 Danny Davis hanging with his fans While plenty of riders pussed out claiming they were saving themselves for the road to Vancouver or that Breckenridge’s 18 foot pipe was inferior to the 22 footers displayed at the X-Games and Open Series events, those who did make the start at the first Dew Tour of the season still put on one hell of a show.
The cold temps that have plagued Colorado for much of this early season gave way to sunny skies for Saturday’s finals. With several world class contenders not competing, the women’s event gave plenty of opportunities for other competitors to shine. The American halfpipe dominance we saw a week earlier at the Copper Grand Prix was on hold as three foreigners, Spain’s Queralt Castellet, Canada’s Sarah Conrad and Norway’s Kjersti Buass landed in 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively.
On the men’s side the Americans faired much better. Salt Lake City Olmpic bronze medalist and Summit County local JJ Thomas continued his stellar comeback season by setting down his patented backside 900’s on the first hit for third place. Second went to the Rueben of riding, the one part Swiss and one part Russian, Iori Podlachikov. Though on paper it might sound like some sketchy favoritism considering he is the poster boy for two of the events title sponsors, Totinos and Mtn. Dew, Highland Michigan’s Danny Davis had this event in the bag from his first drop. It was Danny’s Cab 10 2x cork right out of the gate on both runs that earned him not only first place but also a score of 96.5 which is the highest score ever awarded in a Dew Tour Halfpipe event. And he deserved it!
Double corks are quickly playing out as the game changers that many predicted them to be. The only thing that is keeping double corks from sweeping podiums is untimely falls. This means that without a double cork a rider needs to not only spin more, go higher, and stomp everything perfectly, they also need to get lucky and by that I mean they have to hope for the rest of the field to take a dive. In turn 1080’s, and back to back 900’s, once the decisive moves in a riders arsenal are the bangers on runs that are looking increasingly stock. Fifteen points can separate a solid run with a 2x cork from one without.
2010 Breckenridge Dew Tour Halfpipe Results
Breckenridge, CO – Dec 19, 2009
Men:
1. Danny Davis
2. Iori Podlachikov
3. JJ Thomas
4. Mason Aguirre
5. Steve Fisher
6. Zach Black
7. Iikka Laari
8. Fredrik Austbo
9. Roger Kleivdal
10. Janne Korpi
Women:
1. Queralt Castellet
2. Sarah Conrad
3. Kjersti Buass
4. Kelly Marren
5. Elena Hight
6. Kaitlyn Farrington
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SALT LAKE CITY, UT (December 18, 2009) – The 2010 Season is well underway, the Midwest has been getting hammered with storms, and the West Coast is shaping up to have an epic year. As if all the snow wasn’t enough, Celtek is stoked to add Chris Grenier and Bode Merrill to its long list of heavy hitters. These guys had killer video parts last year with Chris landing the opening part in the TWS video, Get Real, and Bode getting the much coveted ender in Absinthe Film’s Neverland.
For more on the Celtek Clan consisting of Bjorn Leines, Aaron Biittner, Justin Bennee, Mikey LeBlanc, Cheryl Maas, Zac Marben, Stevie Bell, JJ Thomas, Deadlung, Eero Niemela, Iris Lazzareschi, Maggie Dubois, Dan Brisse, Gabby Maiden, and now Grenier and Merrill, go to http://www.celtekclan.com/team/.
ABOUT CELTEK – Co-founded and operated by professional snowboarders and brothers Bjorn & Erik Leines, Celtek’s mission remains the same since it began in 2003: inspire creativity, express individuality, and ride every chance you get. Working with a world-class team of athletes and designers, Celtek’s innovative, art-inspired gloves and accessories bring the roots of action sport culture to the surface with unmistakable style and matchless quality. For more information and to sign up for the Celtek Clan, check out www.celtekclan.com.
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Picture 1 of 10 Eero Ettala, photo: E-Stone In early April of 2009, the greater part of the Nitro Snowboards team assembled at The Canyons resort in Park City, Utah for a private, high-caliber park event—SNOWBOARDER Magazine’s fourth of five Super Sessions of the year. According to the dictionary in my computer, the adjective “super” is defined as, “With outstanding or excellent qualities; exceptionally large or powerful; and greater than what is normal.” The noun “session” is defined as, “A period of time during which people are involved in doing something together.” And that’s what snowboarding is all about—excellence and togetherness; I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Evan LeFebvre –
A Super Session is in effect a smaller, more select version of Superpark—SNOWBOARDER Magazine’s flagship event. It’s a more intimate affair than its big brother, and smaller in attendance, but not in impact. The premise of these events is to bring out a relatively small group of riders to a mountain with a top-tier park crew, and once there the focus is on pushing the art and science of designing and constructing snowboard parks and raising the bar of what riders are capable of doing on their snowboards.
At this Super Session we had eighteen invited boarders on the roster. The Nitro constituent was more eclectic than the lineup for that “We Are the World” song, and stacked like a chimney. The super roster consisted of Eero Ettala, Bryan Fox, Austin Smith, Will Tuddenham, Jon Kooley, Markus Keller, Anton Gunnarsson, Yuji Suzuki, Andreas Wiig, Janna Meyen, Ben Bilocq, Knut Eliassen, Joe Mertes, Ricky Tucker, Sébastien Toutant, Cheryl Maas, Jonah Owen, and Tobi Strauss; and then I snuck my boy Cody Rosenthal in there for good measure—a heavy list to say the least.
Coming in as the largest ski and snowboard resort in Utah and one of the five largest in the United States, The Canyons is indeed massive, but it still manages to maintain a hidden-gem feel. The Can has a vertical rise of 3,190 feet and eight mountain peaks, the highest of which tops out at 9,990 feet. There are seventeen lifts in total, which access 163 trails, a pair of well-manicured terrain parks, and a whopping 3,700 rippable acres—there is a lot of shredding to be done. Due to its large size, it rarely gets overcrowded and there’s elbow room aplenty. That wouldn’t really be an issue for us, though, as it was a private event, so we wouldn’t have any random heroes snaking the jumps or weekend warriors riding across landings unseen.
The Canyons is just a short jaunt down the road from the aptly-named park heavyweight, Park City. Since hosting the Olympics in 2002, Park City has invested heavily in its parks and recreation department and has become a major and world-renowned player in the game. But not content with shredding in the shadows, The Canyons has been steadily and notably upping their park ante over the past few years. With the addition of Steve Duke at the helm of the ship, they are edging their way closer to the heels of their rivals.
Duke expands on their advancement in that arena, saying, “A couple of years ago The Canyons was forced to reorganize their parks department. They’ve had a long history of building parks at the resort—The Canyons actually had one of the first terrain parks in Utah. They’ve been a leader in the terrain park world in the past, but it was time to revamp the terrain parks department and do it right.” An integral part of that restructuring was hiring an experienced park manager with a strong background in building parks. Steve came to The Canyons from nearby Brighton Resort with five years experience, and he’s also the co-owner of KAB Rails, to boot—a terrain park design and consulting company based in Salt Lake City. Steve continues, “The other parts of the restructuring were dedicating a full-time staff to maintain the entire park during the day, getting the whole mountain ops department back on board with the terrain park scene, and increasing the new feature budget. With all of the restructuring accomplished, we now have the tools it takes to build fun terrain parks and step up to the bar that has been set by our neighbors.”
Our Super Session took place on the upper mountain in the Respect Terrain Park—the big boy park. Steve and his hand-picked crew had put in work, and the run allocated to us was littered with options. From top to bottom, we had a swinging log spine that resembled a crude wooden field goal; a big-ass tranny-finder hip over the park crew shack; a skate-style quarterpipe complete with metal coping; a poppy dual-lipped table with a precisely-placed pine tree smack-dab in the middle of it; a massive corrugated tube set up like a spine; a menacing step-down jump with three different take-offs and a hefty knot-ridden log jam sticking out the front of it; and a perfectly-sculpted 80-foot kicker rounding out the bottom of the course.
There was a recurring theme of timber throughout the course, and as Steve explains, “We’d been playing around with trees all year. We would ride around the mountain chipping, sliding, and jumping over random trees while we were shredding. Whenever we would see a downed tree that could be slid, the handsaw came out and the branches disappeared. So for us, it only seemed fitting to use trees as a focus for the Super Session features.” Aside from all the heavy stuff and photo-driven features, the lap was fun as hell, and the more everyone rode through it, the more fun little lines developed. Norwegian-American ripper Knut Eliassen expounds on the setup a bit: “The gnarliest feature was the park cliff with the log jam sticking out of it. The best obstacle was the tabletop with the pine tree sticking out of it—that, and just taking runs through the park, cruising. We made so many little hits and jibs all the way through…so fun!” It’s not all about fear factor and meat helicopters, and no matter how good you are at stunt airing, mini-shredding around is still the jam.
On a more serious note, when you do push the limits and start building next-level stuff for riders, the consequences and potential for injuries become heavier with every push of the cat’s blade. Unfortunately, while taking his first run into the aforementioned “park cliff” on day one, our friend Joe Mertes landed inches shy of the tranny, compressed on the knuckle, and broke his back. More specifically, he broke two of his vertebrae, sustained a few other minor injuries, and was rushed in an ambulance down to a hospital in Salt Lake City where he was treated immediately. Bryan Fox was up top judging speed and contemplating his first attempt at tackling the beast with Joe right as he dropped in, and as Bryan explains, “That was fucking harsh, man. Watching anyone get hurt blows; watching a good friend get hurt is fucked. That really bummed me out. We were both standing there going, ‘Is this enough speed?’ Joe sent it, and he paid the price. He was probably thinking, ‘Fuck it. Get some!’” After spending the spring on his back, Joe is healing up nicely, and will have already been snowboarding by the time this hits the printer.
Accidents will and do happen, but on the whole, everyone made it out in one piece and our time at The Canyons for this Super Session was fun and well spent, and some really extraordinary stuff went down as well, the most notable of which would inarguably be young up-and-comer Sébastien Toutant’s impressive aerial assault. Watching him pick apart the course was like watching a real live video game; everything landed perfectly. The most unanimously outstanding move was a real doozy—a switch frontside double cork 1260 across the 80-foot expanse of the bottom kicker. I’m not sure if that one has been done before or not, but it’s the first time I’ve seen that many things happen consecutively while someone was flying through the air on their snowboard. That shit was crazy.
There’s no doubt that jumps will get bigger and more life-threatening, and there’s no doubt that riders will send themselves across them in attempts at adrenaline and glory. There’s also no doubt that as long as we’re able, we’ll be there along the way doing whatever we can to foster the progression of snowboarding by putting the right people together in the right places and enabling them to do what they do best, be it building, boarding, or documenting.
Many thanks to Steve Duke, Dan Schoppee, Eric Hansen, Jerry Romney, Tony Hagadorn, Zack Argyle, Mary Ellen Jones, Jonny Hall, Andy Marston, Daryle Young, Dan Black, Tim Semple, and everyone else at The Canyons for making this session as super as it was.
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