As a proud SASS employee, Ryan knows a thing or two about summer. Unfortunately, he also knows a thing or two about getting stuck behind in North America while all your homies slay pow in Argentina. Out of heartbreak comes, well, semi-aggressive ideas for a summer spent in the northern hemisphere. Enjoy!

Plan A: Get a Summer Job

There’s nothing like convincing your parents that you’re maturing in your teenage years by sweating it out for minimum wage for three months so you can buy your own goggles next season.  A couple popular options are:

Lifeguard

Nothing like watching other people enjoy themselves within arm’s reach for 40 hours a week, while you burn your retinas out and develop a healthy slouching problem in your fiberglass chair.  As you must be attentive for any drowning retards in the deep end, no visual or auditory distractions are allowed; that means no looking at porn to pass the time, and no listening to NPR to keep your mind limber.  Also enjoy the rash from the shitty bathing suit you are sure to be forced to wear.  A healthy tan is the only side-benefit, but who needs a tan when you got game?

Occasionally, your boss will be cool and let you face away from the pool.

Bus Boy

The temps are in the 90’s, the humidity is at about the same number… time to work around ovens, grilles, and boiling-hot dishwashing machines.  If you didn’t own a water bottle before, you certainly will after losing your body weight in sweat while the Mexican cooks make fun of you for being a skinny runt.  No matter how good the food, you will not want to eat it after the first week, and you will, at least once, drop all the dishes in your arms in front of your boss during the busiest shift of the week.  Kitchen work will, however, help you grow a thick skin, as the only ones more miserable than you are the people above you, who have been in the same shitty kitchen for much longer and will unleash this pent-up frustration, usually hidden in their small corner of the kitchen, upon you and your lack of self-esteem.

With his mind clearly in other places, this amateur is soon to spill his load.

Caddy

If you paid attention in school and can actually muster a complete sentence in front of an adult, it might be wise to step it up into one of the better summer gigs.  With no hourly wages and little formal labor structure, there is always the potential you’ll get screwed for tips, but if you keep your head up, follow the ball, and get lucky on a few club recommendations, you’ll have a repeat customer and mad Benjamins in your pocket in no-time.  Just be sure that your virgin ears will hear every version of every curse word under the sun, as your weekending employer for the morning is taking a well-deserved break from his wife to swear with his friends and smoke cigars while hitting a little white ball around the largest playing field of any sport known to man.

But sir, those words make my ears hurt!

Stay tuned for the next installment where Dunfee casts doubt on the heterosexuality of several sports and complains about being injured!

In addition to dishing out advice, they’re holding video contests in the forums. They seem pretty informal, but it’s a hell of an opportunity to get your edit exposed to a different audience than it might if you simply put it on NS. Their last contest was based solely on editing and they specifically said that quality of riding doesn’t matter. I like that because the next great ski or snowboard filmer probably isn’t the sickest rider on the hill and he/she doesn’t need to be either.

We’re planning on bringing some edits to BroBomb once winter starts rolling, so I’m sure we’ll be taking advantage of some Knife Show advice.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with their work, this is my personal favorite:

It’s been a long time coming. The first time I remember seeing it was when CR Johnson threw it down on a handrail that abutted a wall in Happy Dayz. Since then it has been ignored, ridiculed, or straight up hated on. But I tell you my friends, its day seems to have finally arrived. People are doing them with style and I’m an especially big fan of when it’s done on the top half of a flat-down, and then swapped to a regular slide. Shit’s smooth, stylish, and adds desperately needed variety to the rail tricks possible on skis.

That said, it leads naturally into the eternal question…what’s next?

We’ve seen noseslides (what most skiers call nosepresses, but for my purposes will need to be named properly) come and go. It seems like they can be achieved to some degree, but physics stops us from getting far out enough on our noses to make it aesthetically unique from a regular slide. Of course the C-rail is an exception, but that’s really just centrifugal force keeping you on. It’s not sustainable on a flat surface. Tailslides, swivels, crookslides, pushes, nollies, and tappity-taps are here to stay. They’re stylish as all hell, and they’re immediately recognizable as different, even to a non-skier. But the question remains…what’s next? We know it can’t stop there, and there’s still shit tons of room for rail trick variation.

I’ll drop my idea in a second, but this will be way more fun if you’ll add your 2 cents. Post up your predictions for future tricks in the comments (to join, just put in your email address). My prediction is a switch 1-foot nosepress. I’m not talking about a noseslide here; lord knows we can’t do those too well with 2 feet. I’m talking about sliding switch on 1 foot and leaning hard for your toes and getting that tail up off the rail/box. It’d probably be easiest on wood or a wide metal surface. I think the off-rail foot could provide some counterweight, and otherwise you’d just lean in hard. I’d imagine some rockered skis would help, but they’re the future anyway. Right?

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.

You’ll have to forgive me in advance on this one, but I’m about to do some soapboxin’. You see, I have an irrational love of mini shred. You might even call me a mini shred evangelist. For those who don’t know exactly what mini shred is, well its really anything at all. I guess it tends to fit into the broad spectrum of what we call “urban,” but there’s plenty of mini shred to be had at your local resort too. I guess I’ll sum it up as a creative re-imagining of the way small things can be ridden. How’s that for specific?

That lame attempt at a definition notwithstanding, mini shred is the SHIT! It doesn’t require you to live in a park mecca with perfectly groomed features and the stuff you need is usually accessible at little to no cost. The only real limit is your own creativity. It has a long and venerable history in just about any “street” oriented sport you can think of, and its time has come in skiing. Enough riding laps with your friends as if it’s the finals of a slopestyle event. Go find something small and try to do something you’ve never thought to do on skis.

So where does this long chain of self conscious replication end? Well that’s a hard question, but it most certainly extends beyond skateboarding. You see, skateboarding’s style comes from spending some time in the trendy parts of any major city and then emulating the most ridiculous butthole of a hipster you can find there. This makes sense, because by nature skateboarders spend more time in major cities than any of the aforementioned sports. Therefore, they are there to behold the hipster ridiculousness pouring out of a Man Man (or any other band nobody has ever heard of) concert .

So for all you ski fashionistas, if you want to leapfrog the biting all the way to the front of the line then grab the keys to mom’s Audi, leave the McMansion, and head on down to your local major city to get inspired/bite that shit hard. If you’re near Philly I recommend anywhere in N. Liberties or Fishtown. If NYC isn’t too far, I bet just about anywhere in Brooklyn would do the trick…otherwise you’re on your own, but it can’t really be that hard.

If big cities scare you then just jump on www.latfh.com and do a little mix and match. It’d be hard to go wrong with anything this guy is working with:

SPK Kaos boot.

After perusing the latest edition of what Freeskier calls an Annual Gear Guide, I could write a week’s worth of posts on the complete lack of real product reviews in the ski world. I’ll try not to wear the hater hat for too long, but let’s face it, there are shit products out there. But of course you would never know this if you relied on the sole surviving print mag our fledgling corner of skiing has left. Each ski gets a stoke factor (which means literally nothing), and the only products that get a more thorough look are pro setups. The LAST thing that matters in a gear guide are pro setups. They’re paid to ride this shit, hell I’d ride any damn thing if you paid me to do it. I’d rather hear what Joey the pizza guy in Truckee is riding, cuz his ass paid real hard earned cash for his setup. That means something.
ANYWAY…on to our review:
I rode the entirety of last season on a fresh pair of SPK Kaos model boots. For clarification, the Kaos is joined by the Kreation, and the Pro in the SPK familia. To the best of my knowledge the Kaos and Pro are similar when it comes to the stuff that matters (liner quality), but the Pro gets a pretty cool leather-ish wrap around the shell to eliminate some of that robocop aesthetic.
The boot takes a baby step away from the race heritage boots that are still king in the ski world. The four buckle system has been reduced to two rather wide buckles and an extra wide power strap holds down your calf and shin area. The reduced hardware definitely provides for a lighter than usual ski boot, which is a huge step forward right there. The flex has been stiffened slightly, and I found it to work in most conditions. I had the opportunity to experience a six foot dump at Squaw Valley, and I probably could have used a stiffer boot, but to be honest the SPK did its job for the most part. The liner cinches with a drawstring, and I had no problems with it staying tight throughout the day. The drawstring tab did come dislodged every now and again, but I didn’t find it overly troubling to tuck it back in. The calf section of the cuff has a smooth spot so your heel can slide in a touch easier. I’m not going to say that this boot has solved the ankle-breaking problem of jamming yourself into a cold pair of boots, but I’ll take whatever help I can get. As far as fit goes, they are pretty true to size, but the guy at my local shop had me get one size smaller than what I’d normally ride. This was a genius bit of advice, because the SPK has a ton of padding that inevitably packs a bit. By April I still hadn’t reached that last notch on the buckle, so I’ll pass that advice on to you.
Aesthetically we’re looking at my favorite boot design to date. I am biased towards a non-spaceboot feel, so the smoother plastic and lack of weirdo neon shell wins major points in this review. The toned down look also helps with ease of use, as the two buckles are wide enough to provide support, but require less micro-adjusting to get that perfect fit.
To break up this SPK love-fest I must say that my riding buddy had a much less pleasant experience with the cheaper SPK version- the Kreation. The liner was thin and was tearing dude’s feet up by mid-season. They’ll save you a few bucks, but its not worth it if you’re running to the shop for another pair by February.