Maybe maybe maybe from r/maybemaybemaybe
IN THE COMMENTS: Temujin said:
Well, finally. Someone made a video of the nightmare that wakes me up from time to time.
February 20, 2020
What I'm trying to understand at the moment instead of last night's debate.
IN THE COMMENTS: Temujin said:
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24 comments:
Well, finally. Someone made a video of the nightmare that wakes me up from time to time.
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. [Hold my beer and watch this]
I assume this video was recovered from the skier's black box found by the rescue team?
What's not to understand? Some freestyle type skier going down a prepared course.
Ahhh, to be 23 and immortal. Those were some great years...
What happened to the Minivan?
That was last night’s debate.
I sure hope the old skis were being used that day.
Little known fact: Frozen grass is much easier skiing than thawed grass.
Curious George said...
What's not to understand? Some freestyle type skier going down a prepared course.
Yep, from the tracks, they'd tried this SEVERAL times, before this shot
Presumably, the earlier tries, were slower and less successful
By the time they made This One; they had it down to a t
Looks insane. But parts of it also look like a video game--the jumps and the road cuts are far too perfect to be real.
I want to know how the car is going to get back down the mountain.
These things are carefully choreographed. Groups like Teton Gravity Research have full time staff just to do the trig.
That's what skiing will be like in our globally warmed future.
I want to know how the car is going to get back down the mountain.
I was once on a road similar to that in Alaska and praying no one came the other way as there was nowhere to turn off and backing up was perilous. Fortunately, no one did [they all had better sense, I suspect].
The course had obviously been run previously as evidenced by the existing trail, and it does look like some well kept prepared jumps. I think the minivan was a tug to provide some added speed at the beginning.
I would be very nervous about doing that.
And I have had nightmares like that, but they involve cars that won't stop, not skis.
Of course skis have no brakes, so if that bothers you, you shouldn't do it.
And the skier remained alive and in one piece. Amazing.
How to get the car down?
Gravity.
Narr
Sheesh
"Narr said...
How to get the car down?
Gravity."
Ha, I worked with a guy who had his pilot's license and would fly his family to their vacation destinations. I asked him if his wife could get the plane down if something happened to him and he said something like : "oh, that's not an issue. The plane will come down on its own."
That was thrilling! Now, I won't have to do it.
Mockturtle- yes, very much Alaska. It reminded me of climbing Flattop in Anchorage as well as driving on remote service roads.
Thank you, Althouse. That vid made me very happy, not that I could have successfully completed that run even in my prime. Reminded me of glade skiing, picking a path through trees and rocks off piste.
Not sure that it was a single run, but maybe several spliced together. In any case, the whole thing was carefully constructed. Initially, I thought that they may have just found a half covered road. I don’t think so. Rather, I think tat that snow on the road was brought in and the snow lane constructed. The snow looks a little sloppy. Wet. The sort that you get in late spring in the CO mountains, or early summer really high up. Not sure though where you are going to find that sort of bricks along the downhill edge of roads. Not used to seeing it, and probably something that you wouldn’t do anymore.
But back to my point, if I have one. The original shots might have been natural, with the road half cleared. But then the skier then headed downhill and proceeded to hit a series of man made features. You don’t move that much snow around w/o a machine with a blade in the front doing the work. Likely the sort of machines that ski areas used to groom slopes. Even so, probably a couple days work to move around that much snow. Which means a budget. And I think a sponsorship. The start of the video could have been done by an amateur , but there construction of the jumps says the skier was a professional free style skier.
Maybe 15 years ago, I was working for the ski patrol at a VR ski area in CO, as a volunteer, for the ski patrol, doing patent work to pay for my hobby. Friend from HS, whose mother was in our church, was the mountain manager. Skied with him on some regularity, and one of his jobs was building the features in the terrain park. The big jumps there took an amazing amount of work to put in every year. They got a large chunk of the ski area’s water budget every fall for the snow they blew making them. Esp for early in the season, when the area is running mostly on fake snow. I used to notice the remnants of the Half Pipe and the big triple jump well into at least July, at the bottom of Copper Mountain, heading west up Vail Pass. The rest of the ski area would be mostly clear of snow, and these features slowly melted away over several months.
Now to the fun part. There was a race between the ski areas to build novel features in the terrain park. Someone one year thought that if Half Pipes were fun, maybe one closed at the bottom may be even more fun. At the bottom, you had a 180 degree arc to corkscrew around, up to the top. Whoops. Sure, really good free style skiers and borders could run it fast enough to get out at the end. But what happens if they weren’t, which was the usual case? That left them trudging back up the center of it, over very slick artificial snow, with others coming down as they herring boned back up. So, they broke out chain saws, and spent two days cutting a tunnel out at the bottom. Called the Toilet Bowl, this was its drain. A month later maybe, my kid and I were skiing with this friend, who was escorting the VR chairman around the mountain, and we went down the drain there. Apparently, they had cut from both ends, and there was a 6” drop halfway through, and I had the ignominy of being the only one to crash going through. Even my kid, a young teenager at the time, made it through in one piece.
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