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

Thanksgiving Ski Day - Snowbasin

Day two of my '09-'10 ski season is under the belt and boy are my quads feeling it from the groomers.  I went up to Snowbasin, my resort choice of the year, for a couple of hours prior to the Thanksgiving festivities to get my legs in shape.  The resort only had a single run open, which is standard for opening day.  I got in a total of 5 laps before I had to head back to get ready.  That's a good 11,550 vertical feet on hard, loud snow.

I can't wait until winter is in its full swing and the runs are filled in.  I'm pretty sure that I'll have a lot of fun at Basin this year.

I'll post my season goals tomorrow.  Here's my awesome Basin Season Pass pic for ya to enjoy:

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

The Real Man

Every once in a while I feel that I need to remind myself, as well as those around me, what a real man is and what he should look like.  To become a real man, it takes much time, dedication, and discipline.  For me it took about 3 weeks.

You might be wondering what standard I have become and now I'll show you.

The Real Man "Cool Man" Look

The Real Man "Excited" Look

Joey's Wedding

I know that I've slacked on this so I'll give you a little blurp on the most ridiculous, fun, exciting, touching, joyful, crazy, humorous, and out of control weekend.

That's pretty much it; I don't know how to describe it any better than that.

No really, I enjoyed being home with my second family. I've missed the Kraemers and this was a great weekend being together. I was so honored to be in Joey's wedding party. We definitely rocked the house, were loud, obnoxious, and joyous. I really can't detail how much fun we had.

Here's some pics

Marjean and Me

















Greg's wife Jess, Greg, Me, Sara, Ally, and Sara after Rehearsal















Getting the boys ready
















My wedding party counterpart and me exiting

Let the party begin







Jeremy at the end of the night

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

Bye Bye Birdies

So it finally happened: Marek and Seth got rid of Jackson and Bentley. These were their two African Grey Parrots that I've grown to love. Unfortunately with having a small almost year old baby crawling around, Seth and Marek didn't want to risk Scout crawling into the bird room and accidentally getting bit. You see the birds were very curious yet scared of Scout and would get defensive if she was around.

Yes I am sad and it's just not the same around here anymore. Here are a few pics for my memory.

Bentley


Jackson


Bentley 'n' Me



Bentley


Bentley and Jackson going at it - Bentley tells her off

Let's Go Shootin'

After all the fun at work with the Flybar pogo stick, Travis, Chris, and I travelled to Travis' father-in-law's place to let out some stress and have fun shooting. We, more like they, brought a decent arsenal of all types and calibers. We did everything from rapid fire close quarters, off-hand rifle distance shooting, to 150 through 300 yard shots.

You can really tell that Travis has spent a lot of time here as he is deadly fast and accurate with his .40 S&W. I really enjoyed shooting Chris' .45 LC pistol and carbine. You gotta love cowboy guns.

It was a really good time with some buddies that I've come to enjoy and am sad to see be let go from the company. That's one thing that I've come to not enjoy with working in the government contractor's world.

Gotta Love Handguns


Chris enjoying the awesome handgun target setup


Chris getting sharp


Taking Travis by surprise

Pogo Stick on Steroids

If there's one thing I like about my generation and those just a little bit older than me is that we love to bring things back from our childhood, but when we do bring it back we take it one step further.

Let's take pogo sticks for instance. They were cool back in the day (probably everyone's childhood) but they lacked the "takin' it to the next level" capability. Well some genius had the idea to make a pogo stick out of stronger materials, add 12 more springs to the equation, and call it the Flybar. This thing can actually propel you over 7 feet high if you know what you're doing. Paul actually bought one of these $200 plus items and we convinced him to bring it into work. Let's just say that we weren't too talented with it and "barely" missed the 7 foot mark. Here's a few shots:

"What?!! I'm only a foot high?!"


"How about now? Huh?!?! Still the same? Watch this!"


"Wow that was close. I'm done!"


Paul banging his knee getting on the thing.