The girls are stoked.
Snowbird, UT
Amidst the empty cans of Red Bull and bottles of Amstel Light lie my memories of yet another IFSA Freeskiing event. The skiers started arriving about a week before the competition. Some of them were familiar faces. Others, new faces that would be familiar by the end of the week. Even with the new faces it was easy to pick a competitor out of the crowd waiting to get on the tram. Instead of verifying what I already knew, a conversation would start out with, "Are you pre-qualified or are you skiing on Thursday?" Next would be, "The comp should be pretty sick. A lot of snow in the forecast."
I remember the first day I started noticing this group homing in on the Snowbird venues. It was one of the first real hardpack days of the season and the snow was fast. I got off the tram and headed toward Silverfox, a popular way to start the day. About a dozen other skiers raced down the groomer to the drop in point, most ripping a few turns switch, scaring the occasional snowplower praying for a miracle to get them down the mountain. It is a whole different experience to be skiing at my home resort and to have a dozen or more comp skiers around me sending cliffs, sometimes the same cliff that I want to send, and just in general generating a kind of chaos not found on a typical day. I don´t know how many times that day I saw two people approaching the same air with massive speed, one person losing the race and having to quickly duck away with both control and smoothness. Not knowing when to turn for fear of crashing into someone skiing just as fast or faster than me made me do a lot of straightrunning that day. Definitely not a day for turns. Just a day of skiing fast and stomping all my airs, so that the next guy sending it would not land on top of me. Along with the craziness came a feeling of community. Being a part of this group of skiers makes the winter, the mountains, and skiing, that much more important in my life.
It has been several weeks now since the Snowbird 2006 event and my body finally feels rested. Skiing and partying at one hundred percent for an entire week was exhausting. The energy used at the top of the course before my run was enough to make partying seem as reasonable as throwing a front flip off a one hundred-foot cliff located in the venue. Well, if Julian could do it, I suppose I could as well, and that is exactly what I did, partied like I was not in Utah. Now, weeks later, I think about the event, the skiing, the friends, the exhaustion, and realize that this stuff is going to add years to my life. I would like to thank M.S.I and the judges for their persistence, Red Bull and Amstel light for the liquid refreshments, and all of the athletes and friends for throwing themselves off cliffs for the love of the sport. .
