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After spending three weeks couch bumming with LINE MC Tony Seyffer in January, I knew I had to go back and do it again over spring break. We started rounding up a crew and soon my car filled and we needed more spots. So, Tony has this girlfriend, Whitney, who has this mom, who has this guy who rents the basement from her. Well this guy has some awesome creeper vans that he isn’t using. One reason for the non-use being that he brought a running chainsaw into a bar. He didn’t kill anyone, but he’s chillin’ in jail. So, we’ve also got this friend, Colten Welch, his mom served jury duty on that. Add 9 rider Austin Torvinen and girl skier #2 Kendelle and you have our van crew. All rocking LINE skis except that 9thward duder. Hella LINE skis.

So we like LINE, a lot, so we decided to write LINE all over this janky van, because we do that (remember the Ullrfest float from episode 7?), with some window chalk. Austin wrote Ninthward on it too, and then wrote Free Candy on the hood. Tony drove straight through the night and had some absurd, unhealthy amount of 5 Hour Energy shots to do it. Oh, there were whiskey plates on them too.

It didn’t take long after arriving in Breckenridge for us to start laughing at how ridiculous our ride was. Every day, we rolled through Main Street traffic, honking at tourists, small children, their parents, everyone. Some people ignored us, some people laughed, some people were downright offended. The best was pulling into and out of free church dinner with it. The van was simply, awesome.

Other random thoughts: spring break crowds at Breck are retarded, Keystone was deserted, Keystone’s medium jumps are wack, In the four weeks total I spent in Summit County this season, I skied 0 real powder.

We didn’t do too much filming since we couldn’t link up with Jake Strassman, who did our LINE Midwest edit on our first trip. The MN Does CO edit was our shots from the week. Here’s the leftover shots from it:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Might as well have done that with chopsticks!