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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.

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.

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.

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.