The excitement was thirty-five feet high today in Mammoth as world quarterpipe height record holder Simon Dumont and the rest of Salomon's pro team shredded the terrain park with the winners from Salomon's Jib Academy stops. The only things taller than Simon's pipe airs were the T-shirts all these kids were wearing. When I met one of the Scandinavian Jib Academy winners in the airport, I briefly wondered if Sweden was behind the times on Thalidomide research. I realized with relief that my alarm resulted from the illusory effect of the massive T-shirt hanging off of his fully developed arms.
A steady stream of flat 3s, rodeo 7s, and switch 7s, 9s, 10s, and 12s from the youthful Jib Academy finalists illustrated the upward trend of ability in freestyle skiing. Today's off-snow activity, soccer, illustrated the popularity of a current sartorial trend in freestyle. Despite the considerable cardiovascular demands of the game of soccer, the players swarmed the pitch (that's a snobby way to say "field"), fiercely competing for the ball as they gulped exhaled carbon dioxide from inside their Salomon Jib Academy handkerchiefs.
I prefer to explain this look as derived from the true bad-asses of the Wild West. Alternate suggestions exist, as "bad-ass emulation" is the fashion statement's central motivator with time and place being only secondary concerns. In news unrelated to skiing, it is fun to do bad things.
"I just want to do hood-rat stuff with my friend."
Oh yeah. For Salomon Jib Academy coverage that goes beyond my thoughts on ski couture, check Newschoolers.com.
My Photoshop thread contribution: Hallary Clinton embroiled in a heated debate with political rival Barack Obama.
They say that one man's trash is another man's treasure. In the same way, one man's moment of glory can be another man's moment of laughter. Somebody found an image of Tanner Hall in the middle of a ferocious cry of victory and encouraged the users of Newschoolers.com to have at it in Photoshop. Users responded with recreations of the original image to double you over. I've posted a few of my favorites below.
Photo: AP/Nathan Bilow
Left: Tanner Hall bellows with elation upon winning Winter X 11 Superpipe. Right: A clever rendering of Tanner's vociferous pose.
Winning comes from within: Tanner Hall in another life, another time.
Every time Winter X Pipe rolls around, the "Tanner vs. Simon" buzz comes with it. A rivalry that fierce knows no bounds, be they seasonal, continental, or even taxonomical.
Tim Durtschi vents frustration during an unsurprisingly cloudy AK heli trip.
Ski videos are wall-to-wall action. They show you the burly Alaskan line, but they don't show you the week of chilling in the hotel room that preceded it. And I'm not saying that they should. There are few things I hate more than the classic, stoner-narrated, heli-skiing segment intro: "The lodge was super chill. We went up for some heli time in March, but the weather would not cooperate. But we played a lot of chess, and looking the majestic mountains made us appreciate what totally radical lives we lead." I know, man. What a trip.
Nevertheless, production companies keep publishing heli-trip down time ruminations, so somebody must like hearing them. Tim Durtschi concluded his first Alaskan heli (hotel) experience last week. I caught up with him over iChat during one of his epic Alaska couch sessions.
John Symms (10:57:25 PM): Are you still in Alaska? Tim Durtschi (10:57:38 PM): Yes. John Symms (10:57:43 PM): How is that going? Tim Durtschi (10:59:05 PM): Well me and Rozendaal played a lot of online poker today and didn't get any shots. Haha. It's cloudsy. John Symms (11:02:18 PM): Have you guys gotten any flying time? Tim Durtschi (11:12:53 PM): Well it's weird, but they will only fly us if we give them large sums of money. John Symms (11:15:11 PM): That is weird. So is that a "no"? Tim Durtschi (11:15:37 PM): We flew yesterday. John Symms (11:16:16 PM): How much longer do you stay? Tim Durtschi (11:17:37 PM): Until the end of April, I think. John Symms (11:17:43 PM): Guau! Tim Durtschi (11:17:47 PM): It's a good way to make a month disappear. John Symms (11:17:49 PM): Yeah. How many days have you put skis on? Tim Durtschi (11:18:09 PM): 6 or seven. John Symms (11:18:15 PM): Out of? Tim Durtschi (11:18:26 PM): 21. John Symms (11:18:32 PM): Damn. I guess that's more times than i've put skis on. Tim Durtschi (11:18:50 PM): Haha. John Symms (11:20:14 PM): What have you been doing? Big, nasty lines? Tim Durtschi (11:24:03 PM): The nastiest. We've just been following Nobis around and snaking his lines. John Symms (11:24:45 PM): Sick. Tim Durtschi (11:28:27 PM): Sage's lines are easy to take over also. John Symms (11:30:08 PM): How come? Tim Durtschi (11:30:41 PM): He's so friendly, all you have to do is ask. John Symms (11:30:59 PM): Haha. Tim Durtschi (11:39:24 PM): But I haven't got on any big huge sh!t yet. Kind of lame, I want to but so far just been small lines. Tim Durtschi (11:41:42 PM): And then we decided to spend an unprecedented amount of money to shoot a kicker from the helicopter. That was a great way to burn a sh!tload of our heli time. John Symms (11:43:23 PM): Nice work. Did you get some good shit anyway? Tim Durtschi (11:44:13 PM): Yea we got one good shot out of it, unfortunately Pep came up short and tweaked his knee a bit but he's fine. John Symms (11:45:34 PM): Burning heli time is key. If you spend less than $10,000, you've failed. Tim Durtschi (11:48:15 PM): Well the sleds have not been used at all while we've been up here which is a bummer. John Symms (11:51:37 PM): Sleds don't cost enough to run. Tim Durtschi (11:58:08 PM): That's true. You're also not paying someone to tell you where you can and cannot ski. John Symms (12:00:54 AM): Anything scary? Tim Durtschi (12:04:17 AM): The guides are quite worried about avalanches. John Symms (12:04:36 AM): If you get in an avalanche, that's a guaranteed shot. Tim Durtschi (12:13:24 AM): That's what I keep telling them.
Snow sports culture has a long standing preoccupation with the Wild Wild West. Look around your local terrain park and tell me it's not crawling with bandits. Pop in a Finger On Da Trigger video and count the bandana-clad desperados. Check out any freestyle ski movie to find herds of neckerchiefed ruffians tearing apart terrain parks the same way they surely must also tear apart dusty saloons.
Photos: Getty Images, Austin Holt
Cowboys used bandanas to conceal their identities while engaging in such rascally activities as bar fights, duels, and bank robberies.
Kid Rock wants to be a cowboy. Add to that the fact that Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson implored our generation's parents to not "let [their] babies grow up to be cowboys," and you have a guaranteed craze. The youth can simultaneously copy a bad-ass (Kid Rock, I love his music, don't you?) and superficially defy their square parents simply by donning the makeshift cotton mask of a spur-wearing, six-shooter-toting, bank-robbing original gangster. It has been alleged that this fixture of snow couture stems also from the popularity of hip-hop music within the culture. Rap sensations like Will Smith's "Wild Wild West" make this a natural, if slightly misguided, attribution.
Photos: FilmMagic, thlevitationproject.com
But being a cowboy, baby, is not the only way to be a bad boy for life.
Cowboys kick ass. I wish I was a cowboy. But for the sake of keeping snow fashion lively and evolving, we need to investigate other methods for projecting a renegade appearance in the park. Enter The Levitation Project. LP's long product line includes balaclavas which cover the face much more completely than the classic do-rag. They bring the cool bank robber image into the 21st century while additionally offering the option to emulate a different kind of bad boy (see photo). The site also hosts a recently released powder packed webisode.
