Sundown Express, scene of literary & spiritual investigation for the duration of the stay.

In my four days at Steamboat, it was obvious that skiing as the 90’s knew it is still very well supported here. Steamboat is to the Olympic disciplines what Breck is to the X Games. An Olympic-level bumps course and freestyle jump were just about to be completed. A separate hill, lit up at night, hosts a pitch for gate-slappers and two serious ski jumps (the ones you do for distance).  Instructors from the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, which outdates even the ski resort itself, could be seen everywhere in their blue suits escorting herds of little shred goblins around the mountain.  All this adds up to more winter Olympians than any other town in the United States; 10-15 of them will be in Vancouver this year toting some hideous Roots berets and fighting for athletic fame in their chosen discipline.

You might be saying “Cowboys?  Ski jumps?  Moguls?  The Olympics?  What does this have to do with freeskiing?’  For the purpose of maintaining the cohesiveness of this article, very little.  And that’s the point.  Steamboat “suffers” from what I will call “The Little Cottonwood Shadow.” While everyone guns up to Alta/Bird on a pow day so they can traverse like a sprinter and snake people for first tracks, Solitude remains empty the next canyon over.  Steamboat, 2.5-3 hours from Denver, gets none of the crowds and few of the TGR-posting rippers that Summit County and Vail swallow up every weekend. This leaves the copious amount of trees, ignored by visiting Texans drawn to Steamboat’s family programs, untouched.

After taking a very quick, quiet, and friendly Go Alpine shuttle from Silverthorne to Steamboat (goalpine.com), I got my lift tickets from Loryn Kasten, Steamboat’s PR Manager (yeah girl!), and then it was on to the gondola.  While Steamboat averages 350” a year, and saw 400” the past two seasons, it was suffering through the same drought as Central and Northern Colorado. It still didn’t look nearly as bad as Summit did.  With most of the top section including Christmas Tree Bowl & the Three Chutes closed due to the lack of snow, we spent most the three days skiing off of the Sundown Express and Sunshine quads.   The groomers were quickly getting scraped down to the bone, and were miserable to negotiate on my Czars. We quickly took the party to the woods, and damn were those woods were fun.  While the first day we slogged through a lot of atypically wet Colorado snow, a clear cold night sucked out all the moisture and for the next two days it was on.  The trees were almost all untracked thanks to the people who wanted to keep their bases intact, and as long as you were willing to scrape a few rocks and ollie a few logs on the way down, you were well rewarded with empty sections of boot-to-knee deep pow.  We found ourselves alone, the weekend before Christmas, in runs like 2:30 & 1:30 trees, Closet, and by far the best- Shadows.  Sitting skier’s right of the Sunnyside liftline, Shadows is the best Steamboat had to offer (with Christmas Tree Bowl closed). Top-to-bottom consistent, steep pitch, with sections that narrow and open back up again and mixed stands of Aspens and pines.  This run is incredibly wide and I don’t think I crossed a track the whole time we skied it.  Not to mention that the notable lack of the party patrol kept things casual.  Steamboat lacks a plethora of cliffs or wide-open terrain (the whole resort is below the tree line), but the resort is built for storm cycles where a week of snowy, grey skies make the trees an essential tool in establishing depth perception, and the extent of the ‘Boat’s tree options mean you won’t be suffering from an intense competition for tracks that will affect your safety meeting-induced mellow.

BroBomb homie, Riley Maddox, gets casual in 2:30 trees.

My legs were a little too beat to explore Steamboat’s single up-and-running park on the way back down at the end of the day. Unfortunate, because while not on a PCMR/Keystone/Breck level, Steamboat’s jib scene can compete.  They made some noise a couple years back when they put together a 600’ foot superpipe that was unfortunately not up during my stay, but Loryn informed me that Steamboat convinced Nick Roma, a Sunday River vet and one of the builders of Dumont’s record-breaking quarterpipe, to head up their park division.  Nick is the only American that has been asked to help with the Olympic skiercross course, so it’s clear he knows how to use a cat to build big bumps out of snow.   Steamboat’s three parks are also separated by level, which means no gapers eating shit off the knoll while you’re trying to put down your seven.

The author gets radical (read: frontseat/ rolls the windows down) near the Sunshine Express.

Steamboat’s Main St. has that real old-ass West feel, more so than Breck or Aspen, and prices are cheaper than both.  We ate well at the Ale House, including a couple pitchers of craft brews, for about twenty bucks.  The Alehouse also has a pretty high-tech trivia set-up, and we even managed to beat a bunch of nerds from U. Chicago med school. If only the UGA sorority had decided to sit in front of me instead of forcing me to make a complete 180 degree back stretch every ten minutes, it would have been perfect.

Other spots like the Tap House cover the dive bar variety, and for accommodations, it’s best to check out the infamous Rabbit Ears Motel.  Sitting on rent-controlled property at the top of Main St., you and three of your buddies can crash there for $105 a night, or a little over $25/person; a true bum’s chalet.  You won’t need a rental car either; town is right there and the mountain is a free shuttle ride away.  The best time to visit is April, when the spring break crowd has cleared out but the skies are barfing that light, dry “Champagne Powder” Steamboat has worked so hard to sue people over for trademark infringement. Package deals from April 4^th-11^th offer free tickets when you buy three nights of lodging, or you can stay at the Rabbit Ears and be forced to cough up about $300 for four days of tickets ($76 for day tickets).  Flights to nearby Hayden airport from metro areas like LA, Chicago, Boston, and New York will run you about $350-$400 (plus the shuttle ride to and from Hayden), or you can get a cheap flight to Denver and take the $170 roundtrip shuttle to Steamboat.  This option will definitely be cheaper if you’re booking last-minute.

Steamboat is indeed a different kind of ski town.  My friend Ben had the pleasure of a lift ride with a little shred who asked him to hold his ski pole out as a surrogate lift bar.  Ben quickly found out that this little goblin, still not old enough to hold ski poles, had fallen off the lift last year from thirty feet and broken both his legs.  He seemed unaffected by the incident except for the fact that his parents had been “really mad.”  He promptly tore away from the top of the lift and ollied off a roller, double-ejecting into a faceplant.  Still unfazed, he ran back up the hill, clipped into his 100-centimeter skis, and took off again.  While the Steamboat vibe is decidedly mellow, I would suggest visiting before this kid is old enough to snake you.

Thanks again to Loryn Kasten for lift tickets & interview, and to Tracey at Go Alpine for hooking up the shuttle rides!

Ground Transportation

From Denver:

Go Alpine Shuttle: www.alpinetaxi.com, $170 roundtrip

From Hayden airport:

Go Alpine Shuttle: www.alpinetaxi.com, $52 roundtrip

Storm Mountain Express, www.stormmountainexpress.com, $52 roundtrip

Lodging

Rabbit Ear Motel:  www.rabbitearsmotel.com, $105/night for 4 people

Steamboat Central Reservations, www.steamboat.com, for package deals

There isn’t much to say about Everyday is a Saturday. If you like Poorboyz releases and find that they fulfill what you want in a ski film, then this one will likely fall into the same category. If you tend to find them visually and conceptually overwrought, there’s no growth demonstrated that would change your mind. It’s the same formula, and damn near the same movie they’ve made for years.

Tanner gets the call for narrating duties, and it’s largely what we’ve come to expect from him. There’s the suburban-Rasta patois & clothing with some discussion of “passion” thrown in to assure us that nothing’s changed. Frank Raymond gets about 15 seconds for the absolute best rail footage in the video, and then quickly moves aside for the standard cast of characters. Theory-3 import, Charley Ager, is the only person with lifestyle footage that comes across as remotely affable or relatable. It’s immediately apparent that he’s having fun in the mountains, without any footage of him sitting on a couch and telling us so. Who’d have known you could capture that in a film without a contrived monologue? Finally, Dane Tudor absolutely slays. It’s the kind of skiing that snaps you out of the trance you’ve fallen into and makes you say, “Damn, this dude is too good.” It’s against the rules to end a paragraph with a quotation, so I’ll say that this movie is exactly what you expect it to be. Whatever that is.

I pledged (kinda) to hate on the shitty movies that come out every year, rather than provide the standard ski mag review of “great riders, great locations, great movie.”  So it’s a little dangerous to start with such a sappy bullshit review, but I love the Traveling Circus series. It is probably the only film project in skiing that I have no qualms about. The damn thing just succeeds on so many levels:

1. The hosts (Will and Andy) aren’t committing any of the sins every skier commits when they are asked to speak on film. These sins include- overdoing a thug persona by making hand gestures and mugging for the camera, attempting to get intellectual with it and philosophizing about the meaning of style or the transcendence of the mountains (I’m talking to you Nimbus), and finally…they aren’t self-consciously posturing /overdoing it. This final sin is relentlessly transgressed by the host of another popular webisode series that shall remain nameless (rhymes with “thug wife”) to the point that I have to look away from the screen because his awkwardness makes me feel squeamish.
2. It’s a new form. Sure the video-blog format is already kind of played out in internet media, but within skiing it serves a different purpose. It’s a bridge between the old format of annual full length ski movies and the newly ubiquitous web edit. It works as a marketing tool for the sponsor companies (important bc that’s how those fancy cameras are paid for), but it maintains the immediate and personal feel of a midseason edit by your favorite unknown rider.
3. There’s a plot, and it doesn’t suck. Ski film companies have tried several times to imbue their films with some sort of cohesive theme, but it usually fails miserably. You’ve got the absurdist radio show of Tanner’s WSKI, MSP’s (lame ass) attempt with Yearbook, or Poorboyz more recent film Reasons. They all SUCKED.
4. Traveling Circus doesn’t suck.