It’s been a great project to be involved with – I’ve gotten to know some backcountry zones in New Hampshire that I probably never would have found on my own and skied some lines that I’ve been looking at for years. But the funny thing about the whole project is that it is what it says – a weekend-based project. As a ski bum out in Colorado, I used to look down at the weekend warrior types who would come in every Saturday and Sunday from the Front Range, get rad for a couple days, then go home. I was so superior with my constant access to the mountains. Now I find myself constrained – I usually have plenty of things going on during the week that keep me away from the mountains. Somehow, I’ve morphed into one of those pounders that I used to look down on.

Whatever. The take-home that I’ve gained from this is: it doesn’t really matter. If you’re out, you’re out. That’s what counts. The East, more so than the West, seems to be full of territorial, secretive, bro-homies who are always killing it harder than you are. And they like to brag about how stoked they are, but they aren’t really willing to share the stoke. Not universally true, and I’ve met some people who are always up to go out and have fun and not worry about ‘blowing up the secret spot,’ but it seems more prevalent here. More people, less terrain, I guess.

So if I’ve got to be a weekend warrior, so be it. Getting to the mountains is about getting to the mountains, not how or when. Once you’re there, that’s what really matters.

Git you sum!

The Weirdest Ways to Slide on Snow:

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/snow-sports/The-Weirdest-Ways-to-Slide-on-Snow-Skiboard.html.

I’ve raced it the Half-Growler before, which I think should be called “The Liter,” and it it super fun, though if you are truly racing it, you better get out front early or you’re going to be stuck in the pain train as it grinds its way slowly through singletrack with few opportunities for passing that don’t involved mangling, or getting mangled by, sagebrush and other spiny off-trail features. This year, however, I was a bit off the back in terms of getting registered and decided that, instead of trying to wrangle a spot, I’d help out and volunteer. I’ve benefited from many events where other people had to volunteer to set them up and break them down, so it’s only fair. Plus, I was able to bring my camera (and only crashed on it once as I was doing a post-race ride). I camped out at Skull Pass all day, which is one of the more technical sections of the course. I got to see it all, from dudes greasing the nearly-blind technical rock moves, to bonking weekend warriors about ready to give up, to guys coming around for their second lap and nailing the line after some trailside coaching by me. Those were the one who were great, the racers who were racing for middle-of-the-pack just-to-finish, who, after a little advice, made it through a line they had walked the first time. Their stoke was the highest and made me remember why mountain biking is so great to begin with – if at first you don’t succeed, try it again. If you get it, the reward is immediate, which is the way I like my rewards.

In any event, I got some pretty good shots, got a tan, and got to ride about 20 miles of trail by the end of the day. Mission Accomplished.

Why is Sedona weirder? ‘Cause they have vortexes, places you can get your ‘aura photo’ taken, and pink jeep tours. Yep, it’s strange. It’s also red rock heaven, with cool slickrock trails all over the place. And to top it all off, they’ve got a great local micro-brewery called Oak Creek Brewing. Beat that, Moab.

So we (me, Louise, and my buddy Shabo) are going to head over that way, shred some red dirt, take some cool photos, eat a rattlesnake, get sucked into a vortex, and generally have a good time. And then we’ll come back here where the Colorado snowpack, now sitting at 143% of annual average, will be settling out nicely for couloir season.

Giddy up!

Yeah. I know. I’m a dork. But it was a sick double tailwhip.

If you've gotta drop something, you should probably spin 3.

I was there at my buddy Devon’s request, or suggestion, or whatever. Devon absolutely kills it as an outdoor action photographer and he’s worked with the Ranchstyle guys for the past couple of years on this comp. Shoveling dirt, building stuff, producing promo materials…he’s on it. So he said I should come over and shoot, so that’s what I did.

This year the competition really stepped it up a notch by becoming part of the newly formed Freeride Mountain Bike Association’s Freeride Mountain Bike World Tour. This tour basically incorporates a lot of progressive mountain bike competitions like the Kokanee Crankworx festival at Whistler, B.C., Chatel Mountain Style in France, and Crankworx Colorado. There are several different levels to the comps, from Bronze (mellower) all the way up to Diamond (Kokanee Crankworx – the grandaddy!). Ranchstyle was a silver event, but you wouldn’t know it judging from the quality of the course (perfect features),  or the quality of the competition (30 pros from all over showed up). It was a great event put on by Grassroots Cycles and a really fun way to get introduced to shooting mountain biking comps. I’ll say this much – when it’s not dumping snow, freezing cold, and the light isn’t all gray, white, or in-between, shooting can be a lot easier. Don’t get me wrong, big mountain ski competitions will always be near and dear to my heart, but shooting in shorts with no gloves on and ZERO risk of frostbite…it kind of rules.

Also, I got to play with a new lens, a Canon 24 – 70mm f2.8 L USM. It’s real nice. The only thing it couldn’t do was get me a beer. Not bad.

Look for the photos to be up soon as I whittle ‘em down.

To start, the mountain at Revelstoke Mountain Resort is massive. Rising more than 5,600 vertical feet from the valley floor and encompassing over 3,000 acres of lift-accessed skiing with only 7% of it listed as beginner terrain, this is not your typical family ski area with a miles of blue cruisers, coffee shops at every trail intersection, and spas littering the base area. It’s a resort where you go to ski, a resort where you go to push yourself, get really scared, and then figure out how to send whatever it is below you. Running directly under the main gondola is a run called Kill the Banker. A nod to some financial woes that RMR had early on in their development stage? Who knows? What you should know is this – it’s over 3,000 feet from the top of the gondy to the bottom and it’s choked with classic British Columbia pillow lines. Fat ones. If that isn’t enough to make you want to go up there you might not be a skier or, if you are, you have no pulse.

Then, once you’re done trying to ski everything on the mountain, which won’t happen ’cause it’s too damn big, you can cruise into town. Once a hub for mining and forestry, Revelstoke is currently trying to map out a solid future as natural resource extraction industries wane. The Resort is part of that, as are the numerous cat-skiing operations based in Revy. Downtown Revelstoke is pretty rad, with a few different bars featuring good beer and poutine. If you don’t know, now you know. The best part is, the entire town seems to really get behind the Freeskiing World Tour stop. There were more events going during that one comp than most of the other stops put together. The town absolutely opened its arms to the FWT.

As for the comp itself, Revy definitely has what it takes to make it happen. The first day of qualifiers was held on a part of the mountain off the Stoke chair called Separate Reality, a pretty straightforward run with three different cliff bands called Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Or whatever the locals actually call them, as those were the names chosen for them by the end of the day. What should have been a simple qualifier, however, got interrupted after the women’s field was finished as it started nuking snow. Revy had been having a pretty dry winter and the Tour seemingly arrived as that drought slammed to a close. Over the course of the weekend the comp would get delayed twice more as feet of snow piled up, resulting in headaches for Mountain Sports International, the Tour’s organizing body, and epic powder days for everybody else.

As the qualifier day was over for the moment, I ditched the camera and went skiing with my fiancee and her brother. My fiancee had qualified for the next day of competition so with the men’s qualifier day to be held the next day, we were free to do whatever we wanted. “Whatever we wanted” turned out to be skiing trees for hours, getting completely lost in massive British Columbia conifers until our early-season legs turned to jelly and we decided it was time to rally back to our rental and down some Kokanee.

During the men’s qualifier the next day, we went skiing. Did I already mention “Kill the Banker”? We skied it three times, popping off pillows until we were thoroughly soaked by the maritime-snowpack wet storm that was in full effect on the lower elevations of the mountain. Goggles fogged and clothing dripping, we retreated back to town for more beer and poutine. Mmm…poutine.

By the third day it was finally time to get the comp underway with Day One kicking off on the main face of Revelstoke’s North Bowl. Apparently most years North Bowl is a pretty serious face. In 2010, North Bowl’s upper reached were barely skiable. The snowpack on some of the main cliffs was so thin that ski patrol had to declare them off limits and push competitors to a couple different entrances. Despite fewer choices than normal, North Bowl had plenty of lines to choose from. As it was my first time on venue as a photographer, I had a lot of choices to make, especially as the venue wrapped around so much so that if you were standing on one side, you couldn’t even begin to see the competitors starting on the other side, making setting up shots next to impossible. In addition, it was cold and north facing. My fully charged battery would only last about 5 minutes before I would have to put it in my coat, warm it up, and then shove it back in the camera as the next skier flashed down the course. After about two and half hours of this, the battery gave up completely. Nothing. No power. I figured at that point that it was time to go in for the day.

At the athlete meeting that afternoon we learned that my fiancee, Louise Lintilhac, had qualified for the next day of competition which meant a helicopter ride to the top of the normally completely out-of-bounds Mackenzie Face. We were pretty stoked. We also weren’t sure if it was going to happen, as it was dumping again. We went back to town. Beer. Poutine.

Our worries about the amount of snow proved totally founded the next day. Visibility at the top of the mountain was around 10 feet, making skiing anything open pretty much out of the question. The heli certainly wasn’t going to fly, and even if it could the avalanche conditions were getting worse by the minute.  The organizers didn’t make the call until around 11 that morning, so the athletes alternated between huddling in the tiny top hut waiting for the radio call and taking laps on the Stoke chair to see if visibility was good enough to ski. It never really was, so after a few attempts at skiing we called it and went back to the base area. Beer. Oddly enough, no poutine.

So the comp was supposed to be wrapped up and put to bed on Saturday. Party time Saturday night and here we go folks, time to drive 25 hours back to Crested Butte. Well, with the epic storm of awesomeness,  that didn’t happen. So on Sunday morning we got up early for the early athlete and media-type-person tram load at 8am for the hike out to Mackenzie Face. What the day lacked in epic snow (none at all) it made up for in gnarly cold (lots of it). We shouldered our skis and started the hike and traverse out to the face, passing under the official boundary ropes. The organizers had set up the finish area on a frozen lake at the bottom of the face, which we could overlook from the end of the traverse along a ridgeline. It was shady and it looked damned cold. As Ski Patrol was just getting flown up to the top of Mac Face, we decided to set up a temporary camp on the ridge with the other athletes to scope out possible lines. When we first arrived Mac Face looked like a skier’s dream – three or four feet of untouched pow blanketed the slope. After the patrollers had finished it looked unquestionably safer and way less skiable. The wind the previous day had slabbed up the fresh snow so that every ski cut released a new slide. The bed surface was an ugly wind slab, toughened up over the course of the drought prior to the storm. Lines that had previously looked good to go were now pockmarked with sharp rocks and landings were jumbled piles of slide debris. Stoke was sort of low, but less than ideal conditions are part of the game, so all the athletes went about figuring out where the best features were with the best snow.

Heli-rides were scheduled to start around 11 and as it was getting close to that time we decided to descend down to the lake. The heli was flying around, the MSI crew was scrambling around, trying to get the live camera feed up, and the athletes were trying to stay warm. The local Revelstoke fans had set up camp in full effect with a huge bonfire burning on the shore of the lake and crowd-pleasing booter built for between-runs entertainment.

After a quick briefing on helicopter safety, the women loaded up first and were dumped on the top of the venue. Louise was due to ski first and had a solid, aesthetic line picked out. As she was sitting in 7th overall, she was stoked to get out and lay down a good clean run that would hopefully move her up and onto the podium. Her first turns were great but as soon as the slope got steeper the snow got worse where the surface layer had sloughed off and the windslab toughened up. One turn into it, her ski popped off mid-turn, sending her tumbling towards a rocky cliff band. She stopped the fall pretty quickly but had to hike back to her ski. At that point she was too low, and too rattled by the snow conditions, to hike back up to her intended line so she took a conservative, mellow run out. As the carnage continued to unfold throughout the women’s field, her run effort was still good enough to take 5th overall. Sara Mancuso got super hung up and ended up losing a ski over a jagged fifty foot cliff band. She had to sit there through most of the field while Ski Patrol cruised down to the base area and found a pair of rental skis for her to ski down on. She ended up donating her remaining Volkl Gotama to the Revelstoke Ski Patrol.

The men definitely made the most of the less-than-ideal snow conditions, especially Lars Chickering-Ayers who center-punched Mac Face in characteristic Mad River Glen ski style – fast, fluid, making turns where few others could. It was good enough to land him the win, followed by Drew Tabke and Young Gun Spencer Brinson. As for the ladies, it was an appropriately Canadian sweep with Leah Evans standing on the highest podium, followed by Tatum Monod out of Banff and Revy’s own wildfire fighter Nicole Derksen in third.

After Revelstoke, my first ski comp as a photographer, I feel like I learned a lot. First, just like in real estate, it’s all about location, location, location. On the last day, shooting from the bottom of Mac Face with a 24 – 135mm lens, I didn’t really get anything that I’d be stoked to use. A couple lifestyle shots, some shots of the helicopter taking off, and a few ‘OK’ skiing shots. But when you’re standing 1600 vertical feet below the drop-in, there’s not a lot you can do sometimes. I also learned that no matter what you do out there, you’re going to get cold and your batteries are going to freeze. But if you’ve got to know the bitter to know the sweet, it’s all the more sweet when you absolutely nail a shot after standing in the cold for three hours. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.

Dana Allen did not take this photo. He is in it.

So Dana Allen is this guy who lives in Crested Butte, Colorado. He got there by way of Penobscot, Maine, where he was born, and Middlebury, Vermont, where he got educated, making brief detours to Neuchatel in Switzerland, Dharamsala in India, Kathmandu in Nepal, Lhasa in Tibet, and Courmayeur in Italy. Penobscot doesn’t really have any mountains, but all those other places do, which is why he went there. He ended up in Crested Butte on a whim, invited by an old friend who told him that it was probably the coolest mountain town in Colorado. His friend was right. It is the coolest mountain town in Colorado.

While living in Colorado his girlfriend, now fiancee, decided to start competing on the Freeskiing World Tour circuit, competing at venues all across North and South America, from Las Lenas in Argentina to Revelstoke, Canada. Being a ski bum at heart  Dana decided to go with her to ski but quickly found out that buying lift tickets at every resort was way too expensive. No good. So he quickly figured out that if he registered as a media affiliate for each of the competitions, he would get free passes. Way better. As he started taking pictures and writing for the local paper in Crested Butte, he discovered something that he had forgotten – he really liked photography and writing. And he wasn’t bad at either of them.

One camera body led to another. A lens was purchased, then others. A portfolio of images started to develop. Pretty soon his friends from the Tour were asking for photos for their portfolios and sponsors. Dana decided that it was time to get his photos off the hard drive and out into the world. That’s Dana Allen Photo. Born out of a passion and a need, focused on the sports he loves.