Poor Man's Heli

Saw this over at Jonny’s site.  Serious LOL material here.

1)  Skier pushes kids down
2)  Skier curses, yells in front of his kids while talking about setting examples
3)  Skier puffs up
4)  Skier dick tucks in a major way (too bad his kids didn’t get to witness dad wrap duct tape on his dick and Silence of the Lambs it between his legs)

Yeah, for some reason yesterday’s embed failed (fixed now).  This one doesn’t.  In the words of Rodney King (or was it Reginald Denny?) “Can’t we all just get along?” and if we can’t I beg of you “If your bark is worse than your bite stop barking”. The dad in the vid reminds me of most of the guys in the Bay area come to think of it – alpha male right up til they aren’t.

#1 Skier Dad from Family Tree on Vimeo.

Travel day summarized:

-PDX is the special ed of TSA workers
-You know you’re in Texas when they are announcing a guy was sentenced to death and you think to yourself ‘ya know, this guy will actually die’
-They call it ‘Lone Star’ beer because the name Hamm’s was already taken
-You know the chicken is bad when a self-proclaimed meatatarian picks it out
-When your hotel says it’s in Austin doublecheck that it’s in the city and not somewhere on the outskirts
-This vid stoked me out

This is a cut of Cordova Peak that Ari Marcopoulos and myself edited as an art piece.  The Footage was given by Mike Hatchett and Standard films.  Someone got a copy of it and posted it without our permission.  It is still my favorite edit of the mountain.  Voices on the tape are mine, Doug Coombs, Tex (Mike Devenport), Mike Hatchett and Victoria Jealouse.  Hope  you like this edit.

Blanche de Putrey is French for ‘makes your starfish pucker’. First descent, 1978. Second descent…possibly during the filming of this movie. That view looking down at 1:57 in….duuuck fat.

2:44 in…sick

The Deeper crew swing another episode from the back seat of their Jeeps. Dunno, the more I see these teasers the more I’m thinking I just want to see quick cut scenes of people hitting a cheesewedge while MGMT (wait, the tight jeans/hipster meets hippy 80s synth redux thing is dead? Fine, let’s go old school and throw some brohymn in there…but can we get a version where the opening bass riff is played on a keytar?) plays in the background.

Pausenot.

Between the part in the Krakauer book I’ve been reading about flying around AK, to the new Surfers Journal article about scouting lines from a plane, makes me want to revisit getting my pilot’$ licen$e.

Another thing that seperates contenders from pretenders – 9000 foot vert overnight hikes.

More teasers for the Deeper flick due out this Fall. One man’s mini golf is another’s lifetime epic.

Was thinking today that the BCA Float 30 pack was supposed to be in retailers hands in December (as was the Tracker 2, though I think that one was originally December 08…) and that I hadn’t seen or heard anything about anybody carrying them in the flesh yet – though I have heard whispers they’ve started shipping. Anyways, found yet another Float inflation vid, testing it’s ability to deploy in temps of -22 below (apparently some Euro standard requirement).

We went into the Sun Microsystems cold lab last week to test the first production Float 30 packs coming off the production line. The temp in this room was -30 degrees C (-22 F). This is the coldest temp at which avalanche airbags must be able to inflate (within five seconds), according to European standards. As you can see, the Float 30 deploys quite effectively at this temp.

It’s not just the air that was -30 C. We let the entire system reach -30 before deploying it. It’s amazing how stiff everything gets when it’s this cold (including BCA technician Jerry Helbak, shown in video). The system has to be very robust to be able to push all this stiff material out through the stiff pack material and Velcro closure. Then, at warm temperatures, you need to make sure it doesn’t make the bag explode. That’s quite a challenge getting the product to work over such a wide temperature range. This has probably been the most challenging part of the project.

So I’m flying out to Wisconsin this afternoon for Christmas and was checking the weather to see what I should pack (yes, serious procrastination, one beer last night before packing turned into seven beers on the town….oh hai hangover) and came across this article about a chairlift running in reverse at Devil’s Head ‘Ski Resort‘ (I use that term lightly in this case given it’s 500 vert total) in Wisconsin. Picture the scene in the below video, just with people on the chairs. D A M N. Best wishes to the 15 or so injured.

C’mon now, look at that thing! That looking up shot at 2:09, seriously? Jeebus.