Mt. Ascutney…backyard country.

Here’s my wonderful wife, ripping it up behind our house today here in Windsor, VT.  We received 14″ of new snow yesterday, and it looks like we’re in for more tomorrow.

Ripping it in the backyard!

Pico tomorrow!  I’ll fill you in on the conditions.

Tidbits and Tidings

Okay, I admit that I have not been very good at blogging. But I’m going to keep on trying and hopefully eventually, it will become habit. But I do have an excuse. I’ve been extremely busy.

• First, I revamped my website. Later this fall I’m going to add a lot more content. Let me know what you think. (Thanks to Michael Clark for the design.)
• Secondly, I’m getting married in three weeks.
• I’ve been working hard with fellow photographer Stephen Gorman. Currently we are working on illustrative photographs for a series of books on Hiking and Backpacking, Car Camping, Canoeing and Kayaking. More to come!
• I’ve also been traveling. I went to Washington and even did some July skiing

Here’s a photo from that trip. This is Steve making some nice buttery turns on Mt. Rainier, July 14.

Sugarbush, Sugarbush, Sugarbush and Noreaster and Snow Update

I know I’ve been fearfully absent from the blogosphere of late, but I swear, I’m back.

Steve at Sugarbush a few hours ago zooming past me

I just had an amazing day at Sugarbush today. I’ve only skied there about 10 times, but every time I always left it saying, “I wish Sugarbush was my home mountain”. Here are my reasons:

The World Didn’t End

But I thought it was going to.  New England Patriots maintain their undefeated status but there was clearly interference from a higher power. Probably the same higher power that has given northern Vermont mountains nearly over a foot of new snow with more on the way.  Check out the Eye On the Sky Weather forecast.

I’m going to Okemo tomorrow.  Plenty of blog material coming soon.

Remiss Random Gist

Okay, so I’ve been remiss in my blogging duties. However, I did have a great Thanksgiving, and I hope you did too. Glad to be back though.

I went skiing on Wednesday and it was great. I went to Okemo, and I skied Upper and Lower World Cup over and over. The snow-making and grooming was great and there was 3-4″ of nice fresh. It was quickly scraped to the sides but the sides were skiing like there was half a foot!

It’s pretty nasty out now though but hopefully most of this is snow up north in them thar hills. Speaking of skiing and weather, stay tuned for a future post on some good sites to check out for reliable and interesting ski-related weather information. But for those of you who like to ski in the northern Green Mountains, I find The Single Chair Weather Blog to be a wonderful resource. Unfortunately, his first post of the season is kind of depressing. Let’s hope he’s wrong. I’m sure he hopes the same thing. Also, as we all know, some of the best ski days can come during some of the worst seasons.

I know I said I would do a ski movie review on Seven Sunny Days but my dog ate the remote so it’s difficult to do a review when you can’t pause the film from the confines of a massaging back rest on the couch. I will have this up by tomorrow though.

One more thing. If you want some guaranteed laughs, you have to check out Mitch Hedberg. There’s a ton of stuff on youtube, such as:

Talk to you soon!

Photography and Skiing News Roundup

Photography News:

On the photography front, there are finally a bunch of new photos out on the web from the new Nikon flagship, the D3. Rob Galbraith has compiled these and you’ll be amazed at what this camera can achieve, even at iso 25,600. Yup, you read that correctly.

Adobe just released Adobe Camera Raw 4.3 and Photoshop Lightroom 1.3. For the most part, these updates just address compatibility issues with Leopard and add Raw file compatibility for a few more cameras such as the Nikon D3, Nikon D300, and the Canon 1DS Mark III.

Michael Reichmann from the Luminous Landscape has just given a field report/preliminary review of the Canon 1DS Mark III. It’s a full-frame camera, 21 Megapixels, with everything you can expect from a new pro body camera including a dust removal system, something noticeably lacking on the Nikon D3. The Nikon D300 has it though. Anyways, he likes it a lot. Are you ready to drop 8 grand on one of those babies though?

Also announced recently is this new product called Naked Light. It aims to approach photographic editing in a much more user-friendly way then Photoshop. It uses non-destructive editing (ie. you never mess-up your original) like Lightroom, but seems to compete in features with Photoshop. It will be very interesting to see what happens with this product. There is also much conjecture that it may be coming from some Mac guys, as the interface looks very Mac-ish and it only runs on OS 10.5 on a Mac, otherwise know as Leopard.

Skiing News:

Most of the major resorts in the east opened this weekend. It’s man-made snow for the time being, but temps are cold so hopefully something’s in store. Check out the conditions at the major ski resorts in the east:

Killington
Okemo
Jay Peak
Sugarbush
Stowe
Sunday River
Sugarloaf

There was a little bit of fresh snow on Thursday and Friday and Jay’s claiming 16″ and Sugarloaf’s claiming 10″.

Check out the Mt. Mansfield snow stake. I know it seems like we’re getting a late start, but actually, we’re right where we should be according to historical averages.

If you get a chance, check out Chris Davenport’s site on his successful quest to ski all 54 Colorado 14’ers (peaks over 14,ooo feet) in one year. I think there’s a movie coming out about it and he just release his photo book called “Ski the 14’ers” that I’m sure is beautiful and I’m definitely going to get. Lou Dawson raves about here on his site Wildsnow.com.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend. My review of Seven Sunny Days the new movie from Matchstick Productions will be posted tomorrow evening.

Oh, and as for Cyclone Sidr. Not great news, but it looks like Bangladesh had shelter ready and set up for a lot of people. Still, over a half a million people are homeless and 1,700 are confirmed dead.

Made the television news and went skiing!

I was in the news last night! My buddy is a newscaster on WCAX and interviewed me about the ski season and how Warren Miller fires me up. Truth be told, Warren didn’t come through for me this time (“Playground” trailer here), but that’s another post, maybe tomorrow. Anyways, I got MULTIPLE seconds! Check it out, although you need Windows Media Player.

Okemo, this afternoon.

And yes, I went skiing at Okemo! Well, sort of. That is to say I planned on skiing for a few runs and I ended up doing only one. This was due to the fact that: 1) The puppy I’m puppy-sitting likes taunting me in the woods. 2) I forgot my boots. (Not the first time, not the last.) Luckily, I realized about 5 minutes into the trip. 3) Season’s pass office was not where I thought it was. 4) I had to stand (not walk) on a looong magic carpet to get to a slooow lift to get to a sloooow lift to get to the traverse over to the section with pitch. 5) I was the first person ski patrol sent down. I had to download from the top. It was a great relaxing ride down though!

Okemo this afternoon, with a light coating of fresh!

That being said, it rocked! The styrofoam ice-snow was all scraped to the sides and it felt like real snow. And at the top (the only part open) there was probably about 3″ of fresh snow. The sun came out and it was just beautiful. Anyways, first day they were open I and got the feel of it again.

Okemo, snow was actually pretty nice!

I’m ready for ski season.

Photo of the Day #3

Mt. Shasta, California

In June of 2006 I went hiking and skiing on Mt. Shasta in Northern California. Every day was sunny. We camped out around 9,000 feet and could ski from all the way from over 14,000 feet to our car at 7,000 feet.

It was my first time doing anything like this, at least with skis, and it was a blast. At night the snow froze solid so we could use our crampons and hike up the mountain. By around 1:00 or 2:00 PM though, the snow had softened up and we had amazing skiing.

Anyways, we camped up a little higher on a more exposed area than these guys and watched the shadows creep across the mountain for hours before sunset. I could really dig another trip like that.

For this photograph, I used my D2x with my 18-200 Nikon lens at 130mm for 1/500th at f/5.6. I’m fairly certain I was using a polarizer.

Ski Movie Review: Powderwhores 07 (PW07)

Warning: Long review. For a quick summary, go to the bottom of the review and check out “conclusion”. Check out the trailer and buy the video here.

As this is my first post in an ongoing series of ski movie reviews. The format is still a work in progress, so please let me know what you think.

Following the success of their first two movies (PW05 and PW06) anticipation was ripe for one of the best telemark ski movie series. Although telemark skiing is not nearly as popular as alpine skiing, it is growing in popularity. With the advent of newer, burlier equipment, telemark skiers are now skiing lines and doing tricks that were previously limited to the realm of the fixed-heelers. Nowhere is this more evident than in PW07.