King of the Hill goes off and gives way to Heiden adventure

We’ll it was dubbed the superbowl of snowboarding, and with the best snowboarders worldwide arriving in the Chugach to compete in the King of the Hill competition including olympic athletes and people by the name of Travis Rice and Mark Landvik I would have to agree. After countless hours of debating wether or not I should compete the decision was made for me by my friends, and I can’t thank them enough. I got my bib number and it happened to be number 1.  I had the privilege of dropping in first on a nasty couloir which set the stage for the whole event!  I had been eyeing the couloir for the previous week which was also rode by pro athlete Rob Kingwell for his 1st run. Travis Rice won all three runs destroying the competition followed by Rob Kingwell in 2nd and olympian Scotty Lago in 3rd.  I wound up 23 in the end and the opportunity to test myself against the best in the world. Sammy VanBuskirk and Sunny Prather locals living in Valdez rode for MHF, Sammy got 21 and Sunny wrapped up top 5 in a womens division packed full of stars, congrats to the both of them and big thanks. Thanks again to Nick Perrata, Mark Sullivan, Dave Geis, and everybody that helped put this amazing event on they are really doing great things for Valdez and the snowboarding industry.

3,2,1, dropping no turns after the choke

All of that was awesome but It was forgot about very quickly due to the MHF boys pushing into the Heiden glacier.  The plan was to experience the amazing mountains of Alaska in a non-traditional way by freezing our butts off every night and slaying ramp after ramp by day. The runs in the Heiden are titled the books and it is safe to say that there is not a page left unread after our 3 day excursion, we cant claim that we skied all the lines put down the last couple days but we did ski the majority of them including the behemoth called the Sequel at the back of the Heiden.  It was definitely my most memorable 3 days in the Chugach range we learned a ton about ourselves and what we are capable of, along with the fact that if you tell Waylon to pack something he wont unload it until you tell him to do so, in other words he will pack a satallite phone, radios, and more until you give him permission to take it out as he likes packing a 40 pound pack. We also found out that Nasty Nate is an animal when it comes to breaking trail he put in the boot pack on almost every run we took.  It paid off for him whenI lined him up with some exposed lines, sick spines, and countless face shots. We ended the trip by walking into the toe of the Bench Glacier.  This 3 day trip will be forever etched in our minds. Thanks again to our sponsors that made this happen Flylow, Salomon, Smith, The North Face, Kombi, Dermatome, Natural High, Cabot Cheese, Prior snowboards and Spark R and D bindings.Base Camp

The sequel

Waylon and the Chugach

Sluff management required

Getting nasty with the sequel The bench glacier

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