Rockin' it in Mammoth.

Hello everyone! I'm reporting to you from Mammoth Mountain here in the sunny state of California for the Chevy Grand Pris. This is my first trip down here and man it is just like I've seen in all the videos. Yesterday i hit my 1st 70 foot jump in a couple of years and my first time I hit it I took it about 85 feet so that was so much fun, and I finally started spinning off it after my 3rd run and watching numerous people getting hauled down the mountain in the red meat sled by patrol. It wasn't as scary as I thought. The crazy thing about that jump is and was that it was the 1st jump on the slopestyle course, so there was still 3 more jumps and 2 sets of rails to go after that but nothing as big as the 1st jump. The whole reason I came down here was not for jumps or rail even though they are super fun! I came down for the halfpipe contest.

The 1st day of practice was very scary because it was the first day of practice was also the 1st day anyone had ridden it. With halfpipe much like anything it usually works better with a little bit of breaking in, need less to say that the left wall of the halfpipe did no goto 90 degrees so it made it very hard to land back on the top of the wall, which is very dangerous when you are going 10 feet high only to find out that you are landing on the the wall which is just like jumping from the roof of your 10 foot garage to the ground but adding backflip to it! You can do it but you can also drive a car with your feet but it doesn't make it a good idea. So for practice there were a lot of close calls but no one really got hurt which is always a good thing!

Pipe practice was 2 days ago. Yesterday was the contest and the pipe was totally different. Like alway Louie Vito dropped first and he went into the danger wall 1st and well he jumped really hard because he thought it was still the same but it actually went to 90 degrees so fully vertical at the top of the 22 foot wall. I was scared for Louie cause instead of landing on the wall he flew to the middle of the pipe so you have a 22 foot wall + a 6 foot air to almost flat. No mater how you do the math your knees come out the loser but because his time on dancing with the stars he must have learned how to just suck it up and he was right back to his feet and finished hi 1st practice run! I was happy he was ok and also that the wall looked like it was like it should be, but that being said it was a totally different pipe then from practice and we only had 30 minutes before we could do our contest runs.

Like I said before California the sunny state; I love how warm it is here in January! there isn't a lot of snow but being able to eat lunch on the deck with just a t-shirt and your sunglasses at this time of year is AWESOME! Our 1st day on snow 3 days ago we all thought we could train in the contest pipe but as I mentioned before it wasn't ready they were still building it. We made the best of it by riding the small pipe which is funny cause the small pipe was still around 18 feet but it felt so small, it felt like trying to put on a pair of 5 size smaller pair of jeans it was TIGHT. With the sun shinning we weren't going to let it faze us and by noon it was already 5 degrees above zero.

Back to the contest, The pipe was so amazing it felt like putting on those favorite pair of pants it really fit my style of riding! the 30 minutes of practice just flew by but thats because I was loving it! The feeling of waiting for your run is always kinda different.

Check in Tomorrow to read how it all went!

Peace

R3