I don’t want to knock america’s adventure place (even if they do have a slick new website) but Afganistan is where it’s at for extreme mountain biking!
Since the invention of the motion picture camera, when man finally had the opportunity to put the works of Mellville and Bradbury in motion, the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains have been the set for hundreds of movies and TV shows. The most awesome of which have been the SciFi classics cause we all know we feel like we’re on another world in places like the Alabama Hills, the Buttermilks or rolling down the surreal depths of Saline Valley.
From Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger to Jean Luc Picard and now Tony Stark in the new movie Iron Man, It’s not just a place for fulfilling your own outdoor hardman fantasies, though it does pretty damn well with those. This is not a review of Iron Man, except to say I liked it (read: was entertained) but I always love to see the East Side on film!
Ok, so when I was in the Theater I was POSITIVE that Tony Stark got Blowed up on Buttermilk Road right near the Tungsten Hills, but looking back @ the trailer I’m not so sure. My Mom said that a few months back they were @ the Alabama Hills and there was some filming going on. But still, most Jeep commercials are filmed @ the Buttermilks… Check out the opening sequence in this trailer for Iron Man, where somewhere on the East Side is standing in for the Afgani mountains:
Oh, we roasted the hell out of some schmoes…
And here’s the bike I helped my sister RozyT build with parts from Gris and Tongaroo!
We camped @ Y Boulder for the first time in YEARS! It was RAD.
That’s Stubbie, the smoothest biker you’ll meet, badass alpine shredder, in the resort and B/C and a beer drinking extraordinaire!!!
So I took a much needed break from the bike, in particular, the 1speed!Last night my buddy Greg (Stubby) called and told me to meet him at Aarons in the A.M.From there we headed west on I-80 to Cisco Grove, parked, and did the giant slog up to Signal PkWe thought we were going to ski the north shot on the backside, but noticed if we did another short traverse, we could scrounge a lil more vert out of it.So of course, we said, let’s do it, and screw the skins let’s just boot pack up this bitch!By the time we got to the top it was a freaking blizzard out!Which was off and on… bluebird, blizzard, bluebird, blizzard…We waited for Mr. Sunshine and sure enough he came.We ended up skiing down an east face that was one of the sickest “Warren Miller Style” screw that, “Powder Whore Style” lines that I skied this year.Well, maybe not that big, those guys go big!Nonetheless, it was fanfuckintabulous anyway!Smokey and Salomon’s lines were pretty sick too.Not bad for a few mutts and some old dogs!Ha!We dropped it like it’s hot, dropped it like it’s hot! So what we skied down we had to skin up, another freaking slog fest!When we got to the top we finished off our vittles and waited out the blizzard again… and guess who decided to show his bright face?That’s right, Mr. Sunshine… so we strapped our shit up nice and tight and skied another sick line down the south face of Signal Pk and took the long semi-downhill traverse back to the car… this was were Smokey and Salomon were really able to show off the speed and not so graceful agility… I think they got broke the fuck off, well, so did Greg and Aaron and I!!!It was a six hour day and we weren’t lolly-gagging around either.Maybe a lil, like pals do I guess! Sorry Wolfy, no pictures, to busy skiing!Sorry for not calling everyone else either, it was a last minute thing and we left early.Later dudes and chicks, Nooner
Like watching Aliens on a broken roller coaster in a hurricane after 17 Insta-Shots…
They tell you to arch your back and cock your head back until you can’t see the ground while reaching under the belly of the plane and touching your heels to the skin of the aircraft. You don’t have long to master that skill. Danielle hung there for only a brief moment before she and Blane disappeared into the dull misty atmosphere above Minden Nevada.
Wess and I scooted forward on the bench, dropped to the floor and before I could really consider it we were at the opening, and the word “drop zone” suddenly had a shit-ton more relevance to my world view than before (come to think of it “world view” became enormously more accute then as well.)
Wess barked orders through the rushing air and engine drone in the now empty cabin of the PAC 750 XL. Then, entirely before I was ready, I was focused on rural Minden Nevada from 15,000 feet, the Pine Nut mountains slowly gathering snow in the growing storm, the graceful meanderings of the Carson River, and finding the bottom of that aircraft with my heels. I nailed that one, and for mere seconds was perfectly satisfied with the experience up to that point. Then the airplane was gone.
We dropped through the toes of the misty sierra cloud with pellets of frozen moisture whacking our goggles and pummeling our skin at 180 MPH. The acceleration was familiar; the duration was not. I noticed three things: That every chemical in my body that reacts to fear or stress was flooding my brain in almost intolerable amounts, the ground, so far away and unchanging, seemed to be a constant no longer relevant to my equation, and breathing required an acute mental focus which I was temporarily unable to muster.
Then the parachite opened, and I saw Danielle and Blane gliding below us. Wess threw us into a nauseating corkscrew and we were right next to them waiving. Then the ground came rushing up again, far faster than I thought it would.
Once we hit the ground and skidded to a stop on dirt farm lane near the airport I could see Danielle standing and chatting with her instructor. I kind of wanted to puke. The camera man ran over and asked me how I felt, how it was, or some other question that seemed wildly irrelevant at that moment. But sitting in that muddy lane as Wess collected our parachute was about the most comfortable I believe I have ever been…
I’ve been on top of 14,000 foot peaks. I’ve hung on the hairy edge with only my strength holding me to the rock and I’ve railed rocky trails at 30 MPH on a mountain bike, but none of that approached the intensity of sensation and thrill, for lack of a better word, of falling (that’s what it really is) out of an airplane.
This video is making the rounds. It’s likely you’ve already seen it, but if not it’s worth a peek. Of note is the thin margin of error at work here. These guys were playing it safe, making good choices, and were snow savy (the victim of the slide had his Masters in snow science). Still, things didn’t turn out so well.
I believe I read that he has no recollection of telling a reporter that he climbed Everest, “because it’s there,” but there it was, and there it still is. Never-the-less Sir. Ed is gone:
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century’s greatest adventurers, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday. He was 88.
The gangling New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called “Ed” and considering himself just an ordinary beekeeper.
“Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality, he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only ’knocked off’ Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity,” Clark said in a statement.
“The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived,” she said.
Hillary’s life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement — and by his personal humility. Humble to the point that he only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Norgay.
This past Saturday Smokey and I meet up with Juni, Wolfy, Dave, Dave and Ray for a lil’ backcountry in the Mount Rose area.
It was a beautiful sunny day, didn’t really know what to expect considering the not so considerate SNOW GODS lately! Actually I was kinda expecting crappy conditions with crappy conditions…. what we had in place was Sick mofoin powder with crappy conditions!
We pondered a bit below hourglass on what to ski. Wolfman and myself noticed some fellers skiing our lines climbers right (more appropriately, skiers left) of hourglass… pow lines! Needless to say, the two Mikes, the two Daves, Ray, Juni and the subtly cracking Smokey headed that way and we’s all had sick lines with the occasional rock jib!
On our way back up to ski the last pitch of the day we ran into your friendly neighborhood tattooed man. Around that point I believe we lost a Dave and Ray, but added one of our TBS mates and one of my 24 hour mates.
Short story short… Wolfy, Dave, myself, Juni and my BONKING WOLFDOG headed back to the realities (holidays) of the world! Huck Tatar soldiered on!
I was thinking about that skiBASE jump I witnessed the other day and morbidly fascinating about plummeting to death at the bottom of the Silver Legacy. But that’s the worst case scenario there. Maybe the absolute worst is that you crash into a spectator and take him/her out too. That would be bad. Still the probable outcomes are such that Shane McConley et. al. still go for stuff like that because the general consequences are limited. That’s pretty much the same reason any of us do any of the seemingly risky things we do from hitting the jump @ the Radio towers to dropping a chute we know could avalanche.
Here’s a little video that illustrates that kind of thinking on, let’s say, a GLOBAL scale…
That’s right. I was not only there, but right there on the roof! Being behind a camera looking over the edge was almost like being the first wako to skiBASE of a building in a dense urban area. But not quite.
Shane McConkey, JT Holmes, Jesse Hall, and Miles (lightning bolt sideburns) Daisher are all hereby invited to be on Team Bacon Strip!
These guys might look nuts, but were way careful. Shane (McfreakingConkey) packed and repacked the ramp and tested the speed of it numerous times before the jumps. Everything went well, even after Jesse Hall’s minor mishap with getting his ski tangled after his double flip. You got to push the boundaries, it’s not like they gonna push themselves…
Here’s Jesse pulling flip one of two. Not sure what happened. Perhaps he over rotated after the chute opened. Either way, It was WAY freaky watching him careen OOC around the corner of the Silver Legacy out of sight and hear the loud clack of him hitting down. A few minutes later we heard cheers, and got twitters and phone calls and txt messages that he was OK.
All in all a SWEET event to benefit the Make A Wish Foundation, which helps make wishes come true for seriously ill children.
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