Yesterday afternoon, on a spring day that could not have been any more perfect than it was, with a park setup built especially for the occasion, the good folks at Grouse Mountain Terrain Parks and Grousepark.com threw a season ending jam for the ages. Shaw Butterworth, Marcus Cartwright, Adam Nicolls, Tom Robinson and Dan Ripper were up early yesterday morning, hoping to get some solid build time, only to run into technical difficulties. With all issues finally resolved at 10 am, they went to work to build a formidable set up consisting of two jumps, a hip and a variety of rails. The hip seemed to be the feature of the afternoon, with kids sending it bigger than I’ve ever seen at a local Grouse event. I won’t ramble on too much as the other bloggers will be bringing you better coverage, pictures and some Go Pro footage. I just want to thank everyone from park crew that was there helping with the jam. Rob Morrison came out for his afternoon shift and helped out huge with course maintenance and tear down. I also want to give a huuuge shout to Jeff Silcock, Grouse Mountain’s Events and Sponsorship manager. Jeff is a background guy, you don’t really see what he does, but without this guy, we’d have no park and the parks definitely would not have grown to where they are. Jeff was there taking pictures all afternoon and you can find them all on our Facebook fan page.
Sunglasses and smiles all around.
Thanks to our sponsors, Quiksilver, DC, Oakley and Roxy, as well as Pow Gloves for hooking up over $3000 worth of prizing. Also, huge thanks to everyone that showed up and ripped hard. Most of you took a tongue lashing from me and put up with it. Not that you really had a choice. It’s tough love, kiddies. You’ll thank me one day. I called the local scene out on their lack of A-game, but you all definitely brought the noise yesterday. We’ll be back next season with more prizing to give away, hopefully I’ll be back as well, but that’s up to Jeff and the crew downstairs. Here’s to hoping we can get the parks bigger and better next year!
No one took me up on my offer to dance for a pair of goggles. Weak.
Near the beginning of the season, Joe Mickelson and I got some filming done in the Quiksilver park. Despite the cloudy day, we got a lot of filming done with both Ben and Shayan. However, due to “technical” troubles, the edit has just been re – uploaded. Excuse the permanent smudge on the wide angle lense. Editing by Joe Mickelson.
What is beef? According to deceased rapper Biggie Smalls, beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep. By that definition, it would appear that there is no such beef between the parks at Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour. Most likely because we’re not located in east Brooklyn. In any case, any one who knows anything about the local scene is well aware that there is, unfortunately, beef between the two mountains.
It’s not intermountain beef either. It’s strictly park related. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but when I was growing up riding, I enjoyed both Grouse and Seymour. Yea, I went to Grouse way more often, but I got up to Seymour every now and then. I was just stoked to ride, didn’t matter where, didn’t matter who had more snow, or who had a better park, or how much the food was, or whether you had to drive up or not. A day on the hill was a day on the hill. Now, it seems like people want to talk shit more than they want to ride. Listening to all the drama that’s going on within the local scene is like reading a script off Peak Season or the OC. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
I’ve heard people say “Why doesn’t Grouse put in some corrugated pipe?” Why does every park have to have the same features? Seymour has corrugated piping set up and yes, it’s super fun. BUT! Grouse has an S-rail, and that’s fun too. They’ve got Nike as a park sponsor, we’ve got Quiksilver. In the end though, who cares? It’s so frustrating, having to deal with all the road blocks that this situation throws up when it comes to the two parks. You go to Seymour as a Grouse rider, you get called out. Why? That’s absolutely retarded. It happens at Grouse too, so don’t get too smug. Moreover, it has nothing to do with the management at either mountain. Have you ever talked to the powers at either mountain? Nicest people ever! It’s just skewed attitudes and ignorance of the riders that ride at either mountain that lead to more drama than all of Shakespeare’s plays put together.
So here’s the deal. Big props to both crews, they’ve both killed it this season. Instead of talking shit, go to one of the local parks, strap in, and get creative on what’s there. There was a time, not too long ago, when having a box and a flat bar was a huge thing. It’s not about who has the most legit handrail, or the most pristine jump. It’s about doing what we do best, and that isn’t dishing beef. It’s riding. If you’ve forgotten what having fun and just riding looks like, here are a few videos to refresh your memory.
Thank you Crapneto, for keeping the fun in snowboarfunding.
The Quiksilver Terrain Park is running stronger than ever as we’re nearing the end of 2009. The sun has been shining almost every day and winter break has brought a few new faces to the mountain. I’m not in much of a writing mood as I’m about to head up the mountain, so I’ll let my photos do the talking. Enjoy.
Corey Mcintosh sending a cork 5 over the jump
James Anderson with a tail 720 over the jump
Park Crew Ryan Belich with a backside 180 off the pole-jam
Grousepark's own Sam Masih sending it off the pole-jam
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.
As we get deeper into December, the days are getting shorter and the countdown to the 21st of the month continues. Now why is December 21st so special? From a figurative stand-point, it is the shortest day of the year. So with the days getting shorter, the hours of available light are fading away with them. With this in mind, I decided it was time to buy an external flash for my camera. So after spending a few days of contemplating what to get, I ended up settling for something cheap to learn the basics with. A Canon Speedlite 270EX to be exact. Yesterday, I finally managed to get out to Grouse for the afternoon and early evening and get some shooting done. I spent most of yesterday shooting in the newly opened Quiksilver terrain park with fellow tight-pant wearing skiers, Bryce Mclean and Peter Warkentin.
So without further ado, here are the results from my first day of shooting with the new flash.
Bryce Mclean with a shifty-on to the down box.
Peter Warkentin, same trick, different feature.
Thanks for reading, more pictures and content will be coming soon!
