Mai oui, The Big LePowSki is rolling into Salt Lake City Feb 25-27 to set up pins and knock’em down until they go click at Brighton. This is the second annual gathering of TBLP, and last year was a blast. The format is pretty simple – ski/ride & party, but not necessarily in that order. Starting on Thursday night with a Backcountry Film Festival, it then rolls on to a Friday night pre-registration at the BD retail store where you can mingle with the athletes/instructors. Noah Howell will be signing left buttock cheeks, Forrest Shearer gets the right and Julian Carr will be sticking back layouts off of the BD clocktower onto a flat cement landing.
The actual skiing action takes place on Saturday from 9am – 4pm at Brighton and features morning and afternoon clinics on just about anything to do with skiing, riding and the backcountry. I’ll be teaching clinics on steep skiing and backcountry terrain assessment, but if I wasn’t, I’d love to take a clinic on filming or park riding. The cost is $75 which includes a lift ticket, the clinics, lunch and a ticket to the Shoot Out Party that night at Club Elevate. Continue reading ‘The Big LePowSki ~ Feb 25-27, Brighton’
I recently attended a seminar at the Winter OR Show entitled “Print is Dead” which had a panel of outdoor writers and e-commerce people, including Steve Casimiro. Steve has been one of my favorite skiing writers since his days at Powder, and the upshot of the seminar was that print isn’t really dying so much as becoming one of many other means of publishing. People kept referring to Steve’s website, The Adventure Life, so I checked it out and discovered (among other things) that Scott Markewitz was giving a photo workshop at Snowbird.
I’ve known Scott since I moved back to Utah about 18 years ago, and knew of him before that through his photography. As far as I know, Scott was the guy who invented the genre of skiing photography where you see a tight frame of a skier completely engulfed in a sea of raging powder, with perfectly lit up details and the person is calming looking through his/her goggles directly into the camera. Photos like these are the embodiment of speed, action, details, nature and humanity all rolled into one, which is probably why Scott has had several hundred magazine cover shots. And skiing is just one of many things that he shoots. There’s a photo on his website of girls throwing snowballs at each other, that makes it look like such fun that I want to give it a try.
My personal photography style is best described as “Point & Chute” where I carry a small Point & Shoot camera set to full auto with the burst mode on, pull it out when things look interesting, fire off a bunch of shots and hope for the best. This usually yields about a 1 in 1,000 ratio of good to crap, and from working with professional photographers, there’s no doubt that carefully setting up the shot is 90% of the game. In that regard, I’m very psyched that Scott is teaching a clinic and willing to share some of his techniques.
The clinic is Feb 4-7 at Snowbird and for $1,250 includes food, lodging, ski tickets and the workshop, although there is also a locals deal available if you just want the workshop. Contact Scott at scott@scottmarkewitz.com or book through Snowbird at 1.800.453.3000. It should be fun.
The Outdoor Retailer Show is in Salt Lake City and the Sundance Film Festival is getting underway in Park City, so Utah is hopping at the moment. A bit more snow would make it even better.
I’ll add some updates from the OR Show over the next day or so.
The “Up There” Ski Film Fest is taking place on Jan 14-15 in Bozeman, MT. It is being presented by the Yellowstone Club Community Foundation and benefits my all time favorite ski mountaineering organization, The Hans Sarri Memorial Fund (<– which happens to have a new website, check it out). Not only are they showing two cool films, “Swift. Silent. Deep.” and “Skiing Everest,” but they are raffling off some killer prizes, like three days/two nights at Aspen, three days/two nights at Jackson, a men’s AT package, women’s AT package and a day with Scot Schmidt. I suspect you can order raffle tickets through Drew Seessel (406.556.1275) and arrange something if you can’t be present at the actual event, but still win. Continue reading ‘“Up There” Ski Film Fest – Bozeman, MT’
I’ll be giving a slideshow on skiing Alaskan’s First Family (Denali, Hunter and Sultana) as part of the Marley in the Mountains kick off party on December 12th starting at about 8:00pm. It is a fund raiser for the Sawtooth National Avalanche Center and with your $10 entry fee, you get FREE BEER! I love going up to Sun Valley and it sounds like they are at least skiing at the resort (come on snow…. come on). I hope to see you there. Continue reading ‘Sun Valley Slideshow – Marley in the Mountains’
Twenty years ago when I moved back to Utah and started touring in earnest, one of the first people I ever went out skiing with was a Park City local named Chris Larson. Since then, Chris has had the wisdom to leave Park City before it became, uhm, what it is now, and moved up to Idaho where he is a computer geek. Being a skier, Chris was able to take many of the existing ski, snow and weather feeds that are available and funnel them into one site, WasatchSnowInfo.com or more specifically, a bunch of sites for areas like the Wasatch, Tetons and eventually some place in Colorado named Aspen. He’s done a great service to skiers as a ton of info is packed into one simple, easy to read page.
The top of the page gives you a run-down of what the ski resorts are reporting for snow, then cuts right to the UAC bottom line avalanche forecast. Continue reading ‘One-Stop Wasatch Snow & Condition Info’
If you live in Alaska, I will be up there today giving a slideshow at the Beartooth Theater Pub on skiing Denali, Mt. Hunter and Sultana. Please stop by and say “hi” if you can make it! Continue reading ‘Alaska Family Slideshow in Anchorage Tonight (Thursday)’
I know – I’ve been a slack-tart on updating StraightChuter.com and apologize profusely. We had family in town last week, plus I’ve been working on a cool little website addition that has to remain top secret until our Antarctica trip.
But, on to more important items. Taking a cue from the ISSW, the Friends of the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center have put together the Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop (USAW) which will take place on Saturday, November 7th from 1:00 to 4:30pm at The Depot in Salt Lake City. The idea with the USAW is to present a condensed cross-section of professional avalanche presentations, and this premier event should be off the charts. Among the highlights are Larry Dunn from the National Weather Service (and an avid BC skier) talking about the new Snow Web Pages for the upcoming year, Bruce Tremper presenting a case study on the 2008/09 Little Water avalanche incident and Ian McCammon talking about critical slope angles. As an event capper, there is an afternoon social at the Blue Goose Bar at the Depot sponsored by High Angle Construction. Continue reading ‘Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop’
It snowed at 7,100′ in Park City today!
Alta supposedly got 10+ inches and I’d imagine some of their tilled slopes will be skiable tomorrow.
The first snow of the year is one of many landmark seasonal skiing events. I prefer to wait until there is some solid coverage before I start going out as I hate to get all psyched up for a season… and then get gacked when it all melts and my skis are trashed. I also really like Spring skiing, so I try to pace my enthusiasm towards the end of the season rather than the beginning.
For skiers, the New Year falls at an unfortunately time as in a good year, you might get two solid months of skiing before the year changes, which means you have to refer to it as 2009/10 when everybody knows you are really talking about 2010. Sigh. In the Wasatch, a really good early season is if you are skiing reliably by Halloween, a normal season means good skiing by Thanksgiving (sometimes the best of the year) and a sucky season is still hurting by Christmas.
If you live in Turns All Year country, when a season starts and ends is an arbitrary date. Tom Jungst and his son Allan up in Bozeman, MT have a tradition of making their first turns of the year on the second weekend of September. Continue reading ‘Beginning of the season?’
The Black Diamond/Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center (FUAC) party is by far and away my favorite party the year and is the unofficial start to the 2009/10 ski season. This is the 16th Annual holding of the gala and over the years it has played a big part in helping to fund the UAC. The event is held outdoors in the Black Diamond parking lot and is organized by Colleen Nipkow who knows how to kick ass, take names and throw monster parties. It is always a great occasion and fun to see all the skiers crawl out from under their summer shade umbrellas and start to think about snow again. Continue reading ‘FUAC Party of the Year – Thursday’
