Cha-Ching!

This post is far overdue, and I apologize for that. The last two weeks have been crazy! I spent last week in Utah to watch my friends compete in the Dew Tour Championships in Ogden, UT and spent a few days riding at Park City Resort. Oddly enough most of my close friends live in Utah. They come out to Colorado in the early season (which is how we met) to shred before their resorts open.

It was an incredibly fun trip and I'm so glad I went. I can't explain to you how thankful I am that I get to take road trips like that. I have a lot of close friends out there that mean the world to me, and it means a lot to me that my parents support my traveling. I really got around to exploring Salt Lake City that week. It was fun to spend time there, but it made me realize how much I love living here in Summit County. I'm sure SLC is beautiful in the summer, but man is it ugly in the winter, ha! There's no snow on the ground until you get up to the actual resorts, and hardly any evergreen trees! It's very... brown. On top of that, it's way too city like for me, that whole area. I like my small little town, it's much more homey! I'd like to think I'm a people person, but that was way too many people for me! Or maybe just too many buildings.

I took a different route on the drive out this time. I usually go up through Steamboat and then over, but a section of that route is very, very, very desolate. In fact, there's a stretch of about 120 miles where there isn't one house, gas station, or building. I took I-70 over through Grand Junction and then up this time. It was still desolate, but not nearly as bad, and a lot more desert like which was cool. I wasn't far from Moab at one point. I also got to drive through some beautiful canyons. I will definitely be taking that route from now on!

I would love to show you pictures, but unfortunately last night my hard drive on my laptop died - I lost everything. It's quite ironic really. Just the day before my best friend spilled nail polish remover on her laptop and lost everything. I gave her the whole "you have to back up your stuff..." lecture, all the while thinking to myself that I should probably do the same. But I didn't, of course. And the next day my laptop died, abruptly and unexpectedly. I'm upset... but this has happened to me twice before. It's my fault for not backing everything up. So I made an impromptu trip to Denver this morning to buy a new laptop. Times like these make me so thankful for the unconditional support from my parents, and also made me realize just how important a higher education is. Life is expensive!

Right after I got back from Denver I had a doctor appointment. I have been having some pretty bad spine issue for the last few years that I am finally fed up with. Chiropractic care has always helped, but it has never been a permanent fix. I went to see a primary care doctor and he referred me to a Spine Specialist in Frisco. I'm really hoping for another solution.

So I apologize again for a lack of posting and pictures lately, as you can tell my life is a little chaotic right now. It happens to the best of us. I'm just going with the flow!

Oh yeah, fortunately I do still have all my pictures that I have posted to facebook. Here's a picture I took of the snowbank on my road before I left for Utah. That's a lot of snow!

And here's one picture I uploaded from my phone of Snowbasin, where the Dew Tour Championships were held. I'm hoping to be able to recover some of my photos from my hard drive. So maybe details on the Dew Tour will come in a later entry!

Denver Big Air

This past Tuesday and Wednesday was the first annual Denver Big Air competition in the Civic Center Park in the heart of downtown Denver. I was lucky enough to be apart of the set-up and therefor got the best seat in the house during the skiing competition on Tuesday.

The total purchase of the scaffolding alone was $600,000. The set-up was 300 feet long and 110 feet high. To get to the top of the ramp I had to climb 15 flights of scaffolding stairs. To say the least it gets very disorientating after a few times. There's so many bars going every which way and the constant spinning up the stairs gets to you. Getting the snow on the actual ramp was a process. It consisted of a crane lifting snow to the top and dropping a little down a time. Or the crane would drop snow at the take off down lower and we would bring it up. Someone would hold a piece of ply wood across the ramp to catch the snow. Then lift it up over the pile and the people behind would pat it down. I'm sure this was done at least a hundred times in the course of a few days.

A crane dropping snow off at the base.

This is what 15 flights of scaffolding looks like.

This is what it looks like looking down.

 

 

Here are some views from the top!

In this picture you can see someone with the piece of ply wood on the far right, and someone helping pack snow down in the center of the ramp.

Will had to paint the wood around the take-off. He took the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to claim it!

The best groomed jump I have ever seen!

Tuesday finally came and I got there around 1:00pm to help with a few last minute things. Snowboard practice started at 3:00pm and here's a little footage from that. (You can hear Switchfoot doing their sound check in the background.)

The public was allowed to start rolling in around 3:30, and there was some last minute grooming right around then.

 6-7pm was skier practice and then it was finally time for the show to begin! The guys did some quick grooming before the show began.

Instead of every rider for himself, this was the first ever competition that was battle of the brands. Big ski brands like Armada, Line Skis, Nordica, Full Tilt and others sent 2-3 riders to work as a team. Each round two teams would go up against each other to do the best tricks for the best overall score, and the best team would move on. 

Here's some footage of some of the skiers.

SIDENOTE: During the first round I was standing on the flat part between the take off and the landing. A group of guys came up the stairs and were watching in amazement next to me. They weren't dressed like skiers or snowboarders but I had a peculiar feeling they were important. They introduced themselves and we got talking and they were really, really nice. Jon was the most talkative one. He was asking me a lot of questions about skiing and the event and asked me to explain the tricks to them. After about a half hour a photographer came up to us and goes 

"Oh my gosh, it's so nice to meet you guys! I can't believe it!" 

They talked for a few minutes and after the photographer walked away Jon smiled at me. I paused for a second and go, 

"Youuuuuuu guys are Switchfoot, aren't you?"

"Haha, yeahhh..." He said and smiled. (I later found out that he was the singer.)

Switchfoot has been a pretty big band since I was in middle school, and they were definitely one of my favorite bands in middle school. They were scheduled to play the live show that night for the competition. I'm kicking myself in the BUTT now for not getting a picture with them.

ANYWAYYYY... The competition ended up with two teams left, Armada (my favorite company in the world) and Line Skis. Switchfoot played between the last elimination round and the finals. I got to stand on the landing and get the best seat in the house! It wasn't too warm and wasn't too cold, and right as they started playing it started to snow very gentle but big snow flakes... the perfect setting! It was also so cool to see the state capital light up like that.

Overall it was one of the funnest events of my life and I can't wait for next year!