The first thing that would jump out to anyone when they first view this picture is that in my youth I was obviously on the cutting edge of late 80s/early 90s fashion. The combination of my favorite Teal Chuck Taylor All-Stars with red and white striped soccer socks blends perfectly with the Hawaiian shorts and Teal shirt and the entire wardrobe is complemented by my Teal Huffy with white wall tires.The second thing that occurs to me while looking at this picture is that ever since I was little I have always loved going airborne. The wooden jump in the picture above is one of many that I built in the workshop with my dad and I took my bike off these jumps so many times that eventually the handlebars fell off. (I mean that literally, not figuratively. I still have a nice scar from that incident.)
I loved any activity that resulted in that brief period of weightlessness whether it was jumping my bike, using a trampoline, or joining the diving team. When I first started skiing and then snowboarding jumping was against the rules at many resorts so I was always on the lookout for the ticket-clipping ski patrol as I engaged in my civil disobedience. Fortunately those rules went the way of the dodo and resorts started actively building terrain parks for snowboarding and I was loving every minute of it.
Seeing the photo my mom had given me inspired me to dig through some of my other photos and I've included some of them here.
Below are some frame-by-frame photos that my friend Jake took on one of our previous trips out to Snowbird in years past. We'd built a little kicker in an out of the way spot where the snow was still soft and launched ourselves off it. The landing was so forgiving I decided to go for a a flip and may have had a clean landing except that the sapling in the last frame had other ideas...
This picture is even older and it is from Whistler in British Columbia. It is from one of Julie and my favorite runs called Peak-to-Creek which descends over 5,400 vertical feet from the very top of Whistler into the Creekside village area. A good hint that the picture is from Whistler and not Utah is the fog that Whistler is so famous for. If you could combine the HUGE terrain at Whistler with the blue skies and champagne powder snow that Utah is famous for you would probably have the best ski resort in the world.
Since snowboarding is clearly a cold weather pursuit and migrating to New Zealand every summer was not a viable option, I had to find something similar to do during the summer and wakeboarding was the natural extension:
Once when I was at Brett's ski lake I even tried going off the Ski jump
The landings aren't always pretty but fortunately snow and water are pretty soft (unless you ski on the east coast on the ice rinks they like to masquerade as slopes). Below is a picture of one of my more spectacular crashes, resulting from an ill-conceived attempt to jump off a wake skate, perform half of a raley, and then transition smoothly into a swan dive to enter the water.
Julie loves to snowboard as well and her favorite motto is "Steep and Deep" (As in Steep slopes with plenty of Deep powder). Fortunately those are two things that Utah has in abundance. Below are two pictures of julie carving up the mountain:
And finally, here is a picture of Julie jumping off a cirque and catching some air as she enters the bowl full of powder below:
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