting up to speed posed a challenge—not to mention the added pressure of hosting the most campers Momentum has seen in its 31 years.
“That brings us to a new level of operation where we’ve got to be more on our game,” he said. “But the best part is just seeing how stoked everyone is up there.”
With elite coaching including Olympic medallists like slopestyle skiers Alex Hall (gold in 2022) and Joss Christensen (gold in 2014), among many others, equipment like trampolines and landing bags set up on snow, and the ability to run camps deep into the summer, Momentum Camps offer athletes a unique chance to improve their skills—one not many other places in North America can.
“We are training from grassroots all the way up to the national team and we have an environment that is so user-friendly and so safe for learning,” Smart said.
“To have a landing bag on snow, right beside a snow jump, they can learn their first double flips on the bag, then take them to snow right away, super fast. It’s just a turnkey operation in that sense, they’re not waiting another day or week or until next year. They turn it right around.”
Initially geared specifically towards skiers, Momentum Camps opened up for snowboarders in 2019 and has since welcomed many members of Canada’s snowboard National Team.
Last week, National Team member and Whistler local Juliette Pelchat attended one of Momentum’s camps for the first time, and said she couldn’t have been more impressed with her experience.
“It is a really sick setup. They know what’s going on. They’ve got some features for everybody. And it’s open to everybody of any ability and I think it’s a pretty sick vibe up there,” she said.
“I did do a few glacier things in the past, although this is a pretty different vibe, which is really cool to see and I am stoked to be up there and to just have another training opportunity for me in my snowboarding. I’m really lucky to be riding in the summer, super fortunate. But yeah, I’ve just been working on progressing, having fun on my snowboard and getting better.”
With just a couple more weeks of this year’s camps still to come, Smart said the best case scenario for the rest of the year is to just keep the momentum going.
“My biggest priority is keeping everyone safe, and making sure that everyone’s stoked. Best case scenario is just good weather, [but] not too hot. We want that glacier to last longer and kids to be fully stoked right to the end and leave with big smiles,” he said.
“And we look forward to the winters staying cold and lots of snow on the glacier like we had. Hopefully we keep this going for a number of more years, because it’s rare. There’s only a couple places you can do it in North America and it’s becoming more and more valuable because there’s less places that you can do it.”
