This season has been a pretty big challenge. On November 28th, I had an accident in Seattle which left me with a collapsed ankle, fractured calcaneus (heel) and a bunch of broken metatarsals. According to the doctors, my season was over before it even started and I should be non-weight bearing for 12 weeks…
Fortunately for me, the beginning of the 08/09 season was pretty dry and the NW did not get much snow on the peaks. But, it wasn’t an excuse to stay at home on the couch eating junk food. I took a bunch of supplements in addition to an all organic diet and healthy meals.
6 weeks later, back in the doctor’s office and the verdict was “start walking with an orthopedic boot, once you feel confortable walking with that, walk with your regular shoes. Once you are comfortable walking with regular shoes, start skiing”. 30 minutes later, I am walking my dogs without crutches and a couple weeks later, the snow started falling again and it was time to go skiing. The first runs were pretty painful but after remolding my intuition liner,everything felt much better.
The NW was still pretty dry and I decided to head to Europe and shoot in the Alps. This season has been really good all over France, Switzerland and Italy. After talking to the sponsors, the plane tickets were taken care of and last thing I know, I am in Megeve, France skiing a foot of fresh powder with Glen Plake and a perfect blue sky.
Brian Robb from Hood River, OR flew over and we shot about 600 pictures everyday. The trip kept getting better and better. After getting all the pictures we needed, we had an 800 foot cliff lined up for a ski BASE. Unfortunately, the weather changed and we got another foot of powder for the last day, wind and flat light. Not good for ski BASE jumping but great for skiing. Brian left the cameras at home and we had an epic day, freeskiing in the Alps.
Right when I get home, I get a call from Albert at I/O Biocompatible to come present my videos and projects during an event called “The Gathering” at Red Mountain, BC with Marko Shapiro, Ace Kvale, John Falkiner, Tom Ericson, Pat Morrow and other young up and coming climbers and photographers. Expecting a fancy event, I call John at Durango TV to put a nice video together for my presentation and hit the road for BC.
This was not what I expected! Red Mountain is totally old school and down to earth! The event turned out to be super low key with only a 100 passionate people coming to share their passion about the mountains and skiing. Guests went from local patrollers to legends such as Eric Pehota.
This event was awesome and very unique. It was organized by skiers, for skiers with a common goal: sharing our love of skiing. I hope this event will become a tradition because it was one of the best moments of the year and to make it even better, we got dumped on and made fresh turns everyday!
This is what I call living the dream and I want to keep living it!
The next session will be at Mt Hood filming some ski BASEing off Mississippi Head and after that, it will be Utah, Southwest Colorado and Washington.
This feels like a short season compared to the last ones but it is for sure an epic one! To all of you out there, keep doing the snow dance for some big spring dumps!