Icelantic SIA Video Clip

Here's a clip of the new Icelantic booth and new line up from SIA in Denver put on by New Schoolers. Christian, Riley, and I had a little jam session. Enjoy.

New Year's Demo at Alta and the Goldminer's Daughter

I had a pretty good weekend working the demo with Icelantic at Alta Ski Resort.  The snow stayed good after the New Year's Eve dump and we had some good turns; the phrase for the 1st and 2nd day was "it does not suck."

I rocked it out with Ashley and Scott, and brought my friend Carmen along to get her out of the house and on the slopes.  I met a lot of people, hyped up the skis and company with lots of skiers, and had a blast.  I did get some footage of the event, combined it with some footage that Scotty captured, and produced an edit to promote the Goldminer's Daughter and Alta Ski Resort.  I tried to be a little more up beat and stylish with this edit.  This edit, as well as my ski tuning edit, is up on Icelantic's website also. Enjoy.

True Ski Love - An Artistic Ski Tune Edit (Attempt)

True Ski Love - It's about how one treats and respects their skis, the same objects that allow one to express their feelings and life experiences on the mountain side.

My Icelantic Nomads can take a beating and give one right back. The Icelantic Shaman is just the same. Because these skis serve us and endure our skiing, we in turn keep them in good enough shape to ski another day.

This is my first attempt at an artistic edit. I didn't want to have it be super artistic or over dramatic. I merely wanted to portray the feelings and aspirations that come to me through my skis. Enjoy.

First Ski Edit

Here's that short ski edit of my first day out that I have been promissing would be out.  I finally got "most" of the kinks out of the compressed file.  I think that it's not bad for my first edit ever, and using only about 90 seconds of ski footage to make it work.

Enjoy and please let me know what ya think:

'09-'10 Season Goals

Yep it's that time of the year again.  The time of year that I actually produce goals.  And with the third day of skiing for the season completed, here they are in no particular order of importance:

1. Ski at least 45 days; includes both frontcountry and backcountry
2. Ski at least 800,000;
3. Ski the south face couloir of Ben Lomond with Christian
4. Drop S&S
5. Ski Monte Cristo
6. Ski Superior
7. Put a couple video segments together
8. Shoot more photos
9. Call in sick to work at least twice for a weekday storm dump of 15 inches or more
10. Solo Willard Peak ice drainage and then ski down into Liberty
11. Throw more 3’s
12. Stick the front flips in all conditions
13. Start throwing back flips
14. Stomp my line at the blonde cliffs with the flip
15. Find a hot ski babe to date

Pretty much amounts to mannin' up and huckin' more

My Winter Has Started

I finally got out on my sweet Icelantic Nomads.  It has been exactly 7 months and 5 days since I was last on these bad boys, and man it was sure nice.  As the snow was falling in huge flakes Sunday night, Christian and I hatched our plan to skirt our work for the day and head out to get some video footage and just get out for some preseason powder.  I will admit that I had a hard time falling asleep because I had the "Christmas Eve" jitters as I couldn't wait for the morning to come.

Christian and I decided not to get out there until the skies had cleared and we had good light for filming.  That meant we wouldn't even hit the trail head until closer to 10:00 am.  This was a nice change of pace as Christian usually likes to meet at his place around the wonderful hour of 6:00 am.

The day was great with beautiful bluebird skies and a foot of 5% Utah blower powder on a minimal snowpack of unconsolidated snow.  Christian did his usual "skirt the main path" routine and we ended up getting a little bushwhacking in.  Nothing like climbing through a tough thicket first day out to get you ready for a full season.

Now the skinning, on the other hand, kicked my butt as I haven't done any cardio in close to 2 months.  I knew that'd be the case, so I just pushed on.

I had a couple of good face shots and Christian had some sweet powder bursts. The snow, was great. All the hidden shark tooths, ie rocks, weren't.  I seemed to hit a rock on every turn and that sucked.  Fortunately my Nomads held up to the "Wasatch Tune" I gave them.  I did hit a pretty good rock right when I started a turn going at a decent speed and ended up face planting.  Luckily I didn't hit my face on hidden rocks. And for you, luckily we caught it on tape.

Look for my season goals and my first skiing video edit to come out in the next day or two.  For now, here are some pics:

Christian a.k.a "The Dude" now resorting to bushwhacking after deadending us

Traci, The Dude's cool wife

 Looking up at Flagstaff

Me setting up the camera with a nice sun flare

Wolverine Cirque in the Background

Black Diamond Gear Swap

I love this event; Not only do I get to find some good buys of things I "need" for ski season, unload my gear and come home with some money, but I get to feel the electricity in the air of winter being right around the corner.

I didn't take much to the gear swap this year since I don't have much to sell, but I didn't come home with much either. You see, I've learned to curb my gear purchasing, mainly due to the fact that I have 95% of the things I need and haven't been purchasing much recently...... of course I know you're all sitting their thinking "yeah right." Trust me, that 5% is a lot of items.

Since I saved Christian a spot last year, he was supposed to get there earlier than me and grab a spot. Yeah that didn't happen. I arrived about 6:20 and the place was already half full. I managed to grab spots for Christian and Scotty V, the Icelantic Ski Team Manager. We had our own little party section.

Winter is right around the corner. Yay!!


Christian rocking sweet handle bars and a sick mullet beanie

Winter Performance Review

So another winter come and gone. Today marked my end of winter; I took the ski cargo box off my car. Let's go ahead and look at my goal performance.

GOALS:

1. Ski at least 45 days: 57 Days; 15 Backcountry
   
2. Ski at least 800,000 vertical feet: 722,345 feet
   
3. Ski the the south face/couloir of Ben Lomond from the peak w/Christian: No
   
4. Ski Little Superior on a good powder day w/Christian: No
5. Get Avalanche Level 1 Certification: COMPLETED
6. Get Avalanche Level 2 Certification: COMPLETED
7. Huck a certain cliff on Banana Dayz in Big Cottonwood Canyon: COMPLETED
8. Huck a certain cliff on Honeycomb Cliffs in Big Cottonwood Canyon: COMPLETED
9. Drop Corbet's Couloir at Jackson Hole: COMPLETED 3 times
   
10. Learn a backflip: No
11. Ski Silverton Mountain: COMPLETED, Got arrested on my birthday
    
12. Ski Monte Cristo in Little Cottonwood Canyon: No
13. Film one or two short ski mountaineering films w/Christian: No
14. Call in sick to work at least once for a weekday storm dump of 15 inches+: COMPLETED
15. Ascend all 3 pitches of Malan's Waterfall: No
16. Solo Willard Peak ice drainage at least 3 times: No
17. Take an ice climbing trip to Ouray, CO: COMPLETED
18. Find a super hot Backcountry Babe to date: No

Ok so let's look into why I didn't accomplish some of these goals:

• I didn't get my vertical footage goal due to my job as a ski buddy with Dakota. I never got him to ski more than 10,000 feet per day (more than 5 runs).
  
• Any goal that I had with Christian became an extreme challenge due to Christian returning to school and having a baby.
  
• I never did learn a backflip because I just forgot about the goal.
  
• I never did get to ski Monte Cristo as I never got up to Superior this year. Montes Cristo is the true summit to Superior and it's easiest to do those two in the same trip.
• After my ice climbing trip to Ouray, I focused more on skiing and I didn't have any luck with weather as it was a really warm winter causing the ice at lower elevations to not form up as usual.
• And I didn't get that super hot backcountry babe to date cause I didn't really care for that goal. Maybe things will change this next year.

INJURIES:

So this year seemed to be the year of injuries for me. I couldn't believe how one injury would happen right after I healed from another one. Let's look at the damage I had:

1. Torn meniscus left knee - Caught my inside ski on the top of a mogul
   
2. Subluxed left shoulder - Cliff drop into really dense deep snow
   
3. Split lip and chin - Hit a patch of ice at high speeds as I initiated a turn = wipeout
   
4. Sprained right knee - Poor technique when exhausted on a bumped out technical run
5. Hairline fracture right fibula - Bad cliff drop onto a mogul
   
6. Sprained left thumb - Dakota ran into me while stopped and took out my legs
7. Sprained right ankle - I have no idea what happened
8. Broken ribs, 7th and 8th on left side - Carbon fiber ski pole to the ribs at high speed

Yeah I got a little beat up this year. Hopefully I will have better luck this next season. Plus I'm going to make sure that I workout during the season, do a lot of yoga, and stretching to stay healthy.

A really cool highlite of the winter was joining the Icelantic Ski Promotion Team. I love skiing so much and have really wanted to get involved in the industry. This has given me a taste of that and really doesn't seem like work at all. I enjoy working the demos and spreading the word about the skis. As long as I am not required to help out with demos on the really good snow days, I'll be good.

Kessler West Couloir Tour

This winter has been an odd one. We have not had the cold temperatures and frequent storms that please us powder hounds. Today is my RDO (Regular Day Off) and I'm taking advantage of it.

Christian and I met at his house at 5:30 am to ski the an aspect of Kessler Peak in Big Cottonwood Canyon. I was feeling quite stoked as the snow pack settled and stabilized. Christian isn't getting out as much anymore due to having a 5 month old baby boy that is never satisfied and always throws a fit.

We pull up to the Argenta slide path to 4 cars in front of us. There are already five headlamps on the way up. We are okay with this because there are plenty of options off the top of Keesler. Christian and I smashed out the 3500 vertical foot approach in 2 1/2 hours. With my new pivot touring binding, I'm able to keep up with Christian a lot easier than last year. You must know that Christian is a monster of a hiker, being able to pound out approaches while breaking trail, setting new skin tracks like none other. Christian claims that it was my new mustache that gave me the strength to keep up with him.

The view was great and the weather beautiful. We came across a very, very large wind slab about 3 feet deep , who knows how wide, over 300 feet long, in the middle of Argenta. We skinned to the side of it for the most part, only having to cross it closer to the top where the slab wasn't as hard or pronounced. We were feeling suspect of the top area stability. We did a couple of compression tests on Argenta and got some pretty good instability results on the newly wind deposited snow. Those signs weren't looking good if we were to ski Argenta, but we were planning going over to the west face. These tests were done on the east face prior to making the ridge. They helped us pick out a more conservative skin route to stay out of the potential avalanche danger.

We make the ridge and decided to take a short break. This break gave us time to refuel, check snowpack stability, decide on our potential routes, number of descents, and finalize our game plan.

Break over, time to get to work. With Christian being the more experienced backcountry traveler, he led the way. But trust me, there was plenty of fresh lines awaiting us. Surprisingly to us, the couloir turned to a two-faced 3730 vertical foot descent of tricky conditions. The left side was soft and fluffy, while the right side was suncrusted and unbreakable.

I skied pretty horribly. I am not in condition for the backcountry. After a really long tour my legs are so blasted that I can't make the same turns as if I had a warm up run or two. Hopefully I'll get conditioned to the point where this isn't a problem. Anyhow, enjoy the following pictures.

Sunrise across the way


Upper Chute of Argenta


Raymond Peak


Christian smiling on the summit


Super Mustache


Cardiff Fork


Mill B


West Chute Entrance


Christian taking charge


Working the tight corridor


Christian steezing the pow


Surface Hoar on the apron

It's About Time........ Time to Set Those Most Important Goals

Yeah, yeah, yeah...... I know: It has definitely been a long time since my last post. With this post I am going to outline the goals which mean the most to me: Winter Time Fun. After I detail the dreams, desires, goals, and "have-to's" that keep me going through the day, I'll brief you with a status update on what has happened since my last post.

Goals for the 2008-2009 Winter Season: (Not in any particular order, just as they pop in my mind, but important non-the-less)

1. Ski at least 45 days; includes both front country and backcountry
   
2. Ski at least 800,000 vertical feet (yes I have a watch that tracks this; last year about 600,000 feet)
   
3. Ski the the south face/couloir of Ben Lomond from the peak w/Christian
   
4. Ski Little Superior on a good powder day w/Christian: Round 2 = my terms
   
5. Get Avalanche Level 1 Certification
6. Get Avalanche Level 2 Certification
   
7. Huck a certain cliff on Banana Dayz in Big Cottonwood Canyon
8. Huck a certain cliff on Honeycomb Cliffs in Big Cottonwood Canyon
9. Drop Corbet's Couloir at Jackson Hole
10. Learn a backflip
11. Ski Silverton Mountain
12. Ski Monte Cristo in Little Cottonwood Canyon
13. Film one or two short ski mountaineering films w/Christian
    
14. Call in sick to work at least once for a weekday storm dump of 15 inches or more
15. Ascend all 3 pitches of Malan's Waterfall
    
16. Solo Willard Peak ice drainage at least 3 times
17. Take an ice climbing trip to Ouray, CO
18. Find a super hot Backcountry Babe to date (that's to satisfy your wishes Mother)

Ice Climbing in Cody, WY February 2007

So this is all I have for now, but trust you me, this list will be growing. It's getting late and my brain is ready to shut down, but before I turn in for the night, I need to give you that status update.

I have been quite busy, not just with playing, but work has picked up. Our new fiscal year started October 1 and so ended our period of performance for our last contract. Now onto 2 new contracts with a lot more taskings. These new contracts allowed for the UID team to grow from 9 individuals in Latyon, UT/Hill Air Force Base, to a team of 32 at Hill AFB, Peterson AFB (Fort Collins, CO), Tinker AFB (Oklahoma City, OK), Robins AFB (Warner Robins, GA), and Tobyhanna Army Depot (Scranton, PA). With all of this growth my responsibility has also grown. Because I did the initial ground work for 2 of the new tasks prior to the new hirings, I have been put as the Junior Project Lead for 2 teams. It's fun to finally have work and short suspense deadlines. Really my work load has gone up about 500%. I have already put in 41 hours this week, and I have decided to work tomorrow on my Regular Day Off (RDO) to finish some work.

But honestly, I'm finally having fun. I have no problem putting in the time now because the winter is coming and everyone knows that I will be travelling and having "sick days" frequently.

I have joined a Senior Hockey League and have played 3 games. Right now we're #1 with 3 wins and 35 goals for. I have 1 goal and 5 assists. Yes it is quite apparent that my team is stacked. I will admit that I played absolutely horrible last game. It is actually really hard to breath when your head is up your .......... well you get the idea.

I also started my last indoor soccer season tonight. We played really bad. We only had 2 subs and we had 2 new guys on the team. We did manage to win 11-0, even though I got beat bad 3 times on defense. I should have had 3 goals tonight but I did get 3 assists. That's not bad for the sweeper.

Ski Mountaineering Epic

Friday was a crazy day. It was a valuable day. This is a day that has given me much experience and knowledge. It calmed my fears and allowed me to grow. It was a day of ski mountaineering, a day that would be called “epic.”

I had the day off and I decided to go skiing. That was a good decision because Little Cottonwood Canyon received over a foot of fresh snow. I went out with Christian again. We were skinning up to Little Superior Peak by 8:30. We had pretty good conditions with good cloud coverage to keep the sun off the snow but it was still a little warm that day. That ended up hurting us a bit later.

The skin up to Little Superior took about 90 minutes. We decided to ski the backside, skin up, and ski down Little Superior. Christian started to check the conditions. He did a ski cut along the top of the shot that we were going to do. This set off a small wet slide that traveled maybe 30 meters at a slow rate. We expected this and decided that we were in business. Christian headed down first and then paused at the bottom signaling for me to go. It had been a couple of weeks since I had skied and I could tell. I didn’t feel as comfortable as I normally did. This was just our warm up run and I needed it. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going on the snow; the snow was heavy. I just felt so out of rhythm. We decided not to go all the way to the valley floor but to skin up the ridge just to our right and get back up to Little Superior.

As we were skinning up this ridge, the face looked so sweet that we decided to ski it. Christian started out and made a few turns down the ridge heading into the trees, the safest route. On his third turn he sent a huge wet slide off. It was about 10 meters wide, traveling about 30 mph (and gaining), and went all the way to the valley floor. We immediately decided to bag that run.

We skinned back up to the top of the ridge and hiked up to Little Superior again. This time was a little harder. The ambient heat had started to melt the snow on top of the knife blade ridge we were hiking. This made it extremely slippery and we were walking over exposed cliffs on either side of us. There must have been inversion set in because the peak, at 10900 feet, was warmer than the valley floor at 8800 feet. As we were walking up to our drop in spot, our visibility went to about 50 feet. That sucked, as we needed to get down before the snow conditions worsened even more. It would have been even harder to see the exposed rocks and cliffs in those conditions. We decided to wait it out but being ready to move at anytime. However, we had decided on hiking the ridge back till we arrived at a safe descent as a back up plan.

Fifteen minutes later our white out started to break. The snow was horribly rotten by this time of the day. Christian started out. Every turn he made sent off a wet slide. That was good for one thing and bad for a couple of reasons. It was good because the wet sliding snow exposed any barely hidden, underlying rock. Now we could see where not to ski. Even though we would be skiing only a turn or two at a time, hitting one of those rocks on a 45 plus degree slope could send one cart wheeling down the slope over some cliffs. The first bad part of a wet slide was that it was a wet slide on a hanging snowfield, meaning that it was suspended stacked snow on cliffs, not a mountain slope. A large enough wet slide could take out the hanging snowfield. The second bad part was now we had only the variable rotten bed layer to ski on.

So Christian skis down, clearly the way and taking his time. I was watching for natural slides above him. When it came for me to drop in I was quite hesitant. I was extremely nervous; you could tell in my breathing, which was shaky and irregular. I knew that I was out of shape for making demanding tele-turns; I was afraid of making a mistake and ending up tumbling towards a cliff; I was afraid of sending a big slide towards Christian. My heart raced as I made my first few turns, trying to stay in the path that Christian cleared to prevent sending down a new slide. I took my time as I tried doing jump tele-turns down a steep slope with exposed rocks. Once I made it down a little cliff band to Christian, I had calmed down. My legs were so exhausted. We continued down the mountain through the trees, not stopping until we reached the road.

We gave an exhausted yell of triumph; we made it down without getting hurt and we were out of danger. As we looked back up to see our descent, we saw that we caused the whole right side of Superior to slide bit by bit. We knew that we had just survived an "epic."

I have not had an experience that was more technically demanding than this day. I am very much grateful that the conditions were less than favorable and that things came about as they did. Now I will be able to remain calm when the situation quickly deteriorates on the mountainside. I now have a confidence that I can make it down a rock exposed slope in less than perfect conditions when needed. And confidence, not cockiness, is a key requirement in ski mountaineering.

Spring Blessings From Heaven

April was a great month for the weekend trips in the backcountry. I had two great tours with a foot plus of blower pow to help relieve the week's stress.

The first tour was a double traverse; Little Cottonwood to Big Cottonwood and back. We started at the end of the road and skinned up to the Twin Lakes Bowl. We dropped our warm up run and skinned out. We continued skinning up the Alta Cat Track to the backside of Solitude and skied a 2000 foot run of untouched foot and an half powder. another short skin and we dropped another 1200 feet. We didn't skin out of that bowl due to natural avalanches occurring all around our chosen path out. We ended up stranded in Big Cottonwood Canyon until we hitch hiked up to Brighton and convinced the liftee to let us get a ride up to the top of the resort so we could skin and ski back to the other side of the mountain. He helped us out and we got back into the Twin Lakes Bowl. Once we skinned out of that we found ourselves looking into Alta with no one around. The sun had warmed up the snow tremendously by this time. The temp had risen 30 degrees since we started out that day. Our last run consisted of heavy snow on top of a good layer of consolidation. I was pretty tired so I took my time finding my last shot. When one of the guys had made it down and I started down my line. The heavy snow made me ski on the top layer and it was fast. I saw that I was right about to ski off a drop off that I was unfamiliar with. I turned hard before going off a cornice into some rocks below and started a small wet avalanche below and above me. It was fun. That day consisted of 9 hours, 15 miles, and 8000 vertical feet.

My second tour that month was with Christian. He took me on a hitch hiking traverse from Little Cottonwood to Big on April 25th. There are pics below detailing the adventure.

Even though the huge dumps brought high avalanche potential, I managed to stay alive amid small slides and enjoy the feeling of having wings on my feet.

Traveling on a huge avalanche slab in Little Cottonwood


A soft warm-up run on Banana Dayz


Getting ready to drop into my first couloir


Benson and Hedges Couloir


Exiting the excitement


End of a good tour with Christian