It is right there, on the top of the mountain, where everything comes perfectly together. The sun high in the clear skies with the view open to the Mt. Washington. The snow squeaking under our boots and thick and heavy covering the branches of the dense pine forest around us. Where to go from here? Aaron hits a little knoll on the side and spins playfully off. Matt ollies restlessly. John, riding switch to rest his back leg, suggests to hit a jib-a-way.
Snowboarding is about gravity. About action and re-action. You push the edge of the board in the snow and the snow pushes back turning your board at fairly great speed. You push to much, and the snow gives in, or there is some naughty ice underneath and you kiss the ground. You push to little and there is no re-action: you continue sliding forward, losing control until, eventually, you catch an opposite edge and flatten your nose in the snow. So, you have to stay focused.
Matt is hopping over the snowgun tubes on the side of the steep trail. Aaron is laying it down really low. John drops into the woods half way down. The pine gradually gives its way to birch, I can tell by memory. I don’t see that right now. My eyes are glued to the Aaron’s butt so I don’t lose the group. I have to look between the trees. Poker-brush here, spagetti-grass there, nemesis of the East Coast tree riding. Huh, some tracks on the left. Small animal. Maybe squirrel. No good. I can’t squeeze thru the same space a squirrel can. Maybe if it was a deer, I thought. The run is steep, all right, and we are hitting it really hard. My thighs are revolting. I sketch out dropping of a 6 foot tall concrete slab called ‘the bunker’ and I run in the middle of the bump field with no trace of my group. Great.
Fortunately, they were just a few feet above my backside screaming my name. "Let’s hit the triangular jump," says John. I see just bumps. I know bumps may be used as kickers. But there must be a clear landing, not bumped up. John has a keen eye for finding those finer things in life like clear landings in the bumps, clean lines in poker-brush lined tree trails, right wax for the conditions and the appropriately sized glass pipe for the occasion. The one we used on our way up was good for four hits. Triangular kicker is, er, triangular, with a mellow approach, a steep backside and a clear landing. It is perfect. Then we hit something they call water-crest and it is essentially a rudimentary, natural quarter-pipe. It is rarely doable, but this year there are tons of natural snow everywhere on the mountain cushioning those not quite stuck landings. Charge up with just the right speed and you’ll catch air at the top, spin and gently slide down.
The sunny skies are deceptive. It is actually 40 below with the wind-chill, and Matt is having a white nose. So, at the bottom, frost-nipped but grinning, trying to avoid chairlifts, we line up to catch another ride up on gondola, that locals appropriately nicknamed ‘ganjala’. Naturally, we do not want to share the cabin with some fancy dressed ‘herb’ family from New Jersey. We declare therefore that we want to keep our snowboards in the racks outside, to avoid damaging cabin’s interior. This quite reasonable request, however, meets the ungainly resistance of the lift guy, a rather luxuriously waisted newbie. So, we move into the cabin really slowly, clumsily, making it impossible for anybody else to come in with us. Finally inside, it is time for another attitude adjustment. The pains and worries of the adult life yield slowly to the great Vermont outdoors. The persistent aching in the joints creeps underneath the thick layer of smoke, but it gives way eventually. All the things that we shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t have done with our lives seem increasingly less important by the time we reach the top, itching for another run, like kids who just want to play in the snow.
"Did you see how I spined of that jump?" asks Aaron, taking it in, deep. No, we didn’t. We were busy watching our own landings, I guess. "This is crazy, we hadn’t that much snow the entire last season," says Matt, excited, reminding me of the time last year when we went to jump of a cliff at the steepest end of the mountain and ended up nose first in the waist deep snow. Today it is almost as much snow as it was at the peak of the last season, and it is only the beginning. "Yup," says John, "we are heading for a real Vermont winter this year."
At the top, we make our way between the tourists and snowmaking guns through the trees to the top of the terrain park. This year there will be more snowmaking than ever. Vermont is not only the state with the largest percentage of Nader vote in the continental U.S. - it is also a state truly committed to environmentalism. Article 250 frustrates large corporations, and leaves Vermonters poor but living in the cleanest environment in the East. The same laws frustrated snowmaking efforts in the past. Snowmaking was restricted by the availability of the local water resources, which suffered a string of dry summers. Now, the water is bought elsewhere and piped up to the resort, making the snowmaking more expensive, but literally without limits.
Unlike the "triangular," kickers in the park are clearly marked with fluorescent orange spray paint, so even in the flat light one can hit them fearlessly. It is my first run in the park this year. So I just straight jump. It is funny. You so much depend on your feet movements while you are riding, and then, suddenly, when you are in the air, you can do whatever you want: you can stretch, you can put your board in the most ludicrous positions. But the air-time is so short, a couple of seconds the most and it is the landing where you have to be perfectly balanced. And there is always coccyx-crushing ice in the East Coast landing zone, because of all the riders breaking on their heel edge. John sweeps the table top with a tail grab. Aaron does a backside 360 indy, but shies away from the rail, massaging gently his lower back that reminded him of his yesterday’s wipe-out. Matt slides down the rail nose-first and hop off 180 to switch.
John takes us then to the other side of the mountain, where still there is a spot of the untracked fresh powder. Man made snow is more abundant and lasts longer, but it lacks that light, sweet and tangy taste of natural snow. The difference is like between plastic and wood, acrylic and wool, orange juice from concentrate and freshly squeezed. There is no real man-made powder. Riding our snow feels like riding through chalk. Riding "heavenly" snow feels like riding through soft cottonwool. Bouncing of rollers, like a surfer hitting the crest of a wave. Getting the snow in your face when you stop. It is worth to ride to the other side of the mountain. It is worth to duck the rope. It is worth an occasional core shot. It is worth a hike in freezing temperatures. It is even worth pushing your board back a dreaded dead-flat cross-over trail.
Day 1: After Hours
I drive Aaron home afterwards. He drove the speed limit this summer, maybe once in his life. Vermont speed limits are ridiculously low. The guy in the Mac truck behind him thought that Aaron was spiting him driving so slow. So, he just run Aaron’s little Hyundai over. And Aaron has no car now. He does have a swell ski-bum accommodation, though. Living with Matt (and three other riders that are crashing in there: Jay, Salmon and Advil) in the house of Matt’s girlfriend’s parents. The parents come over maybe twice a month. We found Matt’s friends busy building a 16 feet long gap-jump in the backyard. Aaron had to go to work. Both Matt and Aaron work as prep cooks in the evening in restaurants in the resort area. So, there is not much time for anything else. They ride, they smoke, they work, they sleep. They don’t go out. They don’t drink. Between riding and going to work, they chill for about an hour with a two feet tall glass bong on the table between them. Matt was off that day, so me and him took a few bong hits, grabbed a Red Bull each and joined his friends in building the jump. After about 4 hours of heavy-duty snow shoveling the kicker, the landing and the approach were ready and tested. We were hitting it until midnight.
I am looking down from the top of the approach line, lit just by the house’s emergency lights: there is a vertical drop, as if you are dropping into the pipe, then there is a sharp curve between a thick, old pine tree and a rock the size of a Jeep Cherokee. It is nearly flat from there on to the 5 feet tall kicker. Obviously, in order to clear the gap, one should not loose speed in the curve. Can I make it? Advil - guess how he got the nickname - run his board into the concrete cinder-blocks on the side of the ‘trail’ - but others made it over. They are all at the bottom, cheering me up. Matt screams that he is going to lie down inside the gap and take picture of me flying over. We had briefly considered putting Advil’s jeep in the middle, but Advil was not quite happy about the idea. A breeze of discomfort charges through my brain: I might be called Vicodin for the rest of my life, given how badly I am going to mess myself up in that gap. Still, I would hate to walk down the steep approach line - I may slip and hit the rock and hurt even more. I decided that I may get hurt less if I try to huck myself over that gap. So, I go for it. Let the clutch go and step on the gas. Speed. Power. "Pump it!" they scream. Matt, however, is not lying down inside the gap. He is a smart kid, after all. Pop. Air. Whiff of the tree branches just above my outstretched hand. Reach the other side with your board, I repeat to myself. Keep the tip up. Finally, a thud and the light, soft snow that we piled up for the landing, encroaches me, and I am laughing. It is interesting how our appreciation for life grows with the amount of risks we are ready to take.
There is that girl that calls Aaron every day and wants to go riding with him. So, he will have to do that tomorrow and will not be able to ride with us. At that time, I thought that sucked, but when I came home, I found the exciting message on my answering machine: Tony wanted us to go hike the part of the mountain that was not yet open, hitting those tons of freshies that we were blessed with in the past week.
Day 2: Out Of Bounds
Tony’s obsession with powder borders on insanity. He travels around the world seeking places to hike for powder. He also tends to wake you up in the ungodly pre-dawn hours urging you to join him in that quest. We park his four-wheeler as far up as it goes and start preparing for the hike: shed the middle layer, put it in the backpack together with goggles, board tools, fluids and energy bars, fasten the snowboard to the backpack, fasten the backpack to your torso, light the joint and inhale the fresh Vermont outdoors scents deeply.
It is a five mile hike three thousand feet up the frozen creek in the below zero weather. Tony is ranting how government is using articles like this one to track and arrest good people. When we reach the top we stop at the warming hut to have a snack. Its wooden walls are very explicit: "Smokin’ that weed, feelin’ fine, got me a 40 and a phat ass dime," says on one end and - "If you don’t choke, it ain’t good smoke," is written on the other.
We hike a little more to the top of the trail, that bears an uninviting name. This trail is nearly never open due to the lack of snow cover. There, Tony digs a hole in the waist deep snow so we can toke. From there on it is all downhill. Steep and narrow. We have to hug the left side of the trail, where there are soft windblown snowdrifts. Tony is goofy, so it’s his toe-side and he points the board straight down and disappears in the cloud of powder. I start carefully, loosening up gradually, absorbing the huge rollers as they pop up in front of me.
As we get two thirds way down to the bottom, we simply look each other and decide that we had still some more daylight to burn, and that this is too good to leave. So, we hike up again. This time we choose the straight line facing the wind and frostbite. Now, hiking up a ski trail of black diamond steepness in a knee-deep slippery medium (a.k.a. snow) is a much more difficult task than getting down the same trail on your snowboard. The last tenth of the hike I simply can’t lift my legs out of the snow any more, so I strap my feet to the snowboard there. Tony goes all the way up.
The concrete slab that holds the lift there, proves to be a perfect cliff. We just needed to iron out the approach line with our boards. Preparing to take the picture of Tony going over our perfect cliff, I realize that my digital camera became uncooperative in the windy, way below freezing environment. He throws his legs up behind his back, showing me the bottom of his board and grabbing the heel edge with his right arm. After that, given that the lifts were not running, we figure to do something that wouldn’t be possible to do at almost no other time: climb up on the chair and jump from there. I give Tony a lift and he pulls himself up, steps into his board there, and let himself drop. As he touches the ground, the snow goes up over his head, and he bounces right out of it. Then it is onto the glades. A perfect, mellow run between the old birch trees, with rolls and drops, and we are the first ones there this season. Too bad it is already getting dark and we can’t do it again. I thought I could go right up again not even realizing how beaten my legs were until I was barely able to climb out of the hot tub later that day.
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dictionary:
huck - throw yourself in the air mindlessly and have faith that the ‘force’ will be with you jib-a-way - go down the slope without particular goal, hitting things on the side and doing tricks ollie - springing of the tail of the board to hop over things that are in your way indy - grab your toe edge with your back hand between your legs backside - spin around showing your back first switch - ride in the opposite direction of your usual way of riding goofy - those who have right foot forward on the board pump it - using your thighs to push the board forward to maintain or increase speed in the flat parts, bottom of the pipe or before the kicker poker-brush, spaghetti-grass - little things that peak through the snow that can throw you over on your nose attitude adjustment - smoking weed to mellow down for better riding experience herb - a person from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut or New York who comes to Vermont to ski or ride, behaves arrogantly, shows disregard for the nature and people, rides (or skis) poorly, yet hits extremely challenging terrain (and sucks there); as an acronym it translates to: Hope Epic - Reality Banal |
pictures by John Hobbs, Aaron Prince, Ivo Skoric and Killington Reflections
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