Broke and Stoked; Tahoe 08-09

Comment Share Posted on Sunday October 4th at 11:44 a.m. Tweet

My time afar with the stripes and the stars, stealing their jobs, women and powder.

Firstly a huge thanks to Sam Hall for my favourite 4 photos in this (the last 4). Also much love to Grant Kaye, my godfather Rob Rowlands and the rest of the Tahoe crew for making this adventure possible and enjoyable through your friendship and generosity. Some of the images are slideshows, use the arrows above them to toggle them (hehe 'toggle'). Peace, enjoy.

Early November in 2008 on a pretty summer's day I was drunk because I had just finished university for the year. While my similarly inebriated classmates pontificated on their upcoming summer jobs over cheap beer at the much loved student pub 'The Foundry', I drifted out of the conversation and into my own mind, to jibs, jumps, drops and powder turns at Squaw Valley USA, home of the 1960 Olympics.

After a week long haze of moving out of old flats, into new flats, organizing trip details and goodbye parties I found myself riding up a new express chairlift at a small resort called Boreal. Boreal is on "Donner Summit' the pass from which the Interstate Highway 80 drops into the Lake Tahoe basin after struggling up the hill from San Francisco, and is the first to open every season due to its high base elevation and snowmaking. It is America's version of Roundhill and so all it really has to offer is jibs and jumps, and the narrow strip of man made ice was all Tahoe had at the time. I was content to be skiing park as I hadn't done much of it in NZ since the club fields had been so epic in '08, which was lucky because it didn't snow until Christmas. That forced both the local park crew and ourselves to get creative with it, which was a lot of fun.

Trying to 270 onto the urban

Luckily I had Christmas off, so I had a great day skiing trees as it stormed. Once it was tracked I left to hit an urban rail in Tahoe City with some Australian friends I had met skiing at Boreal, and their visiting friend Russ Henshaw. The urban was a lot of fun and I was stoked to see Russ in action with my own eyes, showing why he is one of the best park skiers in the world as he laid down all sorts of switch up and spin off combinations, spinning both ways and stomping it all ridiculously easily. The day ended on a downer though as I returned home to Truckee to find out that a local freestyle coach had been killed in an inbounds slide at Squaw that day, a reminder that none of us are invincible.

New years went off, the Tahoe locals showing us how they get it done up there. Unfortunately the rest of the month was as dry as my mouth on the first morning of it, and as hot as the chillies my local friends tricked me into eating at the Mexican restaurant. 'Juneuary' meant more slushy park skiing and dreams of the January I had experienced there last season, which broke 50 year snowfall records. New tricks were learnt, switch backflips achieving maximum stokage, in exchange for the niggling injuries that the game of park skiing deals to its players, such as sprained thumbs, sore knees and shinbang.

My birthday fell as always on Australia day, the 26th of January, and finally brought the snow. The town and resorts burst back into life and I sent my first ‘Squawllywood' air of the season of the season, hopping 'diving board rock', right under Granite Chief chair, a drop worthy of the ‘show pony' article in last year's 2nd edition of NZ Skier.

Eating fresh like subway

With the new snow, and more on the way, the season started to blur into a haze of waking up early everyday, for work or play, and savouring every powder turn. Squaw began to get the vibe back that I had experienced last year, lots of super stoked locals killing it every day, shredding epic lines described in the book ‘Squawllywood' and first seen in the movies ‘Walls of Freedom' and ‘1999' as well as more recent films such as ‘Push'. Lines and airs found in The Palisades and KT22, considered on the brink of what was physically possible in the movies of the 1990's were slain by unknown skiers with no camera crew in tow, just for the love of it. This level of skiing is why I think Squaw Valley can legitimately claim to be one of North America's freeriding meccas and is the home of legendary big mountain skiers such as Shane McConkey (RIP), Rob Gaffney, JT Holmes and Aaron McGovern, as well as one of NZ's original big mountain skiers and former editor of NZ Skier, Sam Hall. These were some of my favourite days of the season especially when I made it to my favourite cliffs and pow stashes before anyone else, a difficult feat at Squaw.

Sneaky night urban

Of course not every day could be a powder day so we got some creative jibbing in on the other days, or weekends when our cheaper midweek passes didn't work. Our backyard had snow, trees, a well padlocked handrail, and a wharf with a dock rail which we turned into a playground with the aid of shovels, imagination and bolt cutters from my secret Santa.

Made it to Telluride for the Freeski Big Mountain World Tour Qualifier but crashed sending my first air, and didn't even get a shot of it! Hit Snowbird on the way back with some dry Utah pow though, that cheered me up a bit.
The wonderful blur put time into fast forward. Broke my skis landing on a rock just under the snow on one of the many pow days but it still did the trick to go shooting with Sam Hall the day before I bailed, on a bluebird day after a 5 day storm, and skied Eagles nest and Adrenaline Rock, two lines I've been wanting for a while. Shane McConkey once graced the cover of Powder Magazine with a photo on Eagles nest and it has now been renamed McConkey's in his honour. As I post this some of his ashes are being spread up there, which is actually the reason why I'm posting this today. If you don't know who Shane McConkey is then go and find out, he helped popularize the fat ski and he invented the reverse camber ski. He was one of the most talented and innovative skiers of our time and was the much loved ski god of Squaw, RIP Shane.

Final mission to Montana to see some buddies for a week before heading back to NZ for uni, got to ski some fresh at Big Sky and made a mission down to Jackson, both amazing mountains that left me leaving wanting more. Skied in the Bridger Gully Freeride too, a local Big Mountain competition, but didn't manage to find a good enough line on my one inspection run, the bottom air of which was apparently out of the judges view too, coming in at a disappointing 19th.

I'm writing this in the San Francisco airport, waiting for my plane home. My car broke down so I left it at the hotel I stayed at last night, and the screen on my cellphone stopped working so I can't read any of the texts I've got in the last few days. I just finished some old French bread that a nice lady gave me on my flight here from Bozeman, Montana and I'm drinking warm water because the only free water here is the hand washing water in the toilets, which I'm guessing is heated to stop people like me drinking it. Well I sure showed them. I'm sweaty from carrying my 60+ kg worth of bags because I couldn't afford to rent a luggage cart, since I used my last quarters to tip the shuttle driver who couldn't believe how heavy my ski bag was. I'm completely broke, hungry too, and hanging out for the free dinner I'm going to get on this flight, which I won't get on for another 7 hours. People are looking at me funny for sitting on the floor with my plethora of bags so I can be next to a power plug- my laptop battery is broken. But I've just finished my 4th winter in 2 years and it's only a few months until the NZ season gets underway. I couldn't be happier.