Them Winter Sports are Getting Too Brutal (Shut it Down)

With XGames, Olympic Training, Dewtour, and the Boloney Battle all gearing up to full swing, the crashes are getting graphic.  And ugly.  And nearly death-inducing.  For years now free skiing and snowboarding have gotten more "extreme" and are now resulting in tricks so complicated and technical that the slightest miscalculation guarantees a hospital visit.  My call?  Shut it down.  Shut it down now.  To summarize a few:

Kevin Pearce:  Olympic halfpipe training.  Trying to go for the double cork - ugh, I hate to even say the phrase - didn't quite make it.  On the second off axis rotation, he clipped his toe edge on the deck or top of the wall, and slammed, hard, on his head.  Even though he was wearing a helmet, he basically gave himself the scrambler and received a severe traumatic brain injury.  And get this, he even had a helmet on.  He would have been a dead man riding without one.  He went from unresponsive to "recovering" while in a hospital near Park City, Utah.  Prognosis, who knows.

Simon Dumont:  This time, Xgames training in Aspen, Simon slammed on a double flip (I don't know if it was front or back) and according to ESPN "exploded off the deck."  Lovely.  He then catapulted all the way to the base of the pipe where he lay for 10 minutes.  Ugly.

Danny Davis:  Another gold medal contender for the Olympics, this guy got shutdown not on some double back cork mcrodeo, but good old Darwin stupidity.  Jumping on a quad at 3am, he slammed into a fence after completing - in I believe a Dewtour stop - perhaps the "greatest half-pipe runs in the history of the sport."  So excited, he cracked his pelvis and a vertebrate.  Great....

But then, Shaun White is nailing tricks that are truly video-game quality.  His most recent, which will likely make it into his Olympic run, not just a double cork, but a double cork mctwist 1260.  I'm not sure what that is, but take a look.

Shaun White Double McTwist - watch more skate, snow, surf, and moto videos

These kids are getting out of control and paying the price for it.  I'm sure they will all heal up and get back on the slopes, but for sure, the crashes will keep coming.

Shreduary Commences in Five Days (The Bums Win)

Winter is here and my job isn't.  The apartment is in boxes and the furniture on craigslist.  Good bye swamps of the Mid Atlantic, hello True North.

As I take my leave from a big boy job to pursue the dream and become a U.S. tax dollar-sponsored snowboarder, my plans for the great month of Shreduary are in place.  Not familiar with Shreduary?  It's of course somewhere between Shredember and Smarch.  My goal?  Simple.  Attempt to land 15/30 days of snowboarding.  Banged up shin or not, I'm getting the shred on.

Mid week days?  Check.  Out West trips?  Check.  Icy frontier of Maine?  Check.  Everywhere in between?  Yes.  Boloney on hand sandwiches and keystone light?  Check.  Growing a grungy stache and developing that magical boot aroma?  ... well I already did that.

Too further appease Ullr and the rest of the snow gods (Radio Ron included), I make it my solemn duty to rock the award-winning Onesie as much as physically possible.

If this appeals to you, sign up for the Power Seen Shreduary experience now!

And to get you further amped, check out TRice chatting about the North Face Masters at Snowbird:

Words With Travis Rice from The North Face Masters on Vimeo.

Videos Dropping and Shred All Over (WWS)

Red Bull has put up yet another awesome video of Free Ride skiing in France.  Certainly awesome and a good teaser of future Boloney ski projects.


Let this wet your appetite, because after myself and TK got back from Utah, I've already been in the editing bay getting together a quick hit edit from the trip.  The summary?  Lot's of sped up footage mixed with Tim killing it on the steeps of Uta.

The next month holds a lot of prime riding and skiing.  What's on the agenda?  VT, Maine, NY, maybe NH?  It looks like we'll dodge the bullet and there may only be one slight warm up.  Hopefully the powder keeps coming down good on the East Coast and a lot of core season shredding will go down.  Will this year see some epic dumps in March?  Let's hope the cold stays and El Nino keeps whipping up some moisture.

First week in March is of course the big out West trip.  Tahoe right now is getting slammed with a mega storm that may produce 10 feet of snow over 9 days.  That's what I call a POW day.  Keep it up Ullr.

Brighton Bests Utah (Magic Uta Pow)

In this installment of the SeenTK show, Brighton was heavily featured, with it's sick steeps and surprisingly abundant snow pack.

After another trek into the Big Cottonwood Canyon, two boloners headed off for their final day of riding during U2.  Brighton is a place we were all blown away by last year, and we were both psyched to head back.  Knowing the snow out here isn't epic this week, we figured Brighton wouldn't be as good as last year, but little did we know.

At first after a run up the Great Eastern Express, not to be confused with the Great Northern mud trail of killy, we thought we were in for it.  The run under the lift and through the trails was icy and brutal.  With a changed game plan, we moved farther right onto the hill and hit up the Morning Wood trees.  Ah, the Brighton we remembered returned.  Steep and snowy trees that seemed untouched even though they lacked fresh snow in two weeks.  Rock drops, quick pow slashes, and terrifying steeps as far as our legs allowed us to go.  

After several laps through there, we again moved on to greener pastures.  This time, the Miley Cyrus express.  The whole Miley "bowl" if that's even the right term, is a super craggy, steep, and gnarly area with acre upon acre of freeride terrain.  

This was the real shock of Brighton.  What we, well, at least I, thought would have been crusted over death steeps with gnarly exposure, turned out to be very edgeable snow, making for the best runs of the trip.  Under the lift things looked rocked out and danger slick, but with Tim's enthusiasm we shot through lines that I thought wouldn't be doable with the snow there.  Sure, I might have made some interesting rock slides, but skis and boards survived - as well as my joints and limbs - and the Miley zone was great.

Final mission of the day was the devastator itself:  Rein's Run.  In the morning that area was brutally hard and crusty.  Something that steep is basically not didable in those conditions, but we had to see if it was as steep as remembered.  Short answer, yes, nutso steep.  In the final surprise of the day, the snow was perfect.  Four or five turns and already dropping several hundred feet, snow sprayed up on every turn and the rocks were well covered.  So good in fact we lapped it three times and as we descended lower to the Snake Express (or whatever it's called) we found plenty of little drops and surprise steeps.

Brighton has got to be one of the best hills in the world, and we were both psyched to take the bus through the Big Canyon and hit it up again.

U2 (Boloney Blasts Back)

It's MLK weekend, and Tim and I are in SLC, well, Midvale, but same thing.  Things are good and Utah is rocking.

Just like last year, we're hitting an identical weather pattern.  Week or two with no snow, mega blue and sunny yesterday, slightly overcast and cloudy today.  First order of business on Friday was of course, demolishing the continental breakfast at the Days Inn South.  I might also add that Tim and myself were greeted as returning VIPs by the Bobby Sharp himself.

So after making a few waffles and drinking an uncomfortable amount of coffee, off to the UTA bus, next stop Snowbird.  The Bird is in fact, the word.  As usual it offered the most amazing steeps and lines around.  Again, even without fresh snow, great runs and packed powder were abundant.  The added bonus of Utah being sans fresh snow is the crowds are just not here.  No wait on anything and enjoying the great sun made for an amazing day of near beers and cruising.  With TK on the planks and myself on the board we cruised around all the favorite spots:  Black Forest, Mineral Basin, and Peruvian.  Even after riding this place last year, I am constantly blown away by just how terrifyingly steep nearly all the terrain is here.

Because no one hill is going to have "epic pow" this weekend, TK and I decided a exploration was critical.  Today's mission was one of Solitude.  Fun Fact about Utah:  Never ask advice from morons that probably don't ski about where to go and where to ride.  Solitude, what was claimed last year as a boring waste of time hill, turned out to be mega gnarly, easily on par with Snowbird or Brighton and quickly became of favorite.

Solitude had every kind of terrain imaginable:  Steeps like the Bird, wide open cruisers like A Basin's main face, Craggy bowls like Jackson, trees like in the North East.  The added bonus of Solitude is just that, no one is here.  And because of that, snow, and I mean actual powder was everywhere.  If you had told me it hadn't snowed here for two weeks I would call you a liar.  All the terrain off the high lifts and within the woods was rip-able and full of stuff to push around.  Enough good things can't be said about this place, so I'll just sum it up this way:  next year I'll be going to Solitude first.

Tomorrow's mission will continue the plan of Blasting Back the Cottonwood Canyons.  We're off to Brighton to go through the awesome woods, down the death steeps of Rein's Run, and through the gnar gnar bowl off the Miley Chair.  Check out all the pictures to the right.

Giddy'up.

Bri/DK Fest X Recap (Bolla, Woods, and Pow)

Three years running (on top of several of the K0 trips) and the Bri/DK Fest is still in full swing.  For the 2010 season we were lucky in to get awesome snow, great weather, one DiK that was loaded down with 2 1/2 gallons of Vallapocellia.  Read after the break for a run down on Killy, Pico, and wine by the liter.

Enchanted Madness (I Fail as Survivor Man)

Before Christmas I shot up to the Catskills to do a mini Exit 20 tour.  Lodging provided by the very comfortable Enchanted Valley Cleary Lodge.  Some may perhaps remember the onesie-based antics that took place there last year around this time.  Because this was a solo trip, I figured it might be fun to live blog my isolation evening in the woods of Cornwallisville.  (well time-delayed live blog).  The following are the uncut musings I jotted down while sequestered in the Enchanted Valley for what turned out to be a very exciting evening.  Read below the fold for the uncut feed.