Crazy Fun
Well it has been a while since I posted… Haven’t done too much crazy stuff or riding lately (riding is never crazy).
Back in January, however, I did have a little fun. We have our annual church retreat up in McCall at camp Ida Haven. I have started a bit of a tradition about going skiing at Brundage the Friday before the weekend retreat. Several other people went skiing too and we had a great time. There was a bit of a breeze maybe 30mph at the top with constant snow, visibility was constrained and there was about 3 feet of new snow. I don’t know how to ski very well in that much snow. Remember most of my skiing has been at Bogus on icy years. So I know how to ski on groomed ice, but not on powder, this is sort of a bummer, but this year is a good year for powder and I am working on learning.
Steve (the one who does riding with me) was able to be up there, he’s a border. Towards the end of the day we started taking a couple little jump trails and one that was about a 5 foot drop. Great fun and more air than I’ve ever gotten before.
So Saturday afternoon we had some free time… what to do, what to do… Steve looks outside and has the brilliant idea of building jumps and getting someone to tow us into them. Sounds like fun so we draft a bunch of people who want to see us hurt ourselves and build some jumps. We tried having a snowmobile tow us into the jumps, but there was too much stop and go and the sled was on the verge of overheating. Well one of the guys that has been coming to the church and doesn’t care too much about using is car for good (go Blayne). Started towing us into the jumps. The firs jump we built had a little transfer trail we had to hit coming off of the road then skip across a parking lot and up the jump. The whole transfer thing took a lot of speed and even getting up to 20-25mph was not enough to get much off of the jump.
We would drop the robe right before we had to hit the little transfer trail and the little car towing us would loose the speed by sliding sideways down the road. Blayne considered this the most effective way to stop in a controlled manner and be able to watch us jump at the same time.
Kevin will be happy to know that the car was a little AWD Subaru… At one point some misinformed people were on the road where that should not have been and Blayne had to choose a snowdrift as the best place to park his vehicle. Fortunately this is Idaho and there is always someone around with a big truck. Elijah went and grabbed his nice red Dodge Ram and the car was back in action in now time (conveniently there was already a rope tied to the back of the car).
That was fun for a while then we decided to build another jump on the other side of the road where we didn’t have too go through a transfer trail. There was a turn in the road and there were tress on the other side of the first jump that necessitated the transfer trail so we could hit it at such an angle as to not fly into the trees.
After supper (and all light had faded from the sky) we headed back out to hit the new jump. We had about half the people up there out watching Steve and I get towed behind the car into the jump. I’m guessing a fair number were waiting to see blood. The pastor disallowed all knowledge of what we were doing and the camp manager refused to come out side so he wouldn’t have to know what was happening.
We both went ten or so times and occasionally got a few feet of air. I’m guess Steve got as much as 4 or 5 feet and I was probably more in the 3 to 4 foot range. Not really impressive to anyone who knows much about ski jumping but it was impressive to me since I have had very little intentional air time on my skis, and I’d never been towed down an icy road at 25mph before.
Now that was great fun…
