WhutsHappening

A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 2: Frozen Smoke and Drunken 3-Man

Continued from A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 1: Sleep-Deprivation

So now we were plugging for the mountains, Peter and I driving Dan’s car while he rode with his friends in their Jeep and all of us tired and refreshed and excited at what the world held for us. Route 70, winding through old mining towns like Georgetown which traced the sheer cliffs of the front range and past the turn-off for Golden where the Coors brothers are beer-brewing bastards and Loveland and all along rapping about nothing and smoking sweet herbs and hiding from the reality of our lives.

 

Then we were at Vail, drinking coffees and croissants from a skinny mountain-girl barista who was happy to serve us while Peter accosted a friend of his, a rich girl from CSU who had extra tickets she sold us for 20 bucks a person. We all proceeded to ditch her and load our derelict asses, dressed down in our finest snowboard gear while Peter clicked into two planks, and we were riding the gondola to the top.

 

Vail is a national treasure, an amalgam of massive powder bowls that weave back and forth through a vast ridge in the middle of Summit County though it’s also a tourist town long-since overrun by gapers and Denverites who ski in vests and button-downs and are too proud of themselves.

 

Still, it’s a good time and so we made our way to the newly-opened Blue Sky Basin, to Lover’s Leap, a thick untracked wall with a couple foot drop off a cornice at the top that turned into 5 friends laying in perfect wide curves with the frozen smoke behind us as we bathed in the white room.

 

At the bottom we found a little booter into powder and I launched an ugly 360 as I had not yet learned to throw a grab into my tricks. Then I threw an ugly tucked frontflip and though I landed neither I still felt proud of myself.

 

We descended through the trees, flat high-speed close-corner powder slashes and all of us were in Heaven but Dan who broke his shitt Morrow board as such cheap plastic-capped pieces of shit are not made for real riding. But with Dan being ever the optimist he just rode down with his tail broken, re-arranged his bindings and rode for the rest of the trip backwards with the tail-cum-nose duct-taped stiff.

 

The powder was amazing for a few days after Thanksgiving, surely better than any Sierra Cement a man could find at Big Bear. We rode hard and laughed loud and at the end of the day, as we struggled to catch our collective breaths and rubbed our sore legs we knew it had been a good day. We drove around looking for hotel rooms to find they had all been checked out for some wild international downhill competition and we were growing disheartened before we found a nice condo almost slopeside in Beavercreek and with Dan using his scheming ways to swindle the front desk clerk into a discounted rate, still pricey but what did we care? We were young scions of industry, golden children with all the potential in the world and fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

 

We drove to a little pizza joint for dinner followed by a run to the liquor store for Gentleman Jack and Natural Lights. Then it was back to the hotel room, puffs of the ganj, and heavy drinking to follow.

 

Dan invented a game called squirble which had no rules but instead we decided to take an existing game and just change the rules as we went along. What followed was one of the most raucous games of 3-man ever recorded in the annals of modern debauchery, with absurd categories and rude, racist, sexist, hate-filled rhymes and questions in which we insulted our own races and gender most of all.

 

Around midnight Dan jumped on an exercise bike in the hall and had an epic biking session. We knocked on the door of the French ski team, staying across from us, and then ran. We walked in front of the hotel, beers in hand, and peed in the snow and yelled very loud and saw a fox scurry by. And that night we all drank until the sweet death of sleep came as a thin layer of fresh snow fell.

 

We decided to ride Beaver Creek the next day as I’d never ridden BC. I found it flat and unchallenging, the perfect place for wealthy financiers from Southern California to spend a week at their condo cruising down the groomed blue squares and bragging about their prowess to their mistresses while their wives fuck ski instructors named Hans in employee housing.

 

Still, we found some tight trees the way that only Aspens can grow in perfect halls of trees with gladed powder turns . Even a day spent riding shitty terrain is better than a day spent doing almost anything else and when you throw friends and powder into the mix it becomes nearly ejaculatory, transcendental cumming in your ski pants.

 

Around 3 in the afternoon we convened for a last mountain meal in the base lodge. Beers and overpriced grill food. Then it was back in the red infiniti for Dan and I, still sporting our snowpants, as we chugged for Southern California on an Eagle Sunday afternoon.

A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 1: Sleep-Deprivation

The year was 2002. Murder was running rampant through the streets. I didn’t own a cell phone, as Verizon had dropped me for non-payment of a $1000+ bill. I was doing a lot of cocaine at the time. It was a great year.

 

Dan was a snowboarder who had a car and his parents’ credit card to purchase gas and supplies with. I was successful as a knife salesman and had a voracious appetite for the mountain. For this voyage we weren’t joking around. We weren’t making a day trip to Big Bear. Not even a long drive to Mammoth. No sir, we were going to drive from San Diego to Colorado for the weekend, logistics and limitations be damned and we were just young and crazy enough to make this a reality.

 

Dan picked me up in front of my classroom on Alcala Way. We had already loaded our gear into the back of his cherry-apple red Infiniti and he had spent the last hour picking up booze and weed. We stopped at a supermarket on our way out of town and bought a twelve of Mountain Dew for him and of Code Red for myself. Dan started off in the driver’s seat and after picking up Starbucks to fire us up I fashioned an empty Code Red can into an aluminum bowl and puffed strong.

 

I was feeling good and toasted when traffic slowed to a hault and we realized that the I-15 checkpoint was running. We opened the window, scared but not really because when you’re 21 and 20 you fear nothing, especially if you’d never hit any brick walls of consequence.

 

“Where are you boys headed?”

 

“Colorado” the stoned boy in shotgun said.

 

“And where are you coming from?”

 

“Uhh, back there, we’re from back there,” the stoned boy said, turning his head and pointing down the 15, at the end of which lies his college, the name of which he couldn’t remember.

 

“We’re from USD” the driver, a short distinctive man says, “Just going away for the weekend.” The pig points forward and neither boy can tell if he means for them to pull to the side or to just drive through but taking no chances, the driver feigns confusion and drive through. And then they’re out.

 

When I woke up it was2  in the morning. I had felt fine letting Dan start out and I hadn’t even though what that meant for me. Running with adrenaline and purple crystals and Code Red I was awake for most of the first shift, talking to Dan about our trip and the audacity such a voyage took and how we were the only men with real balls anymore.

 

I passed out for less than a half hour before Dan pulled over to fill with gas, threw me into the driver’s seat and quickly fell asleep in shotgun.

 

Now here I was, somewhere in the desolate wilderness of Utah where the 15 meets the 70 and I was halfway through a 12-pack of Code Red. The road took on that eery sentiment of another universe inside one’s skull where stalagmites grow down from midair and scorpions morph into armadillos which morph into boulders which morph into mountains as the sun begins to peak above the horizon, burning Eastward! My friend as I guzzle some more caffeine. In those days Dan was a drug-free soul and so there was no desire to subject him to the white demon who would have made me right at this moment. No, I had been driving through the night and my only choice was to continue on until my shift was over.

 

When Dan woke up we were just outside Eagle. My eyes were pasted open and I was craning my neck forward through the steering wheel, planting my face on the windshield to keep myself awake through the rockfields of Western Colorado. When he spoke to me I could only reply in tongues, gibberish. I was hallucinating a purple tint to everything around me.

 

I woke up as we were pulling into Fort Collins. In a dream we had pulled over at a gas station and in that same dream Dan ran in to buy jerky as I climbed into shotgun and in that dream I couldn’t even fall asleep at first. Not until Dan started moving and then the chemicals gave out, the great halls of light opened up, and I was off to another place where darkness reigned.

 

We were meeting up with two friends of Dan’s from back home in Connecticut. They were good fellows who enjoyed the high life, went to CSU, and liked to snowboard. I took a quick nap as Dan hung out with the kids. They woke me up with bowl tokes and I accepted this as a gesture of friendship. At that time I received a phone call from my ex-girlfriend, the VD referenced in previous stories, on Dan’s phone interestingly enough and so Dan took me to meet her for lunch but at the last moment refused to come out of the car as baked up as he was.

 

I was sitting at a table in a patisserie with eyes red and shriveling into my skull, reality pinching tight with a soft layer of foam between it and me and across the table were my ex-girlfriend, more of a raving bitch than I’d realized at the time, and her fiancée, a strange troglodyte from money with teeth like he’d been chewing rocks. His face reminded me of the cartoon Matt Biolos in all those old …lost paintings. Jesus I was baked. I could hardly hold a conversation. Damn you to hell, Dan, for ditching your boy in his 11^th hour of need, an awkward moment made more awkward by the THC running through my body and after eating as fast as possible and watching the hideous life that I saved myself from Dan came back and we returned to the house.

 

I was crashing hard. We would be meeting up with Peter in Denver and he was babbling about some indoor lacrosse game with free beers and I had to get ready. I could barely hold my head up, the darkness closing in. Then a pill of adderal appeared, somebody chopped the designer coke up and I snorted down a line of synthetics.

 

That night we found ourselves at a convention center in the heart of the mile-high city, watching lax-heads run around green astroturf during the inaugural game of the Denver Mammoths, free admission and flowing brews for all. The lights were bright. Walking through the hallowed concrete corridors of the sports plaza,  a crowd of 5 guys on a strange trip and the night before I’d been in class in San Diego, almost a thousand miles away. The wild west.

 

Peter was there, a shaggy-haired derelict friend from San Diego who had spent some time running into and through brick walls though always with a heart of gold. He would be coming up to Vail with us so he came back to the Fort Collins house where we drank brew and smoked green and then the night grew fuzzy as the world shut down for the night and I fell comatose onto the floor. Tomorrow we would be going to Vail. God Bless . . .

 Continued in 

A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 2: Frozen Smoke and Drunken 3-Man

Out of Breath on Telemark Bowl, Jackson

A few days over 4 years ago your trusted Uncle Ryno moved to Jackson Hole for the first time. I say for the first time because I plan on moving back there someday, spending the rest of my life chest deep in fine Teton powder in my log cabin house with a hot tub on the back deck and a raging fireplace. In fact if you asked me where I see myself in 5 years I’d have to say in J-hole (or Driggs or Wilson, but ideally Jackson, most likely) writing my 4^th or 5^th novel, living with my beautiful blond wife, a couple Malamutes and various mutts, and probably a little rugrat or two running around. A happy life.

 

Anyway, back to my arrival in Jackson. The adventure began a few days before Halloween and a few days after I met some drunken girl in a bar in Canton who would forever change my life. I drove to the old trapper’s valley city in Wyoming in 2 and a half days. I would’ve made it in 2 but in the 12^th hour of the second day and chugging down rte. 80 I decided to smoke a joint as the temperature dropped so low I had to put on gloves to drive my ’86 Bronco up mountain passes. A blizzard set in as the Bronco whined at a top speed of 60 and I had to pull into a hotel because I couldn’t tell if I was going up or down.

 

2 days later Josh and I found ourselves driving up the pass, a windy mountain road that connects Jackson Wyoming to Driggs Idaho, just past the Stagecoach Bar nestled at the bottom. We pulled over at the makeshift parking lot where other cars were parked and started walking up a small boot pack and then setting a pack through the knee-high white to a little starting spot just above where a couple kids were building a poppy little kicker.

 

I learned a good lesson that day. I had hiked midway up to the bowl. I stopped, breathing heavy as soiled cityboy lungs fought to adjust to the lack of oxygen. It was time to strap in as I catch my breath so I put my board down on its bottom. The thin air and extreme exhaustion made me temporarily forget why we used snowboards – that is, to ride downhill in the snow. But this lesson re-impressed itself into my brain when the board took off down the hill, myself swearing as I set off running, more like hopping through the deep pow as my old K2 Doublewide embedded itself in a ditch a good hundred yards below.

 

I retrieved the old fat green plank and sprinted back up through the same deep snow. True introduction to the mountains, trial by fire in snow the color of heaven, as one would imagine it. When I got to where Josh was standing with a day-after-booze-filled smile creeping across his face, I continued pushing up as if nothing happened. I stopped just once to throw up a decent chunk just to the side of my tracks.

 

Finally prepared to hit the jump, I rolled down, losing visibility as the snow was blowing. In the end I missed the kicker completely. Some kid said “At least your approach looked good” and I waved, apologetically, and Josh and I decided to hike the bowl.

 

Later we would come to find out it was called Telemark Bowl. But that would be later on. On this day we were just explorers, two cityboys making our ways into the wilderness our first time. Frightening and titillating and I’ve never felt so free before or since. We didn’t even know about slides though that’s about as good a first backcountry spot to hit when you’re avalanche unawares. Once we were high enough we both strapped in and set off.

 

MY first 2 turns, before it got chopped up lower, just two perfect pure arcs through an empty canvas, I knew I’d found heaven. At the bottom we jibbed around a little popping over a knocked over log and staring up at the sky.

 

Then we were good and tired and ready to get our drink on. On the way down we ran into a couple hitch-hikers looking for a ride back to their car at the parking lot. The girl, it turned out, was a McDonough graduate. She knew mutual friends of mine. It was our first hitchhiker – and as luck had it, she left her hiking poles which I claimed for myself.

 

That season would go on to be one of the great turning points in my life. The time when I realized I had to accomplish something for myself. That I couldn’t keep fucking around anymore. That I could only return to the mountain once I’d earned it.

 

Still – those early days – the ones of discovery, of the open white canvas so full of possibility and what we would accomplish. That is what life is lived for. That is what I miss. That is what I yearn to return to. The open canvases, the grand skies, and mountains that reach in all directions towards the horizon.

Drunken Boxing

Fight Night and all may apply!

It’s a strange racket invented no-doubt by some back-alley huckster as a fail-safe traveling circus of sorts, the Mountain Town Fight night. This age-old tradition is a staple of life in the backwoods lands where men are men and women are, uhhh, kinda mannish as well . . .

So Josh had a couple respectable SD gapers in town visiting, having road-tripped in a Jeep Cherokee and in celebration they told me to fight in this filthy one-night amateur boxing evening. And why not? Surely a savage beast like myself would enjoy an organized fracas and the chance to earn a little money for my troubles only sweetened the deal.

I had my boy Josh drop me off at a dastardly little shithole called the Shady Lady in the basement of the Snow King hotel to sign up. I paid the bastards 15 dollars, complaining about the sheisty undercurrents that make a man pay money to provide entertainment for a crowd of bloodthirsty ski bums. But the attractive, svelte big-titted promoter girls at the check-in table calmed me down by appealing to the most punished part of any red-blooded male in a ski town, the cokkanbalz.

So I pay these carnies my money and strip down to my boxers to weigh in.

“Uhhh, we subtract weight for shoes and clothes anyway.”

“That’s fine.” I weighed in a little under 175 and so I decided that, being weighed in and having a few hours before the fight, I’d grab some food. Then I decided to knock back some of the sauce because, well, I couldn’t remember ever being in a fight while not intoxicated so I promptly ordered a shot and a beer from the Shady Lady. When I decided that wasn’t enough I asked my boy Tyler to pick me up and drive me home. Josh, my roommate, and the SD gapers (good-hearted – not gapers, really, just funny SoCal kids) greeted me with shots of Captain and beers. Knocking ‘em back, laughs, good times, I was sloppy when Tyler brought me back to the Shady Lady. When I checked in again, I stood around watching the whole deal going down, blokes fighting and all and as stumbled around Josh rolled over with a flask full of rum and a few beers. So finally I’m drunk and I’m ready and it’s my turn so I climb into the ring and get ready for my fight with Josh holding my water bottle in the corner.

The first round is a vicious flailing, throwing wild punches and crushing my opponent, a skirted little fucker, into a corner. Then he fights back, hits a couple good ones and I fall. Drunk, angry. I fall a first time before the round is over.

Round 2 starts off strong but by the end I’m falling, slipping, throwing wild punches and missing my opponent. By Round 3 it’s all but over. I’m falling out of my shoe because I'm wasted, breathing heavy, drunk and sloppy and rotten and everything is fuzzy and so when the fight’s over I don’t know whether I’ve won or not, though it should be obvious. But in my heart I won and that’s all that’s important.

So afterwards I went downstairs with my boys to the Shady Lady and ordered a couple beers, washing down the spittle and the blood. Then suddenly I had to run outside and in the cold night, in a pile of snow, I throw up all of my food and all of my booze and the fighting viciousness, rotten spew into the evening. The great spit. But when the world stopped spinning, I made my way back inside the bar and found my boys and we relaxed while random guitarists played an acoustic set and it was a good way to unwind.

(This song is "You're the Best Around" by Joe Esposito)

One of Josh’s friend, a Latin guy from Coeur d’Alene who frequented Josh’s liquor store and appreciated the fact that I fought, bought me a drink.

“Hey, can I hook my boy up with anything?”

“I’d kill for some chatch.”

“Really? Follow me.” So he and I walked back to his place in the cold night with our breaths floating in the airs above us. At his place we talked about life, ripped massive bingers, and fired down a couple sloppy ding-dongs of the old wendy white-bag and we indulged in that vile, massive stuff. What a fine evening, I thought, though soon enough it was time to go. I ran down the street to a party where Josh and the San Diegans and the rest of our friends were partying, my head all twisted and all and eventually, the night slipping away, we headed back to the house.

When we’re there two of the San Diegans immediately passed out, the only girl to come back was a chick named Anessa who was bobbing on Josh’s nob regularly that time, and soon the Beirut was taking place outside, our breath visible, and we yelled rude comments as is customary of such sausage parties and Anessa laughed as I said somethig about her blond friend who loved the kok and we put a cup of warm water on the table. When the ping pong balls fell into the snow, we had to pick them up and dip them into the warm water to heat up our hands, heat up our souls. That was the mountains. That’s what it is, what it was all about. Checking out the new life. And trying something new, no matter how stupid or poorly thought out.

(The song was Jack Johnson covering "Badfish" on the Sublime Tribute Album)

Freedom. The fight. The tour, everything that was fun and open and savage about the mountains. That’s what I miss down here. The battles, the fights. I feel like none have felt as real since.

Falling Down Miss Jackson's Hole (The Conclusion to a Skitown bender)

Continued from Firing Down Lines from Miss Jackson's Hole

We woke up with razors in our blood and fire in our eyes. It was Gaper Fool’s day, April 1^st, and it was time for the derelict locals to run the mountain, to mock all the squares who come to visit for a week of relaxation on blue square groomers and over-priced fireplace suites. I dressed up in a perfect gaper uniform of windpants and a Slim Shady wear thermal; Josh wore a pair of baggy khakis and a Timberland hoodie, emoting the redneck gaper inside of him. We stopped at Bubba’s for their working man’s breakfast – a secret heaping of eggs, sausage, potatoes, and an enormous biscuit, not offered on the menu and reserved for locals. It’s about 4 pounds of food and costs less than 5 bucks – but it’s not for tourists.

From there we rode up the bus, again using somebody else’s pass so I could go for free. At the base of the mountain, in the parking lot, Josh and I took our first shots. We’d packed heavy for today, looking to emulate a feat we’d accomplished 2 years prior. We killed a fifth of rum between us on closing day, taking one shot each for every lift. We also pounded a few beers, smoked salad bowls of kief, hash, dank, and a sprinkling of powder, and by the end we literally felt like we were flying on our last run down the mountain. This year, despite it being my re-introduction to the altitude and only the 5^th day of the season back on my snowboard, we figured we should one-up that feat. On us we had a fifth of Captain in a new plastic bottle, 6 PBR cans, a gram of blow, and a fresh joint rolled by the master, Josh himself.

We took the fun to the Gondola where the party had already begun, the locals descending on the hapless rich gapers like the caddie swim session from Caddie Shack. Lots of hideous old neon one-pieces and skiers wearing Starter Jackets and jeans. One guy was jabbering on an old fake cell-phone loudly the whole time he was in the lift line and on the lift, yelling fake stock quotes in a suit while skiing, the prefect joke on all those fuckers looking to turn Jackson to Aspen so their stock broker friends can ruin another perfectly good mountain town and turn the savage expanses of Wyoming into another Disney-on-snow Colorado.

The ride up, two gapers shared the gondy with us and we took turns making fun of them without them realizing we were making fun of them. Talking about how huge the hits in the kiddie park were and how epic the conditions were and how we were gonna tackle some of the epic blues and how we hoped we didn’t fall. At the top we threw on our gear, Josh and I passing the bottle back and forth to take a shot each, then charged down to Thunder lift. We were yelling like jackasses, gouging the snow and riding backwards but pretending it was an accident. There’s something so amazingly liberating about trying to ride as shitty as possible and/or trying to just appear like you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s fun to jump around act like a fucking idiot and in all honesty my favorite thing to do when snowboarding, whether gaper fool’s or not, is to throw myself around and really just play in the snow.

At Thunder we ran into an old friend, Lora, who was riding with Phil, I think. She was a ripping skier, one of the best girls I’d ever met and the only one I knew who actually skied a bit better than her boyfriend when I lived there. She was visiting from France or Switzerland or some shit (what the fuck – I move to Lagayna, CA, she moves to a European mountain – God I need to reassess my values) and wearing a bright turquoise one-piece. She and Phil joined the two of us and we rolled up the lift, a 4-person crew, passing the rum back and forth. Josh and I chased our shots with a beer each, then rolled down to the top of Thunder Bumps. This was where the magic happened. This was where everybody would line up, like some goddamned snowy Mardi Gras, all dressed as absolutely absurd as possible. Some people held to the theme and dressed like gapers. Some just dressed weird or wore ski race suits or some other costume, which in all honesty really fucking pisses me off. Goddamnit, what the fuck is happening to this world when motherfucking locals from a mothercunting ski mountain can’t keep to a motherfucking theme based around mockery of the bitch-asses who were forcing Jackson Hole to re-make their main entrance road because it confuses fucking retards who wonder why the goddamn road is "going past" the resort?!!! I don’t want to see some slore dressed like a moo cow unless overtop she’s wearing a shirt that says "Texas State University" or "Kansas" where the fattest gapers come from.

We stood atop, 4 stoic bastards exploring just how far down the rabbit hole goes. I had packed all my booze into my Liquid Lounger, a portable cooler backpack with speakers and an iPod jack built in. While we stood there I unzipped the padding over the stereo and switched it on. I turned on my iPod and began blaring hardcore punk music, getting fired up and ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence. Eventually there were people built up around us on the top of the run and we began to descend, like a swarm of drunken bees, weaving into and out of moguls with reckless abandon, consciously throwing out the window all the years of discipline and skill we’d accumulated to slip and slide down the mountain while drinking beers, yelling at each other in thick southern accents, eye up moguls for credit card airs that we patted each other on the back afterwards. 2 days before, on Josh’s skis I had tried a daffy with no air and nearly knocked the wind out of myself; but on gaper fool’s we were throwing our bodies around like rag dolls blowing in the Teton breeze. Josh and Lora specifically kept on running into each other, getting their skis tied up and taking a few legitimately painful hit and tangles. But with the booze flowing freely, the sun shining bright and the dismal, snowless winter almost over, we felt no pain. Again up Thunder and down the bumps, although Josh and I decided to lose Lora to do a few key bumps in the trees. Crazy creatures were all around, vibrations of debauchery I’d not felt in many moons and as my brain slowly shut down my instincts picked up and there, in those open Wyoming woods, my soul was beginning to return to the wild and for a few blessed hours I was free.

After a few more laps we decided to head over to Sublette and there we ran into Tyler. He was skiing in a big polka dot muu-muu with an umbrella and while it’s not mocking a gaper directly, Tyler’s whole life is one giant affront to gapers everywhere (the only Jackson local I know who lived there for a whole season and clipped or otherwise scammed tickets every day because he didn’t have a pass). He joined our crowd of merry pranksters, Lora disappeared, and I think Tyler, Josh, Phil and I did keybumps riding up the lift – but it’s hard to be sure because my brain was being scrambled and fried like that egg in those old 80’s anti-drug commercials and in reality the whole day was a haze. I remember Tyler hucking one of the rocks right above Sublette lift to everybody’s drunken cheers, holding out his umbrella, and watching as the wind from the drop blue it back and completely ruined it. He came up to us, laughed, threw the umbrella in a trash can and smiled as he said, "It’s my roommate’s." I remember some bowl tokes were in there somewhere. Again with the shots of rum – lots of rum – and more PBR’s. Eventually we decided to make our way to Casper, where the Gaper Day mountain party moves in the afternoon. Already people had lined up on all the picnic benches, big old pitchers of Boozy the Clown’s secret sauce. All the who’s who of the town showed up the freaks and the geeks all sucking on the tit of the Dionysian cow and laughing and smiling because they all knew that finally the miserable snowless season they’d all suffered through was coming to an end and while the year before had been nothing but epic skiing and riding to exhaustion, this season had been one enormous drunkfest from green flag to red. And I was proud to have come up from sea level and to be out boozing all but the best of them. Josh and I disappeared behind the Casper Lodge and restaurant for more key bumps, then came around to rejoin the party, kill the beers in our pockets, and order pitchers which seemed to be appearing out of nowhere as if sent by God to make sure we were good and drunk for Gaper day. Josh and I started pounding the rum, double fisting with a pitcher in the other hand for balance, and then, after all that booze and all those drugs, we decided that the best idea would be to do a few laps of Casper lift. Finally we finished the rum and downed the rest of a pitcher of beer with each consecutive lap. The mountain closed and we took it to the bottom, taking it to the streets, where they’d set up a big free concert in the parking lot.

We decided to duck into the Mangy Moose to buy a few PBR tall boys, the official drink of Jackson Hole, and walked around in the sunbaked mud and ice of the base where other drunken locals sat around, shirts off, sunning themselves and talking loudly and happily. We swung into the VC for a beer or two, the locals official apres nestled between my old jobs at the TGR offices and Wildernest Sports. We were  loud and bombastic, drunken fools are we all if nothing more.

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around. Tyler had gone to work, I think, and Graham had joined us or something. I really don’t know but what I do know is that that redheaded fucker who was the lead singer for the Spin Doctors was performing, a hippie burnt out musician in a crowd of hippie burnt out athletes, belting out acoustic versions of "Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong" and "Two Princes" and "Jimmy Olsen’s Blues" from the legendarily forgettable "Pocket Full of Kryptonite."

Eventually Josh and I were on the bus back to town, dinged out of our minds, drunk, high, completely twisted, our brains nothing more than puddles of goo sloshing around between our ears. I turned on the stereo in my liquid lounger and played the songs from the Jackson sequences from TGR’s "Soul Purpose" (premiering the year I lived up there) and "High Life" (arguably the best TGR and in that case big mountain ski movie of all time). "Rescue Me" by who the fuck knows and Boy Sets Fire’s "The Rookie".

Back at Josh’s house we took Phatty bong rips, then sat in the hot tub as the sun began to set over the Tetons. Slowly the drugs and the booze and all the shit was slipping out of my body and as Josh somehow went off to work, I was beginning to finally nod to sleep. Then Phil rolled in, began lining up some more of the ding, and then I was back in the thick of it, again feeling awake, again not being able to go to sleep until 2 in the morning.

The next day we woke up to a few inches of fresh powder. They couldn’t believe it. This morning was the first day it snowed in months. Everybody was amped, running around like a bunch of banshees, throwing on our gear, grabbing our powder planks, and climbing into Josh’s truck. He had been scheduled to work this day. In fact, he had been suspended from being a ski instructor for the last month for calling some little fucker an "Asshole" (after which the kid whipped out his little Razr phone, called his dad, and complained). Today was supposed to be his first day back at work. Josh decided fuck it and fuck them. No way would he waste the last powder day of a dry season for some little shithead children wanting to learn how to ski. No, we were powder fiends, on and off the mountain, and today we had a beautiful little gift. Today would be my big day of the season.

Graham was working the gondola so he let us up for free – the only person I know who moves to Jackson for half a season and still agrees to work on one of his only powder days – and from there we made our way to Thunder, then to Sublette and finally to the surface lift up Rendezvous Bowl. The used to take people up but now that it was gone, there was only a cold, windy chairlift that blew down most of the time. We thought it would be epic but other than the first few turns it was crud, just dusty on crusty and I was scared so would be the rest of the mountain. Thank God that wasn’t the case.

The Sublette woods were firing and we found knee-high powder stashes with almost every turn. We hooted and hollered, yelling out prayers to the gods for blessing us with one great day and I was sure it was a reward for our previous day’s intense rabble-rousing. If one pushes the human spirit and body to the limit, he is always rewarded, or so says Buddha, the Dalai Lama, and Gary Busey, my three spiritual gurus. Josh and Phil were hucking as was Tyler, decent 5-10 foot drops into a foot or so of thick Spring powder. We lapped Mushroom Chutes under thunder, then back to Sublette for a few Alta chute runs, a line or so down Expert Chutes, and the back to Mushroom Chutes where the snow was its softest and fluffiest. Graham joined us on a lunch break at Thunder and we were charging it, powering through the trees, mini white rooms all over, and I was throwing spray fans like I was surfing a frozen wave. One of our last runs through Mushroom chutes I found myself aat a particularly tight little drop at the bottom of which was a tree you had to turn at quickly and hard right after threading the needle between two trees barely 2 feet apart. I dropped in, layed in my edge to avoid the tree waiting for me at the bottom, and found my little powder trough was just a little dust on crust and instead of turning hard I slid helplessly against an ice patch, slammed into a tree, and scorpioned into an outcropping of pines with a dead thud and a slight snap echoing from my feet.

"Fuck" I yelled out and Graham rode down to ask me if I was okay. I untangled myself from the trees, looked at my board, slid down a little into Amphitheatre and sat down for a few seconds.

"Dude, do you wanna come down with me?"

"No, fuck it. This is probably my last day of the season, might as well push on." I’d hurt my ankle before the trip and had brought an ankle brace which I’d worn every day but this one. Now that ankle was throbbing. I met with Josh and Phil at the base and told them I’d eaten it hard. Graham testified to how bad it was, that he was afraid I was going to die when my helmet crunched into a tree. He continued down but I rode with Josh and Phil for a few more hours, occasionally complaining about my ankle but mostly keeping quiet and quietly wincing with every backside carve and every transfer to my frontside edge. Especially then. We made it over to Casper and ducked into the Palace for a spinach smoke and rode a bit more. The pain went away slightly but it was becoming harder and harder to put any weight on my front foot and trying to push through the pain was exhausting me even more. Maybe I’d finally hit my limit. We finished around 3:30 and I hobbled to the truck alongside Josh and Phil. Back at the apartment I took off my boot, wincing as it slipped over my ankle, and revealed a half-tennis-ball sized swell.

"Fuck dude, you weren’t kidding."

"Yeah. I think I might have broken one of the small bones in it. A navicular fracture, y’know?"

"Damn. Well do you wanna bowl toke?"

"Sure." We packed the bowl and made our way out to the hot tub, smoking in the free Wyoming air with the river running through it and ducks floating down, quacking under the fresh open air and the big high alpine sun. That night we mostly smoked bowls and drank beers. Josh cooked up a spaghetti and and meatball and garlic bread dinner and we relaxed. He and Phil were planning on waking up at 6 to hike Glory Bowl for the last powder faces of the year; I was done. My body was all but broken, my organs were shot, and my soul was going through painful withdrawal every day.

You see I’ve never been as happy, like completely sublimely happy and content, as I was when living in Jackson. Living in the lowlands, I’ve learned to ignore that and to mask my discontent under a façade of cheesy jokes amongst the working stiffs of society, pretending to care about the gapers I worked with’s tales of skiing epic corduroy at Mammoth, and to accept the societal conditioning that a lifestyle not focused on making money is a childish dream. But being back up there, I’m able to put it all into perspective and it’s like all those poisons, the false prophets and social ills that plague our lives when we work the 9 to 5 in the lowlands and still strive for the "American Dream" when we all know it died a good 50 years ago, had started to ooze out of my pores, like a spiritual master cleanse or a colonic for the soul, and all of a sudden I looked at my life and felt horrible about myself. What the fuck was I doing? Why the fuck did I pretend to give a fuck what all those losers at Wet Seal (and yes, basically everybody I worked with at Wet Seal was an enormous loser in the eyes of the grand universal watcher with the exception of 3 or 4 people) thought – why did I even want to keep my job there? Why was I once again pretending to be something I wasn’t? It was like Baltimore all over again.

The next day they left early and I just barely heard them as they stepped over me to gear up for the hike. I woke up, smoked a bowl, and went to work collecting all my shit that had become strewn all over their bare-bones apartment and packing it all back up, made ever more difficult because I couldn’t put any weight on my ankle. Eventually I found a few pain pills after hopping up the stairs to Josh’s bathroom, then forced myself to put weight on my ankle and keep it loose as I knew soon enough I would be hustling through airports and would need the ability to use both legs. Josh and Phil got home around 1 and we smoked a final bowl in the hot tub. I got out, threw my wet trunks in a plastic bag in my ski bag, said goodbye to Phil, and loaded my gear into the back of Josh’s truck. On the way to the airport Josh and I talked about how great it was seeing each other. I told him how envious I was of his life and how so much of me wants to live there but I knew I had to do something big with my life before I could return to the Hole and become comfortable and happy again. He told me he knew, from day 1 he knew Jackson Hole is too small a town for me and that someday, once I’ve achieved Hunter S. Thompson notoriety I’d return.

"But still, I miss you up here, bro. You gotta get back sooner rather than later."

"Well if I haven’t made some good steps by 2008, I’ll be back for the winter."

"First year the tram’s up, nice."

"Yeah man, for sure." He helped me unload my shit from the car. I had put my ankle brace on for the flight, painfully since I had rubbed my ankle and my heel practically raw from its seams and although it supported me it also dug into my wounds with every step. Still, it allowed me to give him a big hug and a wave, then drag my board bag, my suitcase, and wear my Liquid Lounger to the check-in. I got to the wsmall waiting area in the tiny airport and stared. It'’ the most beautiful flight gate ever, with wide open expansive windows that stare hard upon the Grand Teton, the highest point, a 2-day summit (or 1 for the truly hardcore) almost always topped with snow. I stared out into the majestic peaks and wondered again "What the fuck am I doing with my life? Why do I leave this for the hideous rat race, propagated by the everyday normal and the uninteresting of American society? The gapers? Seriously, why do I turn my back on this happiness and fulfillment for a dream that I’m not even sure is really mine?" I opened my weird metaphysical and anthropological book, "Sex Drugs, Einstein, and Elves", and read about one nerdy guy’s musings about all the random shit he knows and while it had been an eye-opener for some crazy kuunt I knew, it just seemed like a nerd with a little too much time on his hands for research. He was making connections many of which I’d already begun to make without spending years avoiding the arts of socialization and while interesting, I didn’t find it any more special than an encyclopedia. Essentially he connected the dots for those too stupid to figure shit out on their own. OK, the idea that DMT might not be a psychotropic drug but actually a portal to another dimension is kinda rad. And I liked the fact he brought up that the English language is really just a mixture of other languages. Still, I boarded the plane disgruntled, made my switch over in SLC, and ordered a whiskey neat. Good bye, Jackson Hole. Goodbye, my soul. God bless booze. I hate gapers.

Firing Down Lines from Miss Jackson's Hole (Part 1)

Okay, so I did a quick write-up about a powder-filled visit to my one-time home of Jackson from 2 years ago. Then Kyle did a little story about his spring break to the town while I was living there. But in honor of the end of Spring Break Month, I’m going to take you through my disgusting bender visit (a la "Spring Break") to Jackson on the last few days of last year’s season – and through a voyage that tested the strength of the human body, the human spirit, and the human liver.

I had originally planned to be in fucking ripping shape by the time I got to town. It was a late March trip due to a need to save money for it and I used the extra time to begin running and surfing and skating as much as possible. About 3 weeks before I was supposed to leave, I fucked up my ankle somehow running up and down a paved hill by my Laguna home, which left me with the sad realization that I wouldn’t be in any somewhat respectable shape to charge the most epic of mountains. But when one door closes a window opens and so I decided to turn my concentration towards a different type of shape, namely partying shape.

I launched myself into 3 straight weeks of drinking every day, usually consisting of nicely glasses of warm rum and whiskey. On the weekends I would go up to LA or Newport or down to San Diego to visit friends and drink to blackout, pass-out, and vomit. As I got on the flight for J-Hole, I knew I was ready.

When I arrived I was picked up by Phil and Graham. Phil is an old friend and my old roommate and longtime ski buddy Josh’s roommate; Graham is a nice kid who’s a little too wholesome to be living with those fiending derelicts. In classic Jackson fashion they had just come from rock climbing and Phil was wearing nothing but his long underwear and boots while Graham still had his harness on like a fucking kook. They drove me into town and I was appalled by the lack of snow. It looked like a Wyoming summer, with vast dry grass fields leading on either side towards the Tetons.

"Yeah, there’s no snow. We haven’t had snow since, like, February."

"Well, fuck, that’s good, because I’m not in the best of shape anyway. That’ll just mean a lot more drinking."

"Exactly." We drove into town and stopped by Josh’s liquor store, a small cottage with an enormous wine and booze selection in the heart of Jxn, the Jackson Hole Wine Company. He came from behind the counter and gave me a big hug. It felt good to be back in the mountains, back among the living, with the ski bums whom I envied and would be with if I didn’t have this goddamned societal monkey on my back. We bought 3 6-packs of various well-made microbrews (including my favorite, the Snake River Pale Ale), a fifth of whiskey, a fifth of rum, and an 18-pack of PBR. Josh hooked up the discount and told us he would be home in a few hours and was glad to see me.

From Josh’s, me fresh off the plane and not even unpacked, we drove down Main Street to Bubba’s, the legendary BBBQ house (the extra "B" stands for "BYOBB") where supposedly they told Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzennegger to wait for a table like everybody else, despite Shriver’s screeching into the ear of the hostess, because "everybody waits at Bubba’s." However, with no snow and it being the end of the season, a table was available immediately so the three of us sat down, ordered ribs, and started pounding beers. We discussed politics and international events – without a TV, Phil was dependent on the small Jackson Daily, which rarely covered news outside Teton County. After our lunch/dinner, we made our way back to Josh, Phil, and Graham’s townhouse, a 3-bedroom 2-level sitting on Cache Creek. It was the perfect ski palace – a wall rack with like 20 pegs hanging next to the door; a small kitchen table where Phil sat down immediately to begin grinding up some herbs, piling up a nice little chunk of kief for the top of the bongload; a living room with a ratty couch and a stone fireplace with splinters of firewood all around it on the floor. In a corner was a TV with a DVD player and 3 videos – Blood Diamond, a home video of a trip to Vail, and TGR’s High Life. But the truth was the back deck – a 2-by-4 floor with wooden benches and a hot tub, sitting on the grassy banks of a tranquil little stream. Seriously, what the fuck was I doing in Orange County working for a shitty girls’ clothes retailer when my good friends were living like this?

I smoked the bong with Phil, heavy dank that burnt the back of my throat, washed it down with shots of whiskey, and we sat on the back deck talking about the lifestyle and about how my current day to day was a fucking joke. Phil moved to Jackson halfway through the season I was there and back then he was just learning how to snowboard; I took him on epic tree runs and even convinced him to do his first huck, off a 12-15-foot cliff. Now this was his town and with every passing year I was becoming more and more of a gaper. Fuck that was depressing. There was only one choice for me – to drink myself local.

We were soon done the micro-brews and had moved onto the PBR’s. One of my best friends from the town named Tyler, a legendary Boulder bearded ski bum with a penchant for fucking random slores on people’s couches using vegetable oil as lube and hucking burly 40-foot-cliffs with reckless abandon, rolled over to drink and enjoy the merriment. Finally Josh came home and I decided there was one thing I had going for my gaperdom, money. I Threw $120 bucks on an eight ball, somehow it appeared, and we drew up big old sloppy, chunky lines. If it wasn’t snowing on the mountain, we would make it snow in their dining room. More shots ensued. More lines. Bong rips and bowl tokes. Next thing I knew we were on our way out to Eleanor’s Cuvee and then I was in full on strobe light vision. Key bumps in the parking lot. Crowded, all locals in vests and hippie beards, a band of some sort playing. We were the freaks, hovering on the fringes, staring angrily at everybody. When I lived there, myself and our little band of miscreants hated most of the other locals, especially the health freaks who liked to ski in control, never drank enough to get violently drunk, and always seemed to be laughing frivolously. The night went on with images of shots and beers at the bar and then next thing I knew I was waking up at noon on a bare mattress thrown on the living room floor and sprinting out to the porch so I could puke up my lower intestines, a few gallons of booze, some ribs, and probably a gram of good blow in the high alpine afternoon.

Luckily for me Josh was feeling just as bad so I didn’t feel guilty about not getting up to ride. It was shitty conditions anyway. We decided that since we were so hungover and the snow was so bad we’d switch up gear. I’d ride Josh’s skis and he’d ride my snowboard. We got to the mountain around 2:30, smoked a warm-up bowl in Josh’s truck, put on each other’s gear, and walked to the gondy. This was my first time in Jackson without the tram and it was sad to see the magnificent beast sitting in its dock, like a half-dead dog about to be taken out back and shot because it was too old. Graham was with us too and since he worked the gondy he got me on for free. Josh and I smoked another bowl as we ascended the mountain. When it ended and the Jackson Hole silver fox, a fucking smoking old cougar (and one-time nude model, as the story goes) smiled at us as we struggled off and took longer than usual putting on our skis and boards. We rolled over to Casper Woods, laughing at ourselves struggling to master the new tools. I had skied maybe 3 times since I turned 18 and made the switch to snowboarding; Josh had snowboarded a handful of times but not enough to be a pro. Still, we probably rode better than 90% of the gapers who rolled up there struggling with the gear they’d "perfected" over a lifetime of riding Blue Squares at Vail. I had to keep reminding myself I had 4 edges, not 2, and that on skis you could just lean back and let gravity do all the work while your two thn tips took the brunt of the choppy snow and slush covering the slopes on the Spring day. We managed 2 or 3 runs, then called it a day.

We stopped at the supermarket and I bought some food to cook up for a phatty feast. Back at Josh’s Phil had rolled a joint and Phil, Josh and I smoked it while sitting in the hot tub, feeling the bright Teton sun on our faces, smelling the freshness of air that hadn’t been destroyed by too many people driving solo in SUV’s down the 5, and joking about how fucked up we had all been the night before. Back inside, Josh’s girlfriend, a little Brazilian on an international business exchange (seriously, how fucking rad is that?) came over and we drank a few beers while Josh and I took turns cooking steaks and vegetables for our dinner. We pounded beers and ate our dinners. Then we lined up a few rails to get ourselves ready for the evening and turned his dining room table into a Beirut Table. Tyler came over again, as did a bunch of new kids I’d never met before (a strange thing when your friends, with whom you had once basically shared a life, now had new friends and new experiences you’d never known).

My Beirut skills had atrophied from living with a girlfriend in suburbia in Orange County so mostly I just drank, fired down lines, smoked bowls, and hung out. But inside my body, the chatch and the alcohol was frementing together, combining like a Voltron of drugs to form the legendary coca-ethylene, a monster more powerful and longer lasting than the sum of its parts. Soon the night began getting hazy and people started filing out. Eventually it was just Tyler and I watching my new Absinthe video, taking bong rips and saying little because our brains had all but short-circuited. Then he left and it was just me. By now the weed was starting to fade away and the alcohol was long gone. But the cocaine was going strong and around 3 in the morning I found myself lying on the mattress, cold, chatched up, and completely awake, staring wide-eyed into the night. Through the thin ceiling I heard the noises of Josh punishing the little Brazilian girl, interrupted with her occasional moans, my heart about to burst out of my chest because of the drugs, and it was enough that I considered swearing off drugs, if only I could get to sleep. Eventually they stopped, I think, and it was just me, alone, yipped up, in the cold wilderness of Wyoming, my mind racing, questioning my life.

Somehow I eventually fell asleep and the next morning Josh came down so we could cook up some eggs and go riding. First day back on the board in J-Hole in a year and it had been too long. We got to the mountain around 11, me with a 12-pack in my hand that I gave to the guys working the gondola so I could ride up for free again. The snow was a mixture of crud, ice, and dirt and so Josh, Phil, and I charged it as best we could but nobody hucked anything, even Josh. We made our way to Thunder, lapping Mushroom Chutes a few times and meeting up with Tyler before we decided to make it over to Sublette. There we hit up Expert Chutes and most of Sublette Trees. We went for Alta 2, which by now was little more than a thin strip of hard-pack with a few inches of depth and gnarly rocks and branches sticking up like a steep mine field. We decided to duck into a hut and Tyler told us he had to go to work and couldn'’ smoke.

"That’s OK, we’re not smoking," Josh said. Tyler looked at us perplexed until we pulled out a small rock of chatch. He smiled and decided to come with us. We did key bumps, then Tyler 86ed down to his job at a ski shop and Josh and I smoked a bowl of "spinach" herbs(my term for it, since afterwards you felt like Popeye, your energy regained, your muscles rejuvenated, and your forearms swollen like an old pipe-smoking drunken sailor) and cruised over to Casper. We lapped Casper woods a few times, digging for the smallest little powder stashes we could find tucked into the trees before hitting up the "Mansion", a big hut hidden in the woods that was big enough to fit 8 people if you crammed everybody in there (as I’ve said before, DO NOT SEARCH FOR THESE HUTS!!! Make friends with the locals and maybe they’ll take you to one. I once heard of a gaper finding one, going in with his buddies smoking it out and holding up a band of locals waiting outside for it. Tree elves have dug and created these things and cast spells on them so that if you’re not invited, your balls will come alive, detach themselves from your dick and break out of your scrotum, then begin strangling you with their testicular tubes.) The spinach had lost some of its effects and so I was struggling for our last few runs as we made it to the bottom of the mountain.

Josh and I rode the bus back to town, me using his roommate’s pass to get a free ride, and at his house he changed, then headed off to work at the liquor store. Phil came home and he and Graham took me to a nice little Mexican place where we bought tasty burritos, in the fluorescent lights of what must have at one time been a small convenience store, and we made it back to their house for a nighttime dip in the hot tub and a bowl smoke. I might have done a line or two as well and when Josh came home we drank a few beers, talked shit, and headed out to the bars again. We hit up all the normal haunts, Eleanor's, the Irish bar, all along firing down keybumps and talking shit. Eventually we decided we were drunk enough after shots of whiskey, unwanted comments to meathead guys and gaper girls, and the ding sliders that we'd call it a night. The next day would be a big one. The next day was April 1^st, Gaper Fool’s day! And Good God! What a Day it would be! (To be finished in Falling Down Miss Jackson's Hole - Conclusion to a Ski Town Bender– when the debauchery takes itself to a whole other level)

Jackson Hole at the peak Pt.2

Continued from Jackson Hole at my Peak

The next day, was a family day, which is a lot different than hanging out with the Spears crew. It was actually a relief to not ski, since my legs worked liked my little man after a fifth of whiskey. After eating a large platter of eggs benedict at their hotel, we made our voyage to the great unknown. By the way, their eggs benedict was as untouchable as grotto in the Vatican. We then hopped into the rented Subaru outback, and made our way to God’s country, also known as Grand Teton National Park.We ate lunch at a little restaurant on the side of a national park. We then acted like a bunch of booming hippies and hiked around the woods without a final destination. We saw plenty of moose and elks, no black bears, but a surreal environment with no idea of where we were going. My advice for a ski trip out west is to take one day to just appreciate the earth Being from Baltimore, and living in Delaware and SoCal, I haven’t really seen mountains that were 14000 feet high. It was some pretty trippy shit. After our journey, we grabbed some grub at a little pizza, burgers, and beer restaurant at the base of the Tetons called Dornan's.

That night we went to the Wort Hotel bar in order to meet up with our parents. After a drink, we decided to spend the rest of the night just rolling around town with Ryan's friends, the sick skier hucker Colorado pothead Tyler and fired up powder charger Josh . Honestly, as much as I love the craziness and the extreme sporting that usually occurs on my trips, there's something that needs to be said about just moving slowly and see all aspects of the current destination. The next day we said goodbye to the rents and headed to the mountain. The rest of the week consisted of hitting the slopes and smoking ganj, which is similar to what happens at the X Games.

Each day consisted of hucking off of a different couloir and chute. Being the decent amateur that I am, I was able to overcome Corbets Coulouir , as well as, Spacewalk and the Mushroom chutes. That said, I did not do it gracefully by any stretch of the imagination. Since Ryan had been out there for some time, he would huck off of 10-20 foot cliffs pretty smoothly, while I on the other hand, would follow by going off full speed and landing on every part of my body except my feet. After going off one of those death ridden risks, your heart feels like you did a gram of blow after drinking 5 redbull vodkas at an oxygen bar. After hitting Corbett's and slamming hard against the wall, I had to make the painful Couloir climb back to my gear while Ryan sat in the legendary Corbett's cave just in front. Every now and then I would follow him the best I could while Glading where our pit stops would consist of local made smoking shelter. There were even communal rolling papers and pieces in them. Ryan mentioned them earlier - they're made during the off-season by local elves and have crazy curses over them that prevent gapers from finding them and punish those who are not with a local guide and don't leave behind a nug or something - so if you happen upon one, make sure you give a gift to the local elves or you'll break your leg later that same day.

The nights were basically the same, with a few exceptions. After a long day of riding, we would usually smoke some pot, cook a fatty dinner, and drink a few beers while watching a sick TGR movie. One night, I went to work with him ,which consisted of drinking 4 40's of PBR and watching raw skiing footage from different TGR trips. This was one of the most cushiony jobs I had ever seen. One night, Ryan and I went to one of his boy’s birthday party at an underground bowling alley in the VFW hall. It was a fucking sweet bowling ally, but there were way to many green heads. The obnoxious smell of patchouli and arm pit does not work for me. The Dude would have been pissed by the lack of respect shown towards a sport that loves freedom. The biggest event of the year in Jackson Hole fell on the last full day I was there.

The last ski day is a spectacle to be seen by all. If you think that drinking while skiing is cool, then Gaper Fools day is perfect for you. The day consists of dressing in ridiculous gaper gear and skiing down the slopes partially drunk and kind of stupid on April 1st, making fun of the gapers who actually dress and ski like that sober. After putting on my Todd Heap Jersey and a pair of large, old jeans, we killed a Bloody Mary and made our way to the mountain. It was a perfect fucking day. It was 40, but felt like 70 due to the closeness of the sun. There are many places to stop in order to get the fuel to continue the downward spiral that leads to the stupor. At the end of the day, the ski lodge blows up. You have to experience the scene to really get an understanding of it. Basically, hundreds of people were walking around with beers while a DJ spun some underground shit, there were plenty of blunts, and I even noticed a few half naked chicks playing in the warm snow.

After taking a perk, I headed home tired, sun burnt, and soar. The Jackson Hole spring break was an unbelievable experience. It was definitely one of the best trips I have ever been on. It was a very diverse trip, full of many different activities that melted together to create an ideal experience. There is nothing better than leaving spring break in better shape than arriving there.

Jackson Hole at my peak Pt.1

My sophomore year, I went to visit Ryan again. At this point he was living in Jackson Hole Wyoming. As I have previously stated, going skiing during spring break is an underrated option. We flew in during the night, when it was dark. The air was clean and crisp and the stars and the moon brightly shown over the bare snow capped ground. I actually flew in with our parents, who were staying for a few days. Even though we could not see too much, you get that feeling that there is some amazing scenery.

We ate real quickly at some nice little diner. What it was called, I completely forget. It was a meal fit for a lumberjack, that’s for damn sure. My parents were staying at a nice hotel, The Wort Hotel. It was a lavish place with a ski cabin feel. It had a nice little bar/ restaurant inside. It was great. SO after we left them, Ryan and I headed to his place to get high. After taking a few rips out of his bowl, we called it a night.

We woke up early the next day, way earlier than I am used to. I, at this point, had hit the pinnacle of my drinking abilities. A few weeks before this trip, I took 22 shots in two hours and didn’t vomit. I was completely fucked up, but I lived. I also played two games of beirut before it (I have witnesses) SO between all of the drinking I was partaking in, I didn’t know that time existed before 12. We got to the mountain at 8 so it we could get one of the first gondolas up. It was amazing up at 12,000 feet above elevation. I could barely breathe and the wind was blistering.

Now the first run for someone who was in shape like should be an easy run to get acclimatized. This was not the case; Ryan had other plans. We ended up hiking about 2 miles completely up hill in about knee high powder. The wind and the snow were flying into me, pelting my face like a bunch of bee stings after their hive had been rocked. After about ten minutes of telling him that I hate him, we ended at Cody Bowl, which is a legendary powder face in the back country of Jhole. It was amazing. After dropping the mini-cornice into some unnerving steeps and cruising my fastest to keep up with Ryan, we ran into one of his friends a little lower in some forests. He shouted at the friend, the kid stopped and told us he had a little present. We went into a little makeshift cabin/shack, hidden amongst the trees, and had a big puff of some dank. It was glorious! However, since not only is it a locals wood shack but also it's out of bounds, if you spend too much time looking for it without a local guide YOU WILL DIE (GAPERS!)

The rest of the day ended up being a catch up for my body. I was weak and tired. That night we met up with our parents in town. Something that Jackson Hole has that no where can say they have is an extremely large arch made completely out of antlers. It was awesome. The town seemed to be known for its dead and healthy. That night, we went to dinner at a BYOB rib shack called Bubba’s Bar B Que, so legit they don't even have a website. It had a crab shack feel, but instead of eating creatures of the sea, we divulged in animals of the land. I must say that I love places that are BYOB. If restaurants just realized that they could jack up their prices a few more dollars but provided BYOB, they would see more activity.

That night, we ended up fat and happy. The next day was similar to the first day. Ryan took me all around the mountain. I have skied in Colorado, Vermont, California, and all throughout the Mid-Atlantic. There is nothing more difficult than Jackson Hole in the US. It is definitely the steepest mountain in the US.

That night we all ended up going to an unbelievable restaurant in the middle of the town called the Snake River Grill. It was a 4 star restaurant for sure. I highly recommend it to anyone willing to spend a few extra bucks for some great ambiance and game. A ridiculously nice restuarant on the second floor overlooking the Jackson square. I went back to Ryan's house with my belly full of the finest meats, smoked a bowl, drank a few beers, and called it a night.

Continued in Jackson Hole at the Peak

Jackson Hole - Attempt 2

So I spent today writing an epic story about a trip I took 2 years ago to Jackson Hole. I talked about flying Jet Blue from Long Beach to Salt Lake while watching the X Games live on Direct TV. I talked about Coleman's and my rental car drive in a Toyota Matrix on the blizzarding road from SLC to Jackson, when we had to stop  and get a hotel room because of the inclement weather in a random bakcwoods truck stop motel just after I finished talking to Kyle from New Zealand.

I talked about finally getting there, about feeling home and sad because this was the only place I'd been truly happy (despite the fact that Becca's the only person who enabled me to be as close to happy anywhere else), about how we were charging it with Josh and Tyler and Rob and Phil. Waist-high fresh powder every day, hucking mini-cliffs off the headwall and the snow huts (carved by elves during the off-season with special magic to keep it hidden from gapers so don't look for it - and if a gaper does try and entry, he will be tortured via CIA-sanctioned waterboarding mixed with testicle flambe and scrotum strangulation, etc . . .) in which we re-energized by smoking bowls of dank we called Spinach.

I talked about going to the ski school party at the VFW hall, the only bowling alley in town and only available to those who rented it out. About drinking ungodly amounts of whiskey and rum with Coleman and Josh (and even Scott, a little), about free refills every run with 12 inches or more of snow falling a day, the sheer drama of the Tetons bringing me to near-tears while everything felt so good and so perfect. About Scott hitting the nose of Corbett's at 40 feet, about calling girls rude things (the girl to guy ratio is 1-5, hot girl to guy 1-40, hot girl without a boyfriend or and 4 or 5 guy "friends" in line to guy 1-100) and almost getting into fights with the respectable, organic-eating athletes who in Jackson Hole are forced by limited bars to mix with derelicts such as myself and my friends. About 43 North and Eleanor's Cuvee and apres with PBR tall-boys from the Mangy Moose general store or at the VC with all the sickest locals, people like Kina Pickett and Travis Rice and Chriss Collins rolling in for coffees or beers, trhe bar sandwiched between my old workplaces Wildernest and the TGR offices.

I went on to describe 2 random nights and 1 day in Park City e airport wher we were flying out of, at the end of the trip, an attempt to stay closer to thstaying with a girl who Josh had met for 3 hours 2 years ago (althugh despite that he thought there was nothing weird about us staying there, even after he discovered she had a boyfriend and Josh wouldn't be able to pay her with dick) and her hot, cool tour-guide sister (who had once a long time ago dated Kurt Wastell), who seemed to take a liking to Coleman and I, two physically wasted creatrures run down by a week of the blissfull excess of whiskey, dank herbs, record powder, and red meat. Even the random night hanging with Whistler locals also staying at the enormous (though relatively cheap) Park City house, an awkward instance of couch-surfing with complete strangers (during the day we had to let in a heating repairguy, although we didn't even know the peoiple whose house we were staying at - I wonder if he stole anything? Lke a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode).

I wrote this all up in an epic blog. The Becca's shitty computer, still our best in the house, turned off, corrupted the file, and I had to throw this together to put something up.

But in the end I guess here's the only point - Jackson is fucking epic. The greatest mountain and the greatest town on earth. And if you know a local, you're entree to a ski trip better than any and all others you've ever taken. If you don't - just make sure to show respect to the locals and don't be a fuckin lame-ass gaper.

RA

Super Bowl 39 in Jackson Hole

Given the fact that not only is Ski Week slowly coming to an end (we'll have 2 or 3 more ski blogs next week, before starting our lead in to Spring Break) but today is Super Bowl 42, I figured I would combine the two into a tight little blog about Super Bowl Sunday in Jackson Hole.

It was 2005, Super Bowl 39, and I had been living in Jackson for a few months. I went riding for a few hours that day by myself, as my ski school friends and my liftie roommate had to work. It was a great day - despite the fact that we didn't have much snow, most of the gapers were in their hotel rooms drinking and "relaxing", getting ready for the big show. It's a well documented fact that most men, especially the average, beer-gut having, physically unambitious, gaper-types, would rather use any excuse to sit on their asses in front of a TV and drink beer than exert themselves. Not that I'm against drinking beer, I just don't believe drinking and skiing or boarding are mutually exclusive. I'm not sure why there weren't many women on the slopes - any generalization I could draw might sound sexist coming from a man so I'm just gonna let you all hypothesize about that.

Anyway, after shredding for a few hours on a nearly-empty mountain, I headed home, changed, and waited for my roommates to arrive from work so we could drive to a friend's ranch between town and the mountain. This kid at gone to school with one of my roommates in New Hampshire and through some strange turn of events ended up sharing a 20-acre ranch with an enormous 5-bedroom cabin/mansion, snowmachines, an enormous tank full of gas for filling them up ("snowmachine" is the non-gaper term for snowmobiles, in case you were wondering), and a huge barn out back. Several times that year they held parties in the barn with hundreds of people, a sick local band named Mandatory Air playing, and a DJ, normally culminating in epic snowball fights around bonfires. But on this day, it was a casual gathering for close friends.

We pulled up, walked past the home-made authentic igloo in which their German Shepherd was hiding, and greeted our hosts with some booze and some wine. They already had a few kegs and had some snacks and foodstuffs, but to get there I had to fight through a crowd of hungry ravenous girls. I'll never forget that, how this Super Bowl party was different from all others because the girls were huddled around the food, throwing elbows at anybody trying to get something to eat, while us guys were sitting in the other room smoking herd out of a big yellow pipe and listening to music.

Finally the game got underway and we all gathered together, drinking keg beer and eating chips. We had one Philly fan in the group and one Pats fan, but otherwise we were just watching it because it's what you're supposed to do on Super Bowl Sunday. We passed the bowl and got real mellow while New England clinched their second Championship Ring in a row, the first team to do that since the Broncos.

All the commentators were talking about how New England was seeking to become a dynasty, which was laughed off by all of us ski bums - 2 wins sure, but I can't see any more - and during half-time we went into the other room and had another session with the bong.

In Jackson Hole yoou're secluded from the rest of society. Things that had at one point seemed so important - the Super Bowl, the Iraq war, college,  9 to 5 jobs, 401k, etc . . . now seemed foreign, distant and removed. You're able to look at it objectively and realize that what happens on some football field hundreds or thousands of miles away really has no bearing on your life whatsoever. So we watched politely, enjoyed the spectacle without any real attachment (except the Eagles and the Pats fans), laughed when they showed a roided out Stallone cheering from his VIP box, and looked at the night as nothing more than another reason to hang out with good people, drink beer, and eat snack foods. The girls were funny but nobody was there to hook up. And after New England clinched it we threw on some ski videos and drank until we were out of everything.

Not to put a damper on the whole festivities - and now that I live in the lowlands I can't help but be at least somewhat swept up in the mainstream fervor over the greatest football game of the year and I know for sure that the Giants may prove to be David, although the Patriots' victory may be a resounding signal that the terrorists won't win. But there's a part of me that misses the clarity that comes from being detached from everything and everywhere, despite spending much of that time trapped in a blue cloud.

That being said, when I lived in Steamboat Springs, CO and the Ravens went to the Super Bowl, I was the most die-hard Purple and Black fan that side of the Rockies. But that's another story for another time. And no matter how detached I may become, I will always be the loudest motherfucker in the bar when watching the Ravens whup some ass.

Happy Super Bowl.

RA