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A project thinger I did for class. Something about infographics I think… Used my Wacom tablet for the first time in months. It’s sorta funny I guess…

So, the guys down at Summit must have realized how much Wild Mountain’s King of the Hill Shop Wars sucked, especially for skiers, because they ripped the idea off pretty hard to create Crew Wars. Shop Wars let us [Team Ski Hut] take two runs as a team per round and there were absolutely NO prizes to be had for us, the winners, or swag to throw out for any of the competitors. Us skiers sat around for two hours while snowboarders lapped the course in a jam format that we definitely didn’t get. Lame.

Summit’s shop team was conspicuously absent at Shop Wars, not that they missed out on anything. Instead, they put on a Star Wars themed comp open to ski crews, snowboard crews, and even mixed crews. 15 crews were registered, and a quick number crunch told us that we’d be up against 80 or more other people.

Practice was absolutely nuts with every crew trying to get hits in before the first heat. The action was slimmed down a bit with four crews taking the backyard park at a time in 20 minute heats. We took Team Tinga’s Hats all the way to the third and final round, going up against the snowboard crew from our first round heat that qualified alongside us.

After an indecisive final, they made us hike up for a final hit to decide the winner. Basically, we could have taken one run instead of going balls out the whole night, awesome! In the spirit of X Games, someone decided to implement an even more indecisive method of judging than txt to vote. The crowd cheered and yelled in a loudness match to decide the winner, rap battle style, until we were declared the winners.

I’ve seen blood drawn over skate decks thrown out in product tosses. I thought it was pure insanity to throw out a snowboard AND a pair of skis. Needless to say, it was messy. Summit threw another great event in their backyard park, fun times and excessive amounts of RedBull were had by all.

We walked away with a big backpack full of stuff and a lightsaber that Summit reportedly spent $150 on on eBay. It makes cool noises and stuff.

I spent the last three weeks living on couches in Breckenridge, how you say, ‘living the life?’ Me and trip buddy Tony Seyffer met up with fellow Minnesotan Andrew Featherstone and embarked on many a ski adventure.

A merciful [pitiful] four inch overnight snow at A Basin was one of only two powder [yawn] days we got over the course of our month long vacation. Whatever fell got windblown into the trees on the main face. For two days we skied probably 10% of the sad 30% of open terrain. What followed the temporary clouds and flakes was probably two weeks of straight sunshine and calm skies, which produced many a productive park film day.

We bounced back and forth between the parks of Breckenridge and Keystone getting clips with Minnesota native Jake Strassman on most days, and messing around with my camera on the down ones. The Christmas crowds were dreadful [suicide inducing] and left us hiking a handful of rails at Breck for the better part of the week. Sometime in the last week of our trip, the park finally got some rail flow and was a bit more fun.

Our first day at Keystone left us scratching our heads. The medium jumps could have been from Minnesota: they were flat in every way. There was ice everywhere, and the majority of the rails and boxes were in the, ‘barely long enough to be in a real park’ category. There were definitely some creative and unique features built though which made it worth lapping. The features were clearly skatepark influenced, and involved a lot of trannies and technical jibs, in my opinion, the direction parks should start going in. They were the best features I had ever skied, not because the jump was xxx amount of feet big, or because the rail had a xx foot gap onto it, or x number of kinks, but because you had to sit there and think, how do I ride this?

I feel like a lot of my best ideas come to me in fast food establishments. Something about grease and plastic chairs just really puts me in the mindset, and I’m sure many people are also the same way. It was about 9pm, and Featherstone was paging through a paper and came upon an ad for the Ullrfest parade on Mainstreet in Breckenridge. Wouldn’t it be funny if we turned Featherstone’s Buick into a parade float? Ha, let’s duct tape all our skis [LINE Skis] to his car. That’s literally how it happened. We were in Walmart 10 minutes later buying decorations [that we returned after the parade] and finished decorating the float in a gas station parking lot half an hour before the parade start the next day.. How does it feel to ride through a street with a couple thousand [inebriated] people chanting PBR at you? Pretty cool to say the least.

We were tipped off about these free dinner nights by a friend. A couple churches put them on every Sunday and Tuesday. We attended three of them and they were the best meals we ate on the entire trip, spaghetti, roast, chili, delicious. They didn’t even ask me if I had accepted Jesus as my savior, just if I had found a job yet.

We Headed back to Denver a couple nights early for our flight back home with the intent on checking out the Ruby Hill Railyard. Winter Park operates it next to a sledding hill. They’ve got a three foot base, seven boxes and rails, and a volunteer park crew. The best part, its free. We were skeptical, it was in the 60s in Denver and we had little recon of the place. It turned into one of the most fun sessions of the trip. Hiking at 11,000 feet in the mountains is murderous compared to sitting comfortably at sea level back in the land of flat. Getting back down to 5,000 was an amazing feeling. The Railyard has some great features and amazing lights. We’ll be coming back for sure.

Skiing in Summit county for three weeks was an enlightening experience for me. Being my first real ‘out west’ experience, (I’m not counting glacier skiing at Mt. Hood) I had absorbed all the hype and was expecting perfection. I encountered a horde of high class tourists, long lines every day, massive commercialization, and a loss of feeling. I was happiest at Arapahoe, a resort that reminded me of the Midwest, a resort where you noticed how beautiful the mountains were instead of how absolutely retarded human beings are who pay $32 for lunch. Breckenridge made me really appreciate who I was as a skier and where I was from. That said, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, an unforgettable 21 days of amazing skiing, awful sleep, crappy food, worse water, and good friends.

Enjoy episode 7, 18 minutes of content.

Reunion 3. Our annual Christmas Eve sesh at Hyland. It’s supposed to be a big day for us to film and hang out in an empty park while all the kids are home with their families. The tradition might be dead now with just four of us old friends left. We skied a park that was as busy as ever. It had snowed probably about a foot the previous night and was still coming down, leaving conditions in the park piss poor. The name ‘Reunion’ really meant something this year. None of us call Hyland our home hill anymore, and all live in different cities. We didn’t get the best shots or do the best tricks, but we did get to ski together as a crew again and remember good times.

Summit Boardshop runs a damn good competition. The 2nd qualifier rail jam went down at Afton Alps with an hour long jam format. Couldn’t ask for a more chill vibe than hiking a few rails with all your friends.

January 27th, about 11pm, the mood is panic. Myself and fellow LINE MC Tony Seyffer are in a bit of a pickle. We are to fly out from Minneapolis in eight hours, and despite knowing dozens of people in the Denver or Summit County area, we have no ride from the airport. Reaching desperation, mentor/life coach Bill Hickey tells me to hitchhike to Summit County via Newschoolers.com. See thread. Approximately 45 minutes later, we have a generous Newschooler lined up to pick us up. Fearing the worst, including abduction, rape, death by axemurderer and the prospect of performing… favors… we got in the car. Turns out he was a way rad dude and we shredded with him at Breck the rest of the day. Newschoolers FTW.

We’ll be in Breck for two more weeks, filming and bumming on couches. Not too bad of a first trip out west, eh?

LINE Midwest Goes Outwest edit, coming soon. Here’s episode 6.

The past couple weeks have been mostly uneventful. Our local hill, Spirit Mountain failed to open with any semblance of a park despite all the begging we did. Most, if not all the hills around here have opened with several rails for all to enjoy. Spirit cited a ‘lack of space’ for their continued shortcomings. A funny, poignant, and poorly illustrated diagram of the dimensions of a modest rail was posted on their Facebook page in response. A few days after opening a small jib park, featuring two boxes and couple… things… that said Damage Boardshop on them, two more boxes were dug in. Sick right? Well, yeah, the placement of them was… interesting to say the least. The new boxes were dug in in a line on the main run. What happened to lack of space and trying to create a safe environment for all kinds of riders? This just in, Spirit Mountain management may or may not consist of cute little primates that may or may not also have feces in their hands with the intent to throw.

You can’t hate on Spirit too much though, apparently their blower water doesn’t draw from their own reservoir, but from the West side’s city water. Spirit isn’t too high on the totem pole for water priority apparently; they’ve been getting cut off at whim the past couple weeks which means they haven’t been able to blow at capacity which then translates to the main park opening being delayed even longer.

All this means that i’ve been hiking a 12 or 15 foot flat box at a slight downward angle for 11 consecutive days. Bangin.

You ever buy big variety bags of candy? Or course you do, because 1. EVERYONE loves candy, and 2. there’s like lots of different kinds of candy in variety bags. Point is, when all is said and done, you always end up with a big pile of the crappy candy or the crappy flavors. Which brings me to chocolate Dum Dums. Delicious and chocolate are two words I would NOT use to describe chocolate Dum Dums. The only person in the world that eats these damn things is probably the same guy who actually likes candy corn.

I’m going to tie this into skiing by using a 300 count bag of Dum Dums as a metaphor for ski event product tosses and raffles. At some such events, you may have at one point wondered why all the swag you and your friends got… sucks. You know, T-shirts in size XS, ugly gloves, the cheap kind of stickers that still come on sheets, water bottles, gaper series goggles, skis under 150cm, and snowboards over 160cm with butcher and pig cut graphics, one of which my room Tinga is in possession of. Maybe its late in the season and reps have already given away all the good swag, or they think your event isn’t that cool but would feel bad if they didn’t toss you a bone, or the riders have already gotten first dibs. Truth is, the good swag has always already been picked over by the riders, given away already, and your event is in fact, pretty lame, and that is why swag is free. It takes up space, its cheap, and nobody wants it, just like chocolate flavored Dum Dums.

Just kidding, I love crappy free swag. I’m going to have a contest, first person to comment on this post gets at least 50 chocolate Dum Dums, free.

Oh City of Duluth, you guys are so cool. On the first legitimate day of snowfall of the winter, the Minnesota Department of Transportation is caught with their pants stuck around their ankles and their asses in the air. I can still see grass somehow and the roads are completely unplowed. I don’t think anyone is really surprised though, after all, this is the city that could barely afford to salt the roads last winter. I think we got just sand for three months. It’s quite amazing how in a city that gets snow and is built on a steep hill with god-awful roads, there still exist residents that completely suck at driving. They are especially bad at driving uphill. No, you are not going to make it up 21st Ave at 10mph in your front wheel drive piece of suck and you certainly aren’t going to do it if you can’t drive in a straight line up the wheel well. This is a giant hill that has not been plowed, salted, sanded, or otherwise prepared to accept your preferred method of retard.

Idiot drivers aside, its finally snowing. Yesterday I had resigned myself to thinking we had gotten shafted again. The storm had missed us entirely and was instead dumping snow on the Twin Cities, two hours south of us. I’m an experienced Minnesota skier, so I knew low expectations were the key to happiness. It’s better to be surprised by any snow at all than to suffer the severe morningwoodbonerkill of getting a fraction of what you were told. It’s still snowing in the cities and the seven day forecast for Duluth is straight snow. Thanks mother nature for the pity snow, we needed it.

Plans will need to be made for this snow. Perhaps front country shenanigans, maybe some handrails. I might consider just giving up on that whole skiing thing and staying inside where it isn’t below zero to watch the complete fourth season of Nip/Tuck with Tinga of Tinga’s Hats. No homo. A trip to the twin cities isn’t out of the question either. The ideas are rolling now that it not only feels, but looks like winter. Pretty much stoked out of my mind to start filming for Circle Episode 5!

So today, bored in class, trying to filter out the bull that is my design education, I googled myself. It could be a testament to how much I love myself, but I’m just going to write it off as normal behavior.

One of the first things google dug up was the Circle trailer I put out last spring that was re-upped on Zapiks. Zapiks is a French action sports video site I’m pretty sure, so it was cool to see MN making its way to Europe. God only knows however, why the good intentioned Frenchman neglected to copy-paste the copy and credit I had written, and instead butchered our names. Definitely cool though, my joke KOS is re-upped alongside a ton of way more banger edits.

I found this blog when googling MN NICE. Me and Daveb did a killer job on that newschoolers writeup eh? I agree with the author, if our video didn’t get you stoked on the Midwest, get out!

Here is another NICE re-up to Switzerland’s FreestyleTV.

Every once in a while I’ll go through the referrer’s list on my Vimeo videos to see if any of the edits go viral. Reunion II was dug up on this Japanese site with almost a thousand hits. The same goes for my 2009 Season Edit was posted on alltheski, a Spanish freeski site. It’s cool, and maybe a little funny to read barely coherent google translations of foreign skiers talking about my knees. I won’t post them here, but there’s always a bunch of MySpace page links on my referrers list too. Over time though, most of the referrer links get broken. I traced one of my 2008 videos to this, I presume, Russian ski site, HVTEAM.

My main man Skier Steve posted the NICE teaser on Skeptic. Rollerblade forums are kinda quiet. It was interesting to read what responses did show up though. It’s kinda funny that out there, there exists some booters that hate on skiing like most skiers hate on rollers.

I’m sure if I was more bored, I could keep digging, but class is over. A while ago I came to realize that your video has no hope of making it anywhere on the internet without viral reposting. You can plant the seed and spread your content in as many different places as possible, but unless you bite the bullet and shamelessly whore your edit out, you better hope someone thinks your stuff is cool enough to show. Without that, you can rest assured no one except your friends and a couple hundred strangers will ever know.

If your buddy just made a sick edit, do him a favor, repost it, link to it, like it, dig it, tag it (EMPHASIS ON TAGGING, IT’S IMPORTANT!), get viral.

Fall brings a certain anxiety for skiers. We start putting on our new outerwear to watch TV in the living room. We creep resort webcams and compulsively refresh the weather.com 10 day forecast. Everyone has their own preseason rituals. Here in the midwest, the one we all share is the wait for the temperatures to dip below that magical, almost unreachable number, 32.

This season, we were kept waiting a little longer than usual. The weather phenomenon el nino has proverbially screwed us in the ass, leaving minnesota skiers wondering if it was ever going to get cold. Mother nature at last felt a shred of pity for our time and again crapped on region. The midwest has always been forgotten. It’s always East and West, or rather West and East. Spoiled, elitist, and ungrateful west coast skiers looking down on the sad, rain sodden, east coasters that need more attention and sympathy.

Somewhere in the middle, between them, with no actual mountains to speak of, is the midwest. Here in the midwest you find a group of skiers who call two inch dusting of white fluff a blessing. All we know and live are hole in the ground excuses for ski resorts that would struggle to make an old man’s thighs burn. A season starting a month late is a slap in the face from the snow gods who already don’t care about us.

I’d rather not think about what kind of season we are in for at the moment. As of right now, we’re in a state of barely winter, and I’m content with that.

This episode should have gone up 3 weeks ago. Last year, Wild Mountain opened October 26th or 27th. They opened instead on November 15th because of the unusual warm weather. It’s an el Nino year and cold temps are still having trouble staying as we get closer and closer to December.

Shop Wars is a competition Wild does every year. Shops pit their teams against each other in a big rail jam and it’s a ton of fun. Its postponed now til December 20th. Pray for snow.