Hey everyone,
Moving halfway across the country has kept me a bit too busy to post reugularly, but I'm still lurking a lot, reading your posts, keeping up on Amy's love/hate relationship with the weather.
Around my offices, the US Open is like Mecca for my co-workers. It was ALL everyone talked about for a month leading up to it. Many headed down earlier in the week to get set up and work down there. It was intense to say the least.
Anyway, I headed down to Stratton, VT to check out the US Open. Halfway during the 2 hour drive down on Friday night, it started DUMPING down. I was holed up in a condo with the event photographer and the web staff. They weren't done updating the site with the Friday results/photos till 12am. Because it was so late, and snowing hard, we opted to get to sleep early rather then stay up and party, so we could get tracks bright and early.
We rolled out of the condo at 7:45 AM and were on the slopes by 8:05 AM. One of the nice perks about working here is that you can demo any board/boots/binding combo as many times as you like. I tried to get my hands on a Supermodel due to the forcasted snow, but they were out of them so I picked up a Vapor instead as I hadn't yet tried one of these mythical boards. I had it mounted with C60 bindings and took some ION boots with me. A prety sweet, but not powder friendly setup, to be sure.
As we rode the lift up, it was freezing mist. It was coating everything with a thin layer of ice. Every 45 seconds your goggles were coated to the point that you couldn't see. This made things a little annoying till 11am when the clouds cleared out a bit. The mist put a 2mm layer of ice on top of the 18" of fresh powder from the night before. This made riding a little hard for anyone not on a powder board, or with their bindings set back. Unfortunately, with the Vapor, you can't set the bindings back very far, so I just had to work extra hard to keep my weight back on my rear foot.
We rode all morning and into the afternoon. Once the layer of ice was broken free from the powder, I was able to really enjoy the new board. In all honesty, it's the best board I've ever ridden. Everything you've read about it, praising it, is 100% accurate. It really is outstanding. Demo one if you can.
At 3pm we stopped riding to go watch the half-pipe finals. The group I was with staked out a spot at the bottom of the pipe, and we watched from there. It was prety wild watching the riders fly so high out of the pip up close. There was a ton of poachers that would ride the pipe in between the runs, it was nuts.
At 5:30pm we headed back to the condo. All in all, it was a sweet weekend, and if you ever can, definitely check out a major competition if one is in your area. Not something that I'd make a major pilgramage for, but to do it at least once was cool.
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