You know it's off-season when...

You show up to the Ghostface concert 45 minutes late, then have to wait for another two hours while Ghostface eats chicken wings at J-Bar, and his opening act, Skyzoo, doesn't play.

The experience of the off-season is unique to ski towns, which flourish during the winter shred season and the summers, and all but die in the fall and especially in the spring. Half the restaurants are closed, most of the people from town are in Vegas or Mexico on vacation, and the demand for labor plummets, leaving normally-tipped waiters, valets, and bartenders trying to survive on $8.50 an hour until the season starts again after Thanksgiving. Several good live shows have come to town this fall, notably Zion I and Ghostface Killah. I can only imagine what Ghostface was thinking when he started his show, 3 hours late, in front of maybe 30 people, thinking this is how Aspen does. We were able to bounce around enough to keep him on stage for an hour, and it was a good time overall, although no Skyzoo, one of HOT 97's Top 10 MC's, and a Cooper Jones original. Ghostface even brought up a slew of high school breezy's on stage for the last song, which was followed by a freestyle battle between a black dude from Bermuda and a white kid from Glenwood Springs. Bermuda prevailed, even beating a third super wasted guy who tried to take the mic from Ghostface a few times and was booed off stage at the beginning of his battle. Ber-muda gettin irie!

Ski Industry Rant

From time to time I will espouse hard-earned knowledge (opinions) about the state of the freeskiing scene, industry, and its related professional shred heads, filmers, 'photogs,'companies, videos, etc... etc. The spark to start posting about the ski industry came when I read about David Lesh's recently launched clothing line, First Drop Outerwear.
First of all, the outerwear is straight up garbage. With skiing slowly catching up to snowboarding in terms of product diversity and diversity on all fronts (except, stubbornly, in race and ethnic make-up, Justin Vassar and his switch pond skim excluded), basically getting cooler, I was excited to see that the first new outerwear company since Saga & Under Armourwas out of the gates.

First Drops' suit: but my yang is cutting off the corner of my chest pocket!

Lesh claimed that he saw "a huge void in the market that no one was filling." I also see this void... but I was hoping it wouldn't get filled by a company pushing droopy-ass suits with ying-yang motifs and a big ass pocket in the middle of the chest overlapping the zipper. The jacket even has a big pocket in the small of the back in case you forgot your backpack and still want somewhere to put your... wallet. The pants, complete with yang-motif themselves, even come with suspenders, as it is all but assured that the smallest size will have a 38 inch waist that no belt will be able to secure to the 140-pound frame of the average teenage jibber.

Contrast sleeves and pockets! Assymetry is always big with the kids.

Much of the rest of the freshmen First Drop line push the split-color design headlined by the jacket's ying-yang design. "Oh sweet, dude, we could make the sleeve on the tall-T a different color! It'd be sick dude, there's such a void for this ill fresh shit!" Someday in the future, the proportion of freeskiers rocking hideous combos of neons and knee-length tops will diminish as products with actual style start becoming more prominent (although that black/purple fade jacket from Orage is HOT), and cooler people will start skiing. I'll have to visit Aspen again when that happens, and see whether the proportion of white boys from Aspen High wearing studded earrings and yelling the n-word all the time has changed at all.

Holden Outerwear, my favorite outerwear gig, has dabbled in freeskiing in the past couple years, throwing the occasional ad with (snowboarder) Matty Ryan in Freeskier, sponsoring Anthony Boronowski for a month or so, and repping some up n' comers like Maine transplant, Tahoe-loc Jackie Paaso.


Holden's got a lock on super-clean designs, subtle details and overall more like streetwear in fit, style, material use (hemp, denim, herringbone), and feel. For example, the Patch jacket shown below is my jam for this season (albeit mine is blue). Good fit, a little long in the sleezes and waist, both covering up your ass and hands from snow and adding some serious steeze, half-exposed main zipper with over-sized, exposed pocket zippers, DWR-free waterproofing, slub fabric, super lightweight, and a nice lil patch. Holden chose a tomato red and ocean blue colorways for this revival piece, both of which announce your presence but don't scream like more neonish colorways from other joints. All for $170 new.

Holden Patch Jacket: straightforward and clean. hell yeah.

Not sure why they haven't tried to penetrate the freeski market further, as there actually is a void in freeski outerwear for more fitted, mature and detailed styles (not to mention eco-friendly options). Could be due to a lack of budget, or just as likely, that skiing isn't cool enough yet to throw their arty hipster vibe into the mix with the likes of companies with Monster-fueled, high school vibes like First Drop.

Shred Shred Shred

After a great Zion I concert at Belly Up (albeit with half of Aspen high school), Marty and I rallied to get our first lift-served skiing on at A-Basin. While laps took about 45 minutes with most of Summit County in the lift lines, there were two white ribbons of death to choose from and a decent jib park, with plenty of beater snowboarders eating shit really hard on the picnic table.

While I got more of a workout standing in line than I did skiing, it was great to be back on the shredsticks, dodging gapers and trying to remember my few box tricks. Best first full day I've had in a long long time, and while I exposed my park skis to some barely-exposed rocks on a lil slash on the side of the trail, any day those skis don't come off with the bindings unreleased and fly down the hill and nearly kill someone is a good one. Marty even got his Taco Bell fix on, and couldn't figure out why anyone would have digestive problems after eating a mexican pizza, a gordita and nochas with refried beans on them... all from T'Bell.

At any rate, I didn't take any photos because my batteries were dead... and there wouldn't have been much to show anyway.

To replace that, I bring you this Travis Rice seggie, with more typical Travis Rice video-game snwoboarding:

Snowboarding's fun to follow to get an idea of the culture and and organization of the other brand of shred-heads on the hill, and gives you an idea of where skiing might go, as skiing seems to be about three years behind snowboarding in terms of the maturity of the culture and the diversity of styles, riders, and companies out there. And snowboarding is about five or so years (at least) behind skateboarding, which everyone knows reigns as the coolest action sport.

J.P. Walker, who started having some of the best video parts in snowboarding since the Forum video, True Life, back in '02. or probably even earlier than that. Anyway, J.P. got bored with doing every kind of jib video part possible, so last season he committed to doing his whole video part switch. Every takeoff, and most of the landings, are switch, and it would still be crazy if he were riding regular. J.P. had this to say:

"After I got through all my handrail filming I was pretty sure it was going to be sick. With all the rail footy switch I couldn't really turn back. I don't think I hit anything regular in the backcountry at all, even to warm up."

say word...:

This Video Sucks - JP Walker 7/7 Snowboard 2010 from SwitchMag on Vimeo.

Volume Trois

Editing video is pretty tough to take a break from once you get going, so it only took my two days to put back together the parts from last spring for Video Daze 3. This one is by far the most rediculous video I've created... mostly thanks to a guest appearance by the one and only "Clever" Martin Sawyer. Enjoy.

Video Daze Aspen Part 3 from The Life Assimilated on Vimeo.

Moab

After a night back at the infamous Regal after a long hiatus, Pavlik, Neighbor Greg, and I took Pavlik's '85 Civic to Moab for the night and the next.

After enduring Pavlik's insistence that we drive 40 miles out of the way to get ice and that there was no such thing as an open container law in the States, we finally got to our campsite, which sat on the bank of the Colorado facing this wild-ass valley.

Pavlik snapped a nasty one that night.

Waking up it was pretty clear why this campsite was on.

Campsite the morning after. Greg and Pavlik threw chicken bones and

bottles in the fire like some teenagers.

We then made our way downwards to Arches, which was damn wild and full of weird

married couples and Pavlik's "friends from home:" packs of Europeans in

Abercrombie smoking butts on the trail and not smiling.

Greg enjoying the terrain available only to those who aren't weird pale couples,

Europeans or "heavy" people.

Double O Arch.

Wild stone hand 100's of feet high.

Star Wars came to mind... nerds.

Super high up on the arches, you could see foryvah.

Bird Rock.

Bad boyz.

Pavlik and your boy in Double O Arch.

Pavlik got another good one looking back from the campsite.

On the way out. Arches was flippin' badass. Definitely a must-see.

In other news, I am borrowing a camera from a local TV station to re-log a bunch of ski footage

from last season and re-make Video Daze 3... on condition that they get to show it on TV!

My ski film career is blowing up... more to come.

Los Bells

The Maroon Bells is the gnarliest-looking peak in the Aspen area, and blows you away even from the road. Having been in town for eight months and not seen it, I took a lazy Saturday to check it out. Once up close, the whole area is full of wild peaks, the kind that make you lose your sense of space, and you can't tell if the peaks are 1,500 feet of vert or 4,000. While my Air Force Ones were serving as pretty piss-poor hiking boots, I was able to hike out to Crater Lake and make some decent photos.

The light was pretty tough to work with; this one didn't turn out so hot but you get the idea. Huge.

Down on the beach.

Some of the peaks back there looked like what I imagine the Alps to look like.

This elevator drop was pretty easy to spot, I bet Davenport's done it. Think I'll pass.

But if you really want to get your gnarly boots on this winter, consider this line. Can't imagine the vert, but you'd be spending about half of it in no-fall chutes. No bogans allowed.

Dry Season stoke

Well, even though I skied yesterday, it's still the dry season in most of North America right now. In that spirit, here's a little video we put together last winter as part of our Video Daze Aspen series. heck yeah.

1st Inning

With all the mulitudes of ways to introduce this blog, I might as well just start with the most recent thing that happened to me:

I went up to Independence Pass yesterday after work with my Bulgarian neighbors Pavlik and Villi. Pretty sketchy trying to get in some turns in after leaving town at 4:15 pm and having to drive about 4,000 feet up. I spied some legit looking shots in the distance, but given that we started hiking at 5 and Pavlik was suffering from an Eastern European-serious smoker's lung, we didn't get far. He's gotta quit that shit before the season if he thinks he can bootpack Highlands for 15 days to get a free season pass. So we skied that bunny stuff and you could barely make a turn, but damn it was good being back on skis, felt like living again. On the way back, which went unfilmed, there was a super (for October) fun snowfield with barely enough snow to cover the shrubs, but with my busted Rossi BC rock skis, I busted down after a slew of poll plants, and then had enough speed to make some legit sliding turns on some crust and ollie off of some "windlips." Felt like a kid again. Amen.