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Brothers, Jake and Joe Simpson we born in Wales but at about 10 years old their family moved out to France where they have lived since and having been brought up near the mountains found their love and talent for shredding. They’ve been part of the Route One Snowboard Team now for the past 3 years and have quickly become names known throughout the snowboarding community for their self-produced video and the fun-loving duo that are amazing to watch ride as they are to ride with! We caught up with Joe, older of the pair, to find out what they got up to last winter and you can see it in all its glory below in these 3 videos…Words by Joe Simpson:Last winter, we decided to change up our format by doing a series of videos that we released throughout the season. We wanted to do this for various reasons. Editing a video when the trips still fresh in our minds, changing up the crew we went with and the venue we went to each episode, and change the way we looked at spots. For a video part your looking for 25/30 BANGER shots for your season part, but for the series we decided to go a bit more of a cruise but creative, not worrying if the shot was gnarly enough but more if it was funky and different and if it would fit into the video. This led to a whole new way of approaching trips and scoping spots, which made COMBO what it became!We ended up filming, editing and releasing 3 COMBO edits over the winter and here they are with a brief intro from each one:COMBO 1We went to Prato Nevoso in Italy for the first trip. It’s been two winters that we’ve gone there for the first trip, and it now feels like a second home, everyone’s so welcoming over there it’s crazy. We took Kim on his first proper street trip with us, and Dusan Kriz the usual suspect in our vids for the last couple years.Honestly, sometimes it’s like we’re trying to make things harder for ourselves. First spot first trip, kinda like a filler spot more than anything, I get the shot, we pack everything up, get in the car: “ah shit I did the spot with the car keys and apartment keys in my pocket let’s go find ’em. Fast forward 40 minutes of digging through a foot of fresh snow and voila, the keys, right at the landing of the spot, classic.
COMBO 2 We went back to Italy, but a little bit further up north, because it was basically the only place with snow close to us at the time! We got Das Goose (Angus Leath) and the Nuddsinator (Andy Nudds) on the trip with us this time which was pretty surreal as we’ve been watching those dudes in videos since the beginning! Sparrow and Will joined us for the second week but they were filming for their web series, MAT£S, but it was still sick hanging out all together at night time and shit!
Sparrow smacking his head into a fence with no helmet, that was a fun one! We’d never dealt with a proper injury on a trip before (touch wood), so the whole rush to a hospital an hour one way to find out they can’t help us so drive another 1h45 back the same way to find a hospital that will see us was interesting. After dealing with it all, we weren’t sure if they had taken all of Sparrow’s details, so we did a runner! COMBO 3Well, the pandemic was smashing its way through the world so we decided to stay in our local area or Morzine, France to not get trapped anywhere we didn’t want to be! Joonas (Eloranta) the Finnish bossman joined us and it worked out really good cause we’d never filmed with him and we needed a bit of pressure to shred all the local spots that we hadn’t already done! Going filming in the forest always feels hilarious. No snow, no features, saws instead of shovels, and us thinking “what the hell are we doing do people even like watching this shit?” Ah well we’re lock down what else we gonna do? Always regret it after the 15th tomahawk because the mud really doesn’t slide very well at all, haha.
