There may not be as much snow on the hill as this time last season, but that hasn’t stopped park crew from keeping this running smoothly. If you haven’t been up lately, you’re missing out. The park has something this season that it has been struggling with the last few years, flow. A few new additions to Grouse’s park crew have helped keep this flow in the park. The other night I got up the mountain and did a few photo laps with Shayan, Park Crew Conrad and new Park Crew Anthony. Anthony and I had a bit of a close call with him almost landing me. I was shooting with a fisheye lens and, as anyone who has shot with a fisheye lens can tell you, it makes things appear to be much farther away. Due to this, I couldn’t tell just how close Anthony was until I felt him tap my backpack on the way down. Anyways, here are some shots from the night.
A close up of Anthony's face from the jump where he almost landed on me
Anthony looking a little less frightened this time with a 3-tap on the barrel feature
So, if you haven’t heard, Whistler is AMAZING right now. To take advantage of this fact, Frodo, Kyle Jasper, Matt Whelan and I headed up there yesterday and oh ya, it was perfect! Started off with some park laps and found that every jump was absolutely perfect so we sessioned them for most of the day. Since we were having so much fun, I didn’t even bring the camera out till about the 6th lap and only managed to get a couple decent shots before heading in for lunch. After lunch we went up the peak to shred some pow. It had been almost a week since the last storm and there was still plenty of fluffy white powder to float on. We were all pretty tired, so we decided to head down on a good note. All in all, the day was sick and everyone reading this should head up to Whistler before the huge crowds arrive because it’s prime right now. Here are the few shots I got this weekend and hopefully I’ll be able to shoot some deep pow slashes up Grouse soon!
Matt Whelan stoked on the park (and life) after the first lap
At the end of the 2009 season, I was invited to film the Alterna Shoot alongside Charlie Grinnell. This was an amazing experience involving superb riding, course and location. The weather was in our favour, providing the shoot with soft snow and the occasional cloud. As both days came to a close, my P2 cards had been filled and I knew I had something. Here’s the edit of what I came up with, hope you all enjoy it.
Throughout my 2.5 seasons of skiing park, I have noticed quite a few things that I think separate park skiers from the rest of the ski industry. Aside from the obvious one of skiing in terrain parks and making use of having tips on both ends of our skis, we also have a very unique dress code that makes most of us easy to pick out of a crowd. The ‘gangster’ trend has completely taken over park skiing. Having a jacket that reaches your knees is no longer looked at as stupid and un-functional, but rather stylish and cool. With a jacket that big, baggy pants are a necessity to keep things looking proportional. As always though, there are some people who go against the trend and wear tight pants, which are slowly making their rise to popularity.
Along with the fashion side of things, we park riders also seem to have more of a ‘connection’ on the hill. Whenever I’m skiing the park alone, I can almost always find someone to do laps with. Whether I know the person well, or even know them at all, we share the common interest of park skiing. This was one of the things that probably kept me interested in the park scene back when I first started out. If my memory serves me well, this is how I started skiing with Ben Neil about 2-3 seasons ago. Ben got into the park skiing scene a season before me, and I remember in my early days before I got to know Ben, thinking to myself, ‘I wish I could ski that well.’ Well it’s 3 years later and Ben is still way ahead of me in the park, but that never stops us from having fun skiing together.
With that being said, Ben and I (along with a few others) spent Saturday doing photo-laps in the park and managed to come out with quite a few shots that I personally am very happy with. Here are the final results.
Hey Guys, Went up filming Thursday night with Simon and Shayan to test out the Steadicam. The Steadicam was incredibly hard to use and in most cases was shakier then handheld … but I’ll get the hang of it. Anyways it was cloudy up there so I decided to mix up the colors a bit … lemme know what you think.
This winter has been quite the weather reporters dream, especially in BC, but more specifically Vancouver. We went from a mild and wet fall to a freezing cold -20 with wind chill in mid December all the while being pounded with snow. Vancouver, in the city received roughly 100cm of the fluffy white stuff in December, and let me say… the city was not prepared (nor were its citizens), but it sure was perty to look at. And so here where we are wearing t-shirts in mid-January thanks to a temperature inversion. If you’re not sure what a temperature inversion is, the kind folks at wikipedia.org describe it as: ‘an increase in temperature with height, or to the layer within which such an increase occurs’.
There is nothing like a temperature inversion, you wake up its grey, ugly and cold so you think it’s like that everywhere, but when you get about halfway up the mountain you are pleasantly surprised with blue skies and a warmer temperatures the higher you go. The city is covered and you feel as if you are on another planet, standing on top of the mountain looking out at a sea of clouds.
If you have the chance try and make your way up one of the local Vancouver ski hills over the next couple days as it is supposed to remain an inversion until possibly Monday or Tuesday.
