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Before we hooked up with the man, Jake Strassman, to film our LINE Midwest edit, we putzed around with my camera and got a few clips. All the bad ones got blogged up, so here’s the good/decent ones. Shot 100% handheld. Thank god for the SmoothCam filter. Only a couple shots turned out funky from it, but I don’t really care. Enjoy, can’t wait to get cracking on #2!

Just noticed I forgot to credit the song, it’s Guns & Dogs by ‘Portugal. The Man’ off of the album The Satanic Satanist.

Welch Village is the home hill of some of the most talented park skiers in Minnesota. It doesn’t make sense how they came to be that way though, because Welch Village has one of the worst terrain parks in [relative] Twin Cities area. Every year, enormous claims are made and the result is laughable.

Five Welch locals made the trip up north to Duluth and crashed at my place to ski Spirit Mountain. We complain a lot about our park up here, but upon further evaluation, we might arguably have the best park in Minnesota. This day was the first day all but one of the Welch guys had hit a jump all season.

I spent three weeks of January in Breckenridge, Colorado. I made the trip with midwest MC Tony Seyffer, bumming on various friends’ couches and floors. We met up another midwest MC, Matt Halverson for a while and shredded the parks of Breck and Keystone for the lens of good friend, Minnesota native, and now Keystone transplant, Jake Strassman. This is what we came up with.

Thanks LINE. Thanks Jake.

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… View Larger here.

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.