The following couple of weeks were banging with some massive dumps, riding pillows, some of the best face shots ever, finding new zones in the chamonix valley, watching Candide dominate the world tour to busting around with a crew of kiwi's and a couple of fin's. We were working on laying out our backflips and pretty much going rictor, spinning off everything and anything we could find, 100% natural. I even had a touch of tree hopping too!
We all rolled together to the Qualifying Freeride Tour events which has been fun! At the Engadine Freeride World Qualifie
r we had some really good times. Congratulations to Sam Smoothy from New Zealand who won. I picked a completely different line to anybody else in the qualifier and hit one of the larger cliffs on the face but unfortunately one of my turns at the top of the face was a bit wild and less controlled so i lost out on being in contention with qualifying. The party was pretty crazy and i had fun playing my first ever ice hockey game the following day, i couldn't even skate that well but managed to score 4 goals, haha!
After getting back from Engadine I got a last minute call and was involved in a Lotus catalogue shoot. We were jumping a skier cross style jump over a couple of the cars, it
was different but kind of cool, 007 style! I even had my debut as a model with Dan Wakeham, 3 Swedish and 1 Australian chick involving a casino and one of the cars. It will be interesting to see what they will use from the shoot!
We were one man down going
into Mystic Freeride in italy. Sam Smoothy had broken his leg and hurt his knee in a crash in Fieberbrunn at one of the other qualifiers. Pete and I were left to charge on over. I had a run I was reasonably happy with coming in 25th, although slightly disappointed with the result I improved on last years result. The next rider after me to take a section of my line managed to send off one of the biggest avalanches that I have seen with my own two eyes. It gave me a weird feeling watching it as it could have happened while I was on the face. Crazy times!
I stayed across in Gressoney with Rob Emling shooting for the unity movie after the contest. I hooked up with Nicolas Cruz-Memry for a day. We found some fun tree runs although the base was quite thin in places. Rob and I had a few downdays but managed to occupy ourselves with some table tennis. We got out for a few more days and got some more tree lines sorted and I had a go at some pretty big 3's off this really big natural pillow which was fun.
Next stop was Bruson and finally we had got dumped on the night before. We hooked up with Andy Bennett and got to ski some pretty cool zones. We even found a couple new ones that Andy hadn't seen before which was cool. I won't tell you to much as you will have to check out the movie to see what went on.
