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It’s been a warm March so far. We kind of dove straight into spring skiing, and there’s no more snow in site. I’m being optimistic that there will be a spring dump, but the forecast is looking pretty bleak at the moment.

Park crews in Minnesota have never heard of salt. Well, maybe they have, but no park in this state gets anything salted. The rail kickers and jumplines are mush. Everything is mostly un-hittable now. The jibs are starting to melt out and wobble. Everything is mostly depressing.

The near future is going to be jam packed however, as we move into spring events like Midwest Superpark and Tyrol Spring Jam. We’ve got a full crew of six riding out in a creeper van to Summit County on Thursday. Can you taste the epic already? Stay tuned… gonna get un-boring real quick!

The last couple weeks have been pretty uneventful. Check out some Spirit hot laps, and a mini session at Chester Bowl for Freestyle Fridays. So here it is, droppin early, because god knows where we’ll be sleeping in Colorado.

Last year, on the way back from Marquette Mountain Superpark, Austin stopped at a gas station and got this ridiculously awesome tee shirt with an elephant on it. Wolf tees are going out, its all about the biggest land animal in the world now.

Summit Pro/Am finals went down on Friday. Me and Austin were in the 15 person field that qualified to compete for the big $1000 1st prize check. I did not make finals, which allowed me to take full advantage of the free PBR. Delicious. Everyone’s best friend Skier Steve Janisch won, and LINE Midwest rider, Matt Halverson picked up 3rd. Andreas White, decked in slim pants, no poles, and fat rockered skis threw down one of the most insane tricks on a down rail I have ever seen, lip 2 3 change 4 out. Wow.

Before the competition, me and Austin met up with super photographer Bill Hickey and Elan/Dalbello rider Willi Engelhart to shoot some pole bonker shenanigans which you can get a peep of at the end of the edit. The park we did it at is right by my parents house. It’s a sledding hill so there was unlimited in run and speed for what we needed to do. Perfect.

The tow rope shred madness tired us out to the extreme, so we decided to do it again the next day at Elm Creek. Elm Creek is a Three Rivers Park District park like Hyland is. Its main attraction is cross country skiing and tubing, at some point, some genius decided it would be an excellent idea to turn the above average sized sledding hill into a ski area. All the old rails from Hyland got tossed over, and a rope tow was put in. It’s possibly the most fun mini shred park, EVER. We lapped for around six hours and it never got old. Austin threw down all eight 270s onto the baby handrail and I tapped and nollied my heart out. David Wells had a credit card number he could use as much as he wanted, don’t ask, and we ordered about $45 worth of Domino’s to the chalet. It was a feast of delicious proportions.

By the way, I ditched the intro segment. I’m sure all you guys were getting sick of it too.

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.

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.

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.