We Dig Dark Park | We Are Mental Meetup

Historically, mental-health discourse has been stigmatized. Recent years have seen an influx in our greater ability to talk about mental health in a, well, healthy way. A few individuals, such as Laura Rogoski at We're All Mental, are leading the charge in normalizing important conversations about mental wellbeing within the snowboard community. 

Laura recently hosted 'We Dig Dark Park', a mental-health focused weekend-long event that centralizes around learning new skills, building new connections and strengthening existing friendships. 

The daily schedule was inclusive, and started each day off with a pre-build workshop where people had the chance to write down a personal goal, a riding goal, and a social goal for the day. Novice shapers were paired with senior shapers and the day began. Questions encouraged, everyone left with more than when they arrived. An impressive 40 person turn-out on day one smashed the previous two year turnouts, and set the stage for a bright future.

Check the recap video below, filmed and edited by Kirsten Potts.

More events like this in snowboarding, please! Shoutout to everyone putting time and energy into their local snowboard community, despite the lack of funding. We encourage you to head to @_were_all_mental on instagram if you're interested in following along with Laura's future endeavours!

All photography by Anna Burch.