justin lamoureux: Colorado, giant crystals and no pow.

Kinda got busy there and a month flew by. Hasn't really snowed since my last posting, so not so much touring going on. Just one little exploration mission where we crossed some creeks, got lost in the maze and found some crazy huge hoar frost. But now the snow is back, Whistler is getting hammered and we're heading out for some storm split boarding tomorrow.

With the long dry spell and no pow kicking around I went down to Colorado for the US grand prix. It was an interesting comp since I'd only ridden 1 day on hardpack prior to being there and had 2 days to practice. The crew at Copper did a really good job on the pipe this year and I was super happy to ride a sick pipe. We only had a few hours of official training of each of the days prior to the comp. And I forgot they were running a ski comp too so we had way less practice time. And half of that time is at the wrong time since you need to take turns of having the skiers in the good light and the snowboarders in the good light.

Qualification day was of course cloudy and bad light. When we'd been riding in sunlit perfection all week (minus the bad practise times). During my few practice sessions I'd focused on getting in tune with the pipe and feeling my edges on hardpack again. And during the 25 minutes practice prior to the comp, I couldn't land a thing. haha. Which a handful of years ago used to freak me out, and now I laugh about it. I almost prefer it now which is a little weird. Anyhow, I landed my first run with a few mistakes but it was enough to put me in the top 4 in the heat and keep me qualified for the finals. By the time my second run came around I was in fourth and knew i needed to land my run clean. Which I did, but the judges gave me a lower score. I don't usually bitch about judging ( I used too when i was younger; they have a hard job), but it sucks when you know you landed a better run and a few judges agree and score you higher and a few don't and score you lower. But you KNOW it was a better run, and you end up with a lower score than your first run, and you get 18th and top 16 got to finals. So I missed finals by 1.2 out of 100. Sucked. I just wanted to keep riding the pipe.

So went and spent a day riding breckenridge with the Frends crew, hitting jumps and laughing all day long. Then came home early and ended up on a splitboard recon...