Skiing C/D

I've been skiing for 19 yrs, and the only place I've seen the "Jonny Tsunami" stereotype about skiing break down was at my local hill, in rural Minnesota, where most of the locals were farm kids.

That being said: I fucking love it, and consider the years I spent bumming in CO among the best in my life. It's one of the reasons I'm psyched about moving back West -- even if it means that I have to hang out with dudes that listen to Widespread and Slipknot, and have pot leaf stickers on the back of their Subaru.

Also: alpine racing is the shit, fuck the haters.

shocker

my advice would be to wait for snow on a mountain. the best way to learn to ski is to take a half day lesson then go to the top of a mountain and say to yourself 'well ive got to get to the bottom now'. you'll improve 1000% on that first run. i cant see much happening at an indoor slope for a beginner. plus, on a mountain mr rumpie can go off and play black diamonds while you learn on the friendly green slopes.

also, avoid snowplowing. it will fuck up your style for years.

went to sheffield "ski village" (hint: its a couple of slopes) the other day and it was impossbile to turn on the toothbrush stuff. but the view from the topwas so stunning that i would have paid 13 pound to do just that.

skiing is still expensive but i think its becoming more egalitarian. the kit and the lift passes, accommodation etc make it pricey from what i know, despite flight costs coming down - the only place non charter planes fly to from dopncaster airport is geneva! seems like everyone is goign skiing this year.

its classic to go just to drink gluhwein (sp?) in a shack up the mountain when yr cold and wet. or mozzarella panini in italy. doing anything halfway up a mountina, drinking beer etc, in that combination of baking/sweating, and being freezing, is classic

The green slopes do seem very very tame, hardly any incline at all. And snowplowing does look awfully ungainly.

I used to ice-skate (badly), I could stay on my feet and build up great speed but I could only stop with the aid of the barrier or by coming to a long, slow halt. That flash sideways stopping thing totally eluded me....

I haven't been skiing in too long.

My jerk friends did this while I was job interviewing in Chicago, missing the fun: http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31153

I'm sure that's not true - for one thing, I have friends who have flown Doncaster-Paris on non-charter flights.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/Snowstruck.gif

Very true. At least 3-4 ppl died in and around Aspen last winter alone, if I recall correctly.

Avalanches are terrifying. Especially freaky when you look at something you skied the other day and there's a 5 foot crown on it.

(jargon watch! five foot crown = the avalanche sloughed a slab that was five feet deep.)

Plus: Europe. Which is nice.

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Full pass = $1800. Or work for the Company.

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yikes $900 for a ski pass. ok skiing in europe is dead cheap then., i revise that.

Why can't we all just agree to live in peace and harmony and to despise bladers for the scum that they are.

http://www.doglotion.com/images/gaper03/blades.JPG

we bought 3 day passes as part of a package through the hotel we were staying at. it included ski hire and a full day lesson. Thing is we had paid the full price which was adjusted by our hotel booker when we arrived in Aspen. When we went to Buttermilk to pick up our passes, they credited our debit card again, I guess not realising we'd already been discounted. so they ended up paying us $5 to ski!

i snickered all the way down the mountain.

...this time last year...decent conditions, I think?

RIP Bill Johnson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkdB42lN1AE

norwegian telemark ski maker, ca 1975 making a pair of skis from start to finish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbPVqUbcjDY

Ok im 7 mins in and already pretty astounded. Axe. Plane. Insight. Labor.

I've got skiing on the brand

Wolf Creek is already open!!

brand awareness is pretty now

https://www.instagram.com/p/Btui73sl2U5/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

when you straightline the final 5 bumps and go checkless to the jump laaaaaay ouuuuut

lol/not lol: #whenintroubletuckfordouble

i pinged my utah buddy to ask wtf this guy was thinking and he responded totally flipping out- he was "20 feet away" and "it was F*ing scary I could not believe he didn't blow a knee he was damn lucky we had about 8ft of fresh snow and the base is super soft/ i'll say one thing the crowd went fullll send for him/ This was a +10,000 GNAR points -- it was the entire crowd was WTF...they saw him straightening that/ you should come out and watch this some year."

I wish my knees were better at handling the bumps. Strength work needed before July.

my alpines were in the shop, so i skied my 2001 Tuas (198/70/188 and soft) with rainey superloops last week, first time on tele in 4 years.

my quads, they were fucking crying. i was so so terrible. i fell at 1p and hit my head really hard (stars) in the bumps and quit for the day, because i was afraid i'd end up in another coma.

otoh, i feel like i never got actually good in bumps until age 49, the year i switched back to alpine from tele after over 20 yrs. suddenly, i felt so multi dimensionally capable of handling whatever they brought. it was ... weirdly epiphinal.

NB i am not good good at them, i am not a ripper at all. but i'm at least ok.

So what you’re telling me is I should fin a reason to spend all of next February in Furano, learn to Tele and then I will be good at bumps on alpine.

this is very much a brag probably but my buds and I just booked our first ever non-dirtbag ski trip now that we actually have jobs that can support such an extravagance (and are unmarried and childless). heading to portillo in August B) and boy am I going to need all that time to get back in shape for it

yeah, i was gonna ask how japanese skiing is, it looks pretty awesome and deep- how wet?

i don't think tele helped my bumps, but it did emphasize weight transfer A LOT and even more skiing through the soles of your feet. those things are pretty helpful. my utah bro just got scarpa maestrales and atomic shifts at stuff, i don't think tele is even done anymore

gbx that's like, fancy, nice! Congrats.

(shh we're actually staying in a shared bunkroom in a building apart from the main hotel but like we can still hang out at the pool and stuff)

youll make that bunkroom look good then

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bty3SqAFe0k/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=jb7bhslzg6cp

I wont try to make this reasonable or approvable but corbets vines are gettin out of hand

that owns

Two separate pals just went to Hokkaido and by all accounts it's fuckin amazing. The snow is actually blower, which doesn't make sense to me

Hokkaido is pretty amazing and this a apparently a bad snow year, there was a lot of coverage on the news. Still 3m piles of snow by the roadside and trucks coming every night to take it out of the city.

The snow at Furano was the best very light powder and it fell the whole weekend I was there. Even Teine which is less than an hour from downtown Sapporo on transit was pretty good, at least the top of the resort where the word up courses are. The bottom was trash. Rusutsu, pretty good but it didn’t snow much whilst we were there.

I had a good long chat with a guy who ran a yakutori place in Furano. There’s lots of small local hills, he’d been to one with a 500yen ($5) lift ticket that day but his real passion is later in the season, taking his splitboard into the Taisetsuzan national park.

Next year we want to try Aomori and Akita. We hired a car this year, to stay off mountain at Rusutsu and it seems like a good thing to do is link a bunch of small resorts together in a trip.

all those possibilities make me a little envious, but tbh the food shots i've seen are just as amazing. and i'm not a foodie. glad you seem to be thriving man

king/queens of corbets is NOW LIVE: https://www.jacksonhole.com/kings-queens-corbets.html .

the celebration vid from last year's makes it look like really a dangerous event that i just sorta approve, it looked like it was done in the right spirit, in the right way. at least it did on youtube. unlike maybe the redbull rampage which comes across as really exploitative? dunno, i'd should probly know more before opining on this.

i will never forget the layout front sommy guy on last year's corbets, and i just didn't think you could get more ridiculous without a wingsuit- until that bump freestyler at Deer Valley.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvwIz_QFZ4b/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=ft8gfntrahp0

closing time, eh?

Did the Grand Traverse skimo race last weekend. 36+ miles from Crested Butte to Aspen. What a slog. I swore I’d never do it again immediately afterward but am already feeling the itch for next year. A couple of old-timers told me that your first year is really just a fact-finding mission, laying the groundwork for future efforts, and that makes sense to me now.

sick