Skiing C/D

were gonna need to build a bigger mountain

ive been doing a lot of x country skiing this winter, at least until it got too cold

well i dunno about you guys but i'm a beginner (this is my second time) and these red trails scare the living shit out of me, like serious nightmare material. some of the blue ones too, if i'm being honest

...red trails?

yeah, I've never encountered red trails

Like red pistes? Or something else?

European rating innit. (& just call 'em reds.) After ten years of snowboarding (ok only a week or two a year so not that many hours on the snow really) I can still get the heebie-jeebies from the odd red, especially if it's icy.

Yeah, it's the condition which makes the difference with reds. Freshly groomed they're lovely, but they can turn really mean if they're patchy, icy or have mounds of that horrible wet April porridge. Or if boarders have scraped them bare ;-)

yeah i dunno, "les rouges" is what i'm talking about, pistes

You're doing just fine if you're able to get down a red run in any way that's not on your arse after two weeks, tbh.

Just cancelled my two-year's-planned ski trip with my brother :( :( :( (he's got more work than anticipated, me too, snow on the west coast not happening)

Sad irony is that there is so much snow in Montreal rn it is ridiculous that I haven't taken more than one ski-up-the-mountain days

I wanna go to the chic chocs

got my mojo back today, felt absolutely beautiful; zero desire to "attack the slope" i just want to sliiiiide man, drifting wordlessly through pine forest, observing the huge blue sky, ça plane pour moi

nice

yeah

that said i've learned that you do have to "attack" a little bit in order for the steeper shit to actually work out i.e. lean forward and into it but that is the extent of my hardman ambitions

finally bit the bullet and bought skis/boots after many years of renting. the expense hurt but it feels great to use legit equipment. and it sure helps make the mighty mountains of MD/PA a bit more interesting.

no good snow in CA rn ;_;

the entire west is a slushbowl afaict. human population destroying drought getting a jump start on the season :(

one of the signs on the 101 normally used for crash and amber alerts just said "SERIOUS DROUGHT" this morning

it's gonna be a cruel summer

the entire west is a slushbowl

nah, colorado/wyo snowpack is like 90%, eldo got 15" two days ago, copper's lookin at 8"-15" more on tap for the weekend, and here in denver it's 65 degrees today. party on this is great.

/sarcasm (the skiing is not bad atm tho).

i just got killed in thurs night race league and i am not happy about it at all

racing is so much about expectations

unless you are actually good, when it is about fucking winning.

(and gbx, that may be you, not meant to be a slight)

i guess it could be about sandbagging or cheating and winning, but that would be sorta or very unethical

if you skied today, you won

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