Bombs Away

I'm now writing some content for the most honest ski blog on the internet block, Brobomb.com. You can check out my first article containing my predictions for the 2010 season here. Enjoy, subscribe, and look forward to more.

The Worst Kind of Reality

I recently read a Vanity Fair article decrying the spread of reality TV and comparing it to vacuum cleaner that sucks culture and any hint of substance from the life of popular media. After the scandal with those idiots known only for leaving untpaid tabs all over DC and running failed vineyards sneaking their way into the White House State Dinner last week I was pretty convinced that even adults were absolving themselves of any potential as role models for America's youth.

And after this most recent spectacle,

I am inclined to agree with the author of the aforementioned. Anyone who willingly promotes themselves with the opening tagline "MTV is taking you inside a shore house you've never seen, full of the hottest, tannest, craziest guidos," and then flaunts pit stains in the opener, needs to be shot. I'm calling my gun-toting, NRA card-carrying, global-warming-is-a-hoax cousin right now. He's been looking to cull some livestock for a long time.

dump o' thangs

all photos by Ryan Dunfee (except Enjoi ad).

Flo-rida

My parents recently copped a place in south Florida, which I would normally avoid if I didn't like surfing so much. Especially when the temp outside is 83 and the water is 75. You can surf until your shoulders fall off from paddling, which is not the case back in NH right now, where rigor mortus sets on as soon as the Vaseline you rubbed on your face to protect you from the 48 degree water and 35 degree air wears off. It has been an awesome week and I've gotten a bit better at surfing. I shouldn't really call it surfing, as I have to kneeboard as my spinal cord injury relegated me to kneeboarding cuz I can't balance standing up. Rehtard. Still fun as, though.

Any photos of kneeboarding from the front make me look like an amputee. This looks somewhat more graceful.

oh yeeeee.

Even Dad slays!

Back to NH Monday, which I'm not really looking forward to, but will be able to hook it up with some homies, possibly ski a day or two, and hopefully get a temp job to increase my dwindling funds before I get killed by the Euro in France. Maybe also surfing, but I am sure that as soon as I step outside I will change my mind.

encore une tasse

two fun bits from the world of unreasable bindings:

VIDEOGRASS TEASER from VIDEOGRASS on Vimeo.

sleezin

K2 has a really good team of shreds, Pep Fujas, Sean Petit, and Andy Mahre have always been favorites of mine. Well maybe not Sean. He's 16, and only really been around a lil bit. At any rate, Rob Huele is another head I'm super into. Even though he lands some shit backseat, he's got that stringy, go-for-it jib style you in skaters like Ragdoll. Plus he KILLS the COC hip in this edit. Even though it's an American holiday, I'm celebrating Thanksgiving with a Canadian video. enjoi (pun intended). The song is a bit slow, but maybe throw on some Ramones and it might make a little more sense.

Rob Heule 09-vid from rob heule on Vimeo.

my header photo is all flipped out right now, but im sick of tyring to fix it. i will be attacking that problem soon.

And even mo' foks!

My friend Kit is possibly, scratch that, the craziest person I have met in my 24 years of living. You may know him already from the Video Daze series, especially Part III. And if you remember any of his time on-camera, you at least have a taste of the hundreds of absolutely rediculous moments I've shared with this kid.

After being let loose from his front desk position at the Hotel Jerome this summer for god knows what reasons, Kit took up art full time. And by full time, I mean that he woke up at six every morning and starting making fully-colored drawings on Microsoft Paint. He managed to churn out two or three drawings a day, and if one judges by his art blog, Infinite Eight, he has kept up that dizzying pace ever since, the whole time managing to insulate his 2nd-grade spelling abilities ("whale" spelt "wale") from even spellcheck. It will forever remain a mystery to me how he managed to gain acceptance to, and graduate from, the country's most selective liberal arts college.

At any rate, Kit has even tried his hand at commodifying his art for material gain, in the form of a Zazzle store with a full array of products. With Black Friday only days away, it's time to start thinking about presents for your kin, and what cheap credit-American doesn't love another t-shirt?

So why not get Auntie Margo or Cousin Jim a t-shirt with a screen-printed scene of a bat filming a pig drilling a polar bear in the ass?

Which one is your favorite relative?

Or how about a visual interpretation of your most horrific night at Aspen's Regal Watering Hole in which you become the victim of domestic abuse by your girlfriend because you were dancing with a cougar while she was at home (at least for a little), all nice and imprinted on a pair of Keds for your niece?

No one wears SB's anymore. Regal Horror Keds are the new it!

To be honest, despite 98% of his art being incomprehensibe (and thus greater art?), Kit has come up with some true gems.

What's your expression?

And by far his best piece (although we still can't seem to convince him of it), the infamous Land Shark tee.

There's a lesson here, kids: Don't think you can get away being a cool, sunglass-sporting deer, or else you will be eaten by a shark, who will either approach from underground a la Tremors or on his back from across the lawn. I still can't figure out from where.

More folks to listen to

I'm pretty suspicious of any big-mountain ripper that comes out of SLC or Jackson. Getting treated like a beater at Snowbird on two different occasions after I'd been jumping respectable cliffs all day lead me to believe that these guys are WAY too intense about their scene, like Flea's locals-or-die surf crew from Point Break that swerved across lanes on the highway while standing in the back of a topless Jeep and tried to beat up Keanu Reeves before Swayze dropped heads.

Despite the fact that Cody Townsend has allies in both Little Cottonwood and out of every gate at Jackson, and despite the fact that he skies for Salomon (of which I'm highly suspicious in general... even though i own Czars and love them), I am starting to enjoy his blog a lot. I think also that pro skiers seem to be much cooler and chiller than the gnarathon locals who bitch at you for slowing them down on the traverse (I'm sorry, there are no traverses at any of the mountains in Aspen, so FUCK OFF). At any rate, I caught two gems of video off his blog today.

The first is a Cody's helmet-cammed run from that rediculously tight and long couloir Jeremy Jones rips in the trailer for Deeper. Turns out Cody is so cool he gets to ride with Jeremy. Instant seal of approval... double seal of approval for keeping his speed down that whole thing.

Flashing Hallways from Cody Townsend on Vimeo.

The second is Cody's post of the Verbier Extreme video from last year. I have always known that when it comes to skiing, the Euros let you go and do whatever you goddamn please, which is why I'm going there for the winter. What I didn't know is that they occasionally force you to go down whatever they goddamn please, to the tune of the Extreme venue being the Bec de Rosses, which is a 2800 vertical feet face (Squaw is 2100 in total) of no-fall cliff bands with no apparent way down, even if you've looked at the face four or five times, or spent two weeks looking at it and watching video of it three hours a day, as many of the pros did in preperation. You only need to watch the first few minutes of the fly-over shots to understand why JT Holmes, who needs to introduction, is shitting his pants. The empty start gate at the top is the icing on the cake... And since Freecaster doesn't understand how to embed things, you'll have to suffer through an extra mouse click to get to the link.

Empire State of Mind

"Sittin' courtside, Knicks and Nets give me high-fives."

hell ye.

As I start packing up my things here in Aspen and getting to make the move to France for the winter (after stopping in Florida and back home in Now!Hampshire), I've gotten to go through all shit for the first time in awhile. When I got all my ski gear together, I noticed a striking progression (i.e. accumulation) of gear. The past few seasons I have seen a huge change in my skiing, both in the improvement in my skills (& steez, rehtards!) and location, having spent four years in college skiing Jiminy Peak and the park mecca of Mount Snow, then moving out to Aspen for a year, and now onto the Alps. The gear tells the story...

2007-2008 Season. Mt. Snow, VT. Center-mounted park skis and East Coast-wide "pow" skis, that felt like skiing on Harts when I went to Alta.

2008-2009. Move to Aspen. Eventually earn enough tips to add a pair of rockered real pow skis to the quiver. I learn how to ski pow, do the Highlands Bowl in 3 turns, and jump a cliff with speed going into a 35-degree chute. They prove worth their while; I even ripped Alta this time. Good, very good.

2009-2010 season. French Alps. Line Blends come into the picture with a touring setup (Marker Dukes, CSD skins), along with a ski bag, powder baskets, a slope meter, an avi shovel, probe, and beacon. Now this shit is serious!

I super stoked to realize I will actually need all of this/use all of this, and can't wait to get my avi cert and start skiing some shit. Already had some great days skinning, and I feel like I picked up right from the end of last season. OH YEAH!!!

Heyah Me Nah

I've come to find that there is very little bad reggae. I have really yet to hear reggae I really can't stand (although Tanner Hall's choices for ski soundtracks occasionally creep close to this), but for the most part it's all good. Maybe it's because it seems really hard to fuck up, it seems pretty easy to do if you got some soul.

At any rate, if you can only press "play" on your computer once from now until the end of time, you would be best served by going to Pandora and playing a station based on The Ethiopians. This is some of the best reggae I've ever found. It will not dissapoint.

This Must be Just Like Living in Paradise

Snwomass got 16-20" out of this last blast, and with my bases repaired on the cheap (thanks Charlie at Durrance for hooking it up!), I got a late afternoon start skiing up towards the Sheer Bliss chair. The hike got rough at times as I was burning through a massive hangover with no iPod to tune myself out with. After two and a half hours, I dropped in about 2/3 of the way up Sheer Bliss.

The pow was mid-winter light and knee deep, I could barely get moving when I dropped.

All in all, a fucking rad day to be out, especially with some warm weather in the forecast this week before it dumps again next weekend. Winter is definitely here in Aspen. Hell yeah.

Wadin'

Poking around the Surface blab I found this ill video of Ian Wade, aka Blake Nyman Vol. II. Naw just playing. I hadn't seen any video of Ian before but this kid rips, even in '08! Super smooth park skiing, most on rockered Live Life II's, and a wild tight pants/ no poles look. Get this!

Ian Wade 2008 Ski Journey from Jeremiah Langston on Vimeo.

Souter on my Mind

Ran across this entertaining article from the NY Times about former Justice David Souter, whose personal and juidicial philosophy represent the purest form of NH individualism possible... namely, not excepting any gifts as a Justice, and escaping Washington as quickly as possible to retreat to a farm house in the woods with no e-mail, TV, or answering machine and hike mountains. Damn. Souter remains one of my favorite public figures of recent memory, as he is one of the few who has been able to keep the responsibilities of his position pure and intact during his career.

This might come across as being written by a self-indulgent liberal, but what writer isn't:

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/souters-summits/

Catchin' Up

Been a calendar week since my last post, so I thought I'd catch everyone up by spewing lots of pertinent information:

-Aspen Halloween involved lots of crazy outfits, hair bands, Green Dragon, short-term memory loss, and a town that hadn't been as packed since Labor Day weekend. Definitely lived up to its reputation.

-Looking at the forecast (10+ days of 50 degree weather) I decided to skin up Snowmass last weekend before all the snow was gone. Two hours later I was about half way up the Big Burn lift and dropped into what turned out to be a very low-tide snowpack, with the sun having done nothing to solidify the snowpack and cover the rocks. Im pretty sure I made three or four turns before I started grating rocks. Two core shots, one in each of my new Line Blends. damn. had to straightline most of the rest of the way through hay and shrubs on about four inches of snow covering bare ground, it was super ghetto but pretty fun pointing it down what looked like bare ground, and not doing any more damage to the skis.

-With ski DVD's creeping up on $30, I was very excited to find out that Matchstick put up their new movie, In Deep, on iTunes for 8 bucks. Worth the money for Sean Petit's opening segment alone. Sean absolutely CHARGES in his seggie, straighlining his 6th-grade size frame down AK pillows with way more vert than you see coming, huge 360s that will surely become one of Sean's signatures, and a rodeo off the cliff that Benchetler broke himself on in Hunting Yeti that he takes DEEP into the landing. Like 150 feet deep. Gets blown out of the landing, but goddamn, at 16 this kid goes for it in a way I haven't seen since Eric Hjorliefsen stopped skiing park with spikes in his A-frames and started dropping lines. We will definitely be watching him for awhile, if he doesn't get bored of skiing by the time he's 18.

On a seperate note, Level 1 put up Refresh on Autumn Garage, something like ten dollars for three views, which is pretty stupid in my opinion. That movie was off the bandwagon as well, but as much as I want to relive Phil Casabon's segment, ten dollars for three views online is not a deal, and neither is 30 dollars for a DVD (when your DVD drive doesn't work). Guess I'll have to wait and see ifthat one turns up in my stocking.

-Following Colorado's accelerating march towards complete legalization of marijuana and solidifying the fantasyland reputation of many of its ski towns, the town of Breck legalized pot to the tune of an ounce or less for anyone over 21. It will be interesting to see how the tourist crowd takes this, but I have a feeling they'll be too busy crashing their rented Expeditions on I-70 to notice. Aspen apparently isn't the next target for Colorado's pot legalization movement; I guess four dispensaries opening in a town of 5,000 permanent residents in two months isn't encouraging enough.

-Our winter weather of late October has morphed into spring, with 50-60 degree temps during the day all this week. The temps have killed any chance of skinning back up Snowmass for turns, and with Independence Pass now closed for the season, skiing options are limited to early-season park shredding in Summit County. (or skinning lines and getting caught in wet slides in Summit County)

-Found the video for Dead Prez's "Hell Yeah," and it is fucking awesome. Here it be

-Hair band cover band "Danger Kitty," which is "an original band, playing the original songs from the original artists," made its way to Belly Up the eve of Halloween. I must say I was very impressed, as the lead singer was able to match perfectly the vocal tones of Bon Jovi, Jani Lane (Warrent), Gene Simmons, AND David Lee Roth. Quite... impressive.

That's all now for the land of la, more to come as I continue to plan my winter in France and maybe even ski park at Keystone on the day next week commemorating our veterans. che che che...

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.