"And the Forecast Says...

...Another scorcher, with mostly sunny skies, and a considerable danger of wet slab avalanches toward the afternoon with rising temperatures." Mt. Baldy staring down at us from the Davenport/Honeycomb cliffs area, after we hiked up Grizzly Gulch in search of a jump spot. We knew that most southfacing stuff was going to be suncrusted from yesterday's immense heat, but the forecast was saying that it was going to turn into soup by about noon, so it was going to be a fun jump session into slushy, heavy, west coast style powder. At least that's what the forecast said. It lied.

High hopes certainly abounded, despite the crust and high cloudy skies, especially when we bumped into a bunch of pro skiers and a huge media crew heading up to the infamous Chad's gap to shoot with Mike Wilson and Tim Durtschi as well as Bjorn Leines and his mad group of Celtek rippers. Needless to say we were pretty pumped.

Despite the graybird skies, we were confident that the forecast would hold up and we'd get enough sun to make the jump worth while, and indeed while we were hiking the sun popped out a little bit and made things look pretty nice. As a matter-of-fact, there were a couple times after the jump was fully built that JP Sokolowski, Derek Olthuis, Stain Reichman, and James Stewart were able to see the run-in well enough to actually hit the feature, and we got come pretty cool video footage. Nothing mind-blowing or life-changing, but some solid tricks on a decent sized kicker in the backcountry, which is always cool.

It wasn't mean to last, however. About 2:30 PM the light completely vanished. Each of the kids tried one last drop, and when you really can't see anything because the light is so flat, it's super difficult to reach the end of the jump, and if you're lucky enough to do that, then it's nearly impossible to land on solid suncrusted bomb holes because it never warmed up enough for the snow to soften in the least bit. The Poor Boyz productions filmers had to go home empty handed without any footage of Chad's Gap because the sun was never consistently glaring down long enough to soften the landing. 

Once the light went to poop I opted to take the camera off the tripod and shoot a few photos and see if I could pull out a little bit more contrast and color in the images than we were bound to see in the video. Somehow Derek put his big-boy pants on and dropped in one last time to do a massive 360 double grab with his eyes closed. Well, I'm not sure if his eyes were closed, but it wouldn't have made a difference because the lighting was so flat the result would have been the same. Big ups to the boys for hiking tons and brutalizing their bodies. It was a really fun day.