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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 roomate 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.

There was a lot of stuff we left out of the movie so we could keep it short and banger. Here’s the b shots, the dumb stuff, the funny stuff, the crashes, and the people in the background. Enjoy!

Newly signed to Line and Full Tilt, Faye kills it, this video does her no justice at all.

Another young and talented rider.. got all these clips in a couple hours of filming.

Sam is Austin Torvinen’s younger brother. He’s 15 now, and developing some crazy skills. Definitely planning on snagging some more clips with this kid this season!