If only it were this easy ... Photo credit: Lee Cohen
Whether you live at the base of the Cottonwood Canyons or in the heart of the Carolinas, you’ll eventually hear the call of a faraway mountain range and travel by air to ski or ride. Since spring is go-time for places like Alaska and interior British Columbia, and it’s been known to produce big Pacific storms throughout the west, we thought we’d share some advice on traveling with your closet of gear in tow.
If the Internet is the great equalizer of the 21st century, democratizing the power of data, then POV action sports video cameras like the GoPro Hero and Contour HD are the equivalent video camera revolutionaries of our age, giving everyone from 3-year-old rippers to gray-haired veterans the chance to share their ski footage with the world.
Videos created with these cameras have the potential to wow your audience, but don’t be intimidated or tell yourself you have to be the ripping-est shredder on the hill to produce compelling footage. With a simple shot list of angles to get, followed by a couple of hours of filming and a modicum of commitment toward editing, you can ditch the bored-to-death ’60s vacation slide show stereotypes and keep your audience glued to their screens.
Grab a friend and get after it
Racking up over 100 days in one season is a feat that many snow addicts fantasize about but few ever actually accomplish. It’s one thing to take a resort job for eight bucks an hour, live in a roach-infested ski-town apartment with six roommates, and ride every day. … But when your life includes stuff like loan payments and a “real job,” putting together a triple-digit season gets a lot tougher. But that’s not to say it can’t be done; follow these handy tips to better your odds of reaching the ultimate snow-bum benchmark.
Snow snobbery at its finest
After a summer in Alaska, I spent the fall of 2004 exploring the West in my beat-up VW Golf. I had the inkling that I would find a mountain town for the winter and become the proverbial ski bum—working as a lifty or something, and riding every day. I handed out my résumé at job fairs in Big Sky and Jackson Hole before making my way down to Salt Lake City. Read More …
May your Christmas consist of endless face shots and so much snow that you can’t even find your own car in the parking lot.
A little something for the grinches (and my personal favorite of the three). A montage of Santas crashing into each other while exiting chairlifts:
And here’s a little something for the snowboarders out there:
Read More …
With more snowboard camber designs available than ever before, trying to choose which one is best for you can be overwhelming. But don’t despair—if you cut through all the marketing lingo and trademark symbols, pretty much every board fits into one of these four categories. Read on to learn about some pros and cons of each, as well as a few general rules about how a board’s camber profile affects its overall feel. Read More …
Start praying now ...
Every autumn, snow worshippers around the nation—nay, around the world—unite and engage in a sacred ritual called the Pray for Snow party. Anthropologists note that this ritual often includes multiple kegs of frothy beverages and bonfires large enough to be seen from outer space. Here in Utah’s Wasatch, we supplicate the snow saints for a solid 500+-inch year (with 28 inches at Snowbird in the past 48 hours, we feel solid about our entreaties thus far). In New Jersey, they pray for enough money to buy a ticket to Utah. We traveled the nation to give you a little inspiration for your own Pray for Snow Party. Read More …
Rocker Sizing
Picking out the right size Rocker or Reverse Camber snowboard is nowhere near as complicated as people seem to be making it. We hate to say this … but it really comes down to personal preference.
Real helpful. We know.
However, keep in mind that many companies urge people to size down because you can get more stability/maneuverability in the shorter size, but not lose any float if you do hit powder. But it still comes down to where you spend most of your day on the mountain. Read More …
Photo courtesy Jamie Preston, #80 on the BC Leaderboard
Many world-class outdoor athletes began learning their sports in their preschool years. Tommy Caldwell did his first climb at age 3. Reinhold Messner summited his first mountain with his dad at age 5. Parents who get their toddlers on the rock or onto the slopes might be giving their kids a leg up—but perhaps even better is that parents have an opportunity to pass on the love they have for their sports or the outdoors to their progeny. Read More …
Grete Eliassen: Best Performance
With the MLB playoffs looming, ESPN.com found time to give props to the best of those other athletes: 2010 ESPN Action Sports Ski and Snowboard Video Awards. This list of editors’ picks compiled by Liam Gallagher (that couldn’t be this Liam Gallagher, right?) and Megan Michelson, focused on awarding “the 10 best in the most coveted of categories based on talent, creativity, gnarliness of tricks and terrain, editing and overall impact.”
We read through the list, and weren’t surprised to see Backcountry.com Team Athletes mentioned in nearly every category. Grete Eliassen and Jeremy Jones even took home honors for Best Female/Male Performances. Ahh yeah. Read More …
Zen and the Art of Managing Powder Panic
By: JGW | December 30th, 20104 Comments »
Every region of the skiing world has its own particular form of this terrible ailment or morning malaise … a rapacious brooding that turns happy citizens into gorilla-chest-pounding, car-horn-honking, Ben-Hur-on-the-traverse fiends. This sanctimonious demon’s name: powder-induced panic. Let me elucidate a specific example …
Salt Lake City’s proximity to habit-forming ski terrain is, like almost anything during this merry-go-round around the Sun, both a boon and bane. Yes, friends, just like Peter Parker’s uncle once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” If you haven’t experienced how empowering 24 inches of Wasatch-density awesomeness can be, then maybe it’s time you took a trip.
But let’s not forget what Lord Acton said: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Salt Lake is within short driving distance of more than ten ski and riding resorts—and the greater-Wasatch-front sprawl boasts more than 2 million citizens. Consider the cumulated monster cloud of psychic anxiety that collects over this salty front each morning fresh snow has fallen … it’s like Ray’s incarnation of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to the Nth degree. Seriously, people WILL lose their shit.
Allow me to offer some suggestions to help you harness this power (and be responsible) without letting it overcome you: Read More …
Tags: resorts, skiing, snowboarding
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