Halfpipe, broken knees, and sunshine

A mixed bag of awesome, frustration, pain, impatience and golden sunny rays. toss a couple free monsters energy drinks in the mix and you get my day: feeling like a bipolar person with multiple personality disorder.

I’ll start with some halfpipe. As the weather man forecast it was a beautiful, sunny, 30 minute sunburn day up on Blackcomb at the Whistler Ski Invitational. As i sit writing this my face is radiating heat, even with several layers of sunblock the rays got to me.

Now for the fun stuff; yesterday when i was shooting the qualifiers for the WSI Halfpipe comp i slipped and fell. CRACK… Uh Oh.

I’m just coming off a knee injury sustained at Mt Washington where my left knee cap decided to take the road less traveled and jumped to the side of my knee and back a couple times. My knee felt pretty good in the past couple days and i was afraid i re-injured it.

Two stops by the physiotherapist treating athletes at the Telus festival gave me some news I didn’t expect; “No Reuben, you did not re-injur your knee”

Sigh of relief? sure, but very brief before it was followed by the diagnosis: “When you fell yesterday a small piece of cartilage ripped off and is now wedged inside the joint of your knee restricting the movement”

Fan-freaking-tastic. its a four month injury if the cartilage wiggles its way out of the joint. If it doesn’t sort itself out i’ll be going under the knife some time later in the summer to get it out. (If that does happen i’m planning to ask to be able to shoot my own surgery POV style, so keep posted)

And back to the sunshine! After the main competition the riders kept hiking for a rider judged best hit contest. No need to string the hits together, just throw down as big as they could and fellow athletes picked out their favorite.

David Wise’s double.

If you are in Whistler this week and you see a big guy, blonde hair, heavy camera bag, and he is paying tribute to Terry Fox stop and say ‘Hi”. We can exchange high fives and chuckle nostalgically about my painful existence.

The onion of weather mentioned in my last blog post continued yesterday through the Whistler Ski Invitational halfpipe Qualifiers. Luckily the rain stopped, but heavy low clouds made visibility quite sketchy during parts of the day.

The Finals of the Competition are to go off today up on the mountain, with bluebird skies to greet the competitors

In the words of Shrek the weather today “was like an onion’, from waking up and ascending: rain under overcast, travel through cloud layer with snow, above those clouds is was rainy and overcast (clouds above and below), above that super-ridiculous windy with rain and overcast.
However the athletes participating in this year’s Orage Masters threw down the best they could on Blackcomb’s Higher Level Terrain Park as fans and co-competitors watched cheered, and annihilated the unlucky people on the chair with snowballs whenever it stopped.

Team Volkl jibbing the Log

Team Volkl ended up taking the competition with almost all 9′s and 10′s from the judging panel made of all the other teams. The with ice cold glacier mountain beer celebrations to follow.

The onion style weather pattern did make for some interesting scenery when you could see far enough to snap some frames.

In the Telus Conference Center the State of the Art Exhibition has been going on with many action local artists and action sport photographers showing off their stuff. There were also demonstrations of artists doing their work live.
Shoe Painting

Deck Painting

Day two of the Telus Whistler Ski Snowboard festival was an exciting jam packed running back and forth until your legs are probably going to fall off type day. That being said it was also a good day.

I started in the morning at the Whistler Chef Challenge, even though i just ate two of the biggest pancakes of my life (plus blueberries) the food still made me incredibly hungry.

After drooling over delicious food i headed up Whistler and across the new Peak to Peak gondola which is pretty nifty, (yeah i said nifty… that word is making a comeback) and over to the High Level Terrain park for the training for Orage Masters (which i’m shooting today).

At Cittas the Hairfarmers (a band) were playing at the Kokanee sponsored Apres ski series at restaurants around the city, quite helarious. i’m not quite sure who this gentleman is, but i’m pretty sure about 90% of the people who see him are jealous of his… everything.

And the big event for the night, and weekend was the Big Air down in the villiage. The riding was amazing, tunes being played, rowdy crowd, it was a great night.