[YouTubeUlar] <— 1919
Gatorade just released a series of 8 commercials with Peyton Manning and Cam Newton and of course Rob Belushi - the gas station clerk who is the star of the show. Nothing more to say here except...
Genius.
Here are the best ones.
[YouTubeUlar] <— 5,006
CREDITS from Adweek
Client: Gatorade
Chief Marketing Officer: Morgan Flatley
Senior Director, Consumer Engagement: Molly Carter
Marketing Director: Jamie Davies
Manager, Branded Entertainment: Nancy Laroche
Senior Director, Sports Marketing: Jeff Kearney
Director, Sports Marketing: Tom Prochaska
Agency: TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles
Chief Creative Officer: Stephen Butler
Executive Creative Director: Brent Anderson
Global Creative Director: Jayanta Jenkins
Senior Art Director: Dave Estrada
Senior Copywriter: Nick Ciffone
Copywriter: Nick Cohen
Art Director: Jon Soto
Director Of Production: Brian O’Rourke
Senior Producer: Tim Newfang
Managing Director: Peter Ravailhe
Branded Entertainment Manager: Marc Johns
Sports Marketing Manager: Erika Buder
Project Manager: Parker Adame
Associate Brand Manager: Ralph Lee
Group Planning Director: Scott MacMaster
Planning Director: Martin Ramos
Planner: Rebecca Harris
Junior Planner: Katie Acosta
Junior Planner: Matt Bataclan
Director Of Business Affairs: Linda Daubson
Executive Business Affairs Manager: Lisa Lipman
Talent Payment Manager: Mirielle Smith
Director, Traffic Operations: Dessiah Maxwell
Broadcast Traffic: Jerry Neill
Production Company: Caviar Content
Director: Jody Hill
Executive Producer: Luke Ricci
Producer: Brian Quinlan
Production Designer: Mark Snelgrove
Director Of Photography: Michael Svitak
Managing Partner: Michael Sagol
Editorial Company: HutchCo Technologies
Editor: Jim Hutchins
Assistant Editor: Joaquin Machado
EP: Jane Hutchins
Postproduction: The Mill, Los Angeles
Sr. Executive Producer Sue Troyan
EP: Enca Kaul
Producer: Kiana Bicoy
Production Coordinator: Jillian Lynes
2D Lead Artist: Robin McGloin
2D Lead Artist: Scott Wilson
2D Lead Artist: Patrick Munoz
2D Lead Artist: Scott Johnson
Colorist: Nick Sanders
Congratulations to good friends TJ Fry and Dani Rae for their successful engagement at the top of the 2014 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb :) Fry ran a 14:08.322 for his first hill climb up Pikes Peak, but more importantly delivered himself and his car successfully to the top in order to carry out his proposal.
I don’t have much else to say here… I Love Awesomeness and this is awesome. Watch the video below for the full story.
[VimeeeeeO] <— 5
Straight from the man and Bird pilot Paul Borrud himself…
“In June of 2014, we spent 11 days surfing the Mentawai Islands. The conditions were perfect the entire trip with light offshore winds and plenty of swell to go around. I was able to capture some pretty interesting angles using Phyllis (name of my drone). Enjoy the highlights of our trip and experience the beauty of the Islands from above. The Bird”
Looks like a surfers dream to me… and one hell of a Niit5 location.
What: A long river trip on an incredibly rare river with an awesome group of friends Where: The Wild and Scenic Wilderness of the Selway River, from Paradise Creek Ranger Station to Selway Falls When: Meet in Missoula, MT at 6pm June 17, and return to Missoula by 11am June 24 Who: About 13 of us total What else: email any questions to Dennett Dwyer
WHAT NEXT?
Read the below. There are some logistics, as well as a lot of info on what to bring—this may require some shopping/borrowing/stealing; also, the sooner we have confirmed details from everyone, the sooner we can nail down important logistics like shuttle and food.
LOGISTICS
Travel arrangements and requirements
• Please plan to meet in Missoula June 17, or arrange to be met in Darby (SLC crew).
• Please do not plan to be able to be back in Missoula until June 24th.
Weather
There is a lot of elevation change on the trip. Temperatures could be in the mid-nineties at their hottest, but most likely will hover around 70-80 degrees, with nights in the high 40’s to low-50’s (and the nights will get slightly warmer as we go). Afternoon thunderstorms are VERY common there in June/July.
Shuttle
Rivers go one-way. This means we’ll need to shuttle gear, people, and vehicles from top to bottom and vice versa. The most efficient way to do this is a paid shuttle service, but our total costs will depend on number of vehicles, space in vehicles for people and (heavy) gear, and time (one-way the shuttle takes a full day). This is why meeting in Missoula with time for us to sort this out is essential.
WHAT TO BRING
Key point: space is a concern, but weight is not.
Equipment / Gear
Everyone will be given dry-bag space of set dimensions when we arrive at the put-in on the afternoon/evening of June 18 Couples will consolidate into larger bags, and tent partners can be determined then. Here is what you will need:
Mess Kit: BRING YOUR OWN PLATE, BOWL, SPOON, CUP, FORK, KNIFE
River clothes: swimsuit, wetsuit/drysuit, river booties (wetsuit booties, NOT water shoes); helmet; PFD
Land clothes: pants, shorts, underwear, t-shirt, towel, jacket for chilly nights, hat, socks, rain jacket, optional gloves, long underwear
Footwear: heel-strapped sandals for the river/day, durable shoes that would allow you to side-hike, or comfortably sit in camp
Sleepery: Sleeping bag and pad. Expect nighttime temperatures in the mid-50’s.
Tent: please coordinate who you will share a tent with or if you plan to sleep under the stars or tarp (perfectly viable option)
Sunscreen. It is probably wise to plan for one bottle for every two people. We can coordinate at put-in so we don’t end up with 90 bottles of goop.
Sunglasses: if they are prescription or otherwise expensive, please be sure to secure them to your head if wearing them on the river.
Games: we’ll bring adventure bocce. Would be ideal to have a Frisbee, any travel-size waterproof board games, etc.
Safety: a personal first-aid kit is wise. If you don’t have one, no worries: there will be a large group first aid kit. If you have special medications or concerns (eg epi pin) let us know so we can account for space in the group kit (it is important to locate that centrally, versus your personal bag, so any responder on the trip can move as quickly as possible)
Food:
• Jesse will have a full 3-meal menu planned for the night of June 18 (campground) through the lunch of June 23 (takeout), including large-scale snacks such as trailmix. Please plan to bring anything you expect to complement that.
Booze:
• In general, plan to bring your own booze or drugs. Boxed wine is suitable, if the wine is in a durable bag inside the box. If liquor, please avoid glass bottles (transfer to another container if needed). Unfortunately, beer is the worst violator of the space consideration and we will not be able to bring nearly as much as we’d like. The glass rule applies here, too. Be warned: If you are a beer drinker, we will pack this last, allocate cooler space and ration the beer appropriately.
Boats:
• Please only bring a kayak if you plan to hard boat more than 1 day. Rafts will be three oar rigs and one paddle rig. This should be the perfect amount of boat for us to have more beer than normal.
Communication:
• We will have a satellite phone. This means you CAN call your children, wife, or lawyer if you’d like. However, please reserve that for emergency situations if possible. The same goes for in-bound calls. We will know the number for our sat phone by Missoula, in case you need to be reached while we are on the river, but please ask those who have it to use it to not expect to get a hold of you.
COSTS
Costs: Total per-person cost of the trip is currently estimated to be between $250 and $450. We will know more as the logistics and rentals finalize. Most costs will be handled by Dennett or Jesse, upfront. If you purchase something for the group, keep your receipts. If you are bringing a raft, you are not expected to pay into raft rental costs. An outline of possible costs is below.
Deposit: None. We can settle up by Square/check after the trip
Considerations: These are the things that will affect total per-person costs.
Equipment rental
Food
Shuttle
Fees
Repairs
OTHER DETAILS
1. Communism: It’s (dumbly) important that, if asked by ANYONE, we say every one of us has paid an equal amount of money and effort to go on this trip. As a collective. The reasoning is that if one of us is profiting, that person can be fined (massively) for running a commercial trip without a license. In recent years, put-in rangers have become weirdly sneaky about casually asking this question in order to write a citation.
2. Capitalism: As Dennett has probably said a dozen times to all of you folks, this is a trip of a lifetime. For me–as someone who does a lot of these trips every season—it’s a special kind of awesome to do it with not only my family, but also mine and their good friends. I’m stoked. And if you’re not as psyched as me, then just take solace in the economics: to do this river commercially, you’d be paying more than $2,000 per person. I think we can get that much fun out of this.
Allergies/medical considerations: Again: please definitely highlight these ahead of time.
Assumption of risk: It goes without saying, this is a group trip of individuals solely responsible for their own safety. Rivers are dangerous, and so are your friends (esp when they’ve been drinking). We have a lot of qualified first responders on the trip, but they have no legal obligation to help us.
Just when you think the inspiration of the ski season is over… And Freeskier publicizes this awesomeness.
FACTION — Way to kill it with your new team and video series.
Adam Delorme – Why don’t you have a “the facebook”?
Etienne Mérel – Keep up the Awesomeness.
***NOTE*** – Next week this post will be post dated back to December 24th, 2013
Merry EPIC Christmas-Holiday-New Year and Happy End of Work Day on December 24th, 2013.
As many of you know I have been charging around the world with a couple awesome people skiing and “in a way” competing in something called Vail Resorts Epic Race. The Epic Race was conceived by Vail Resorts as a contest for the first 10 people who successfully skied every Vail Resort in the 2013/14 season which included 26 ski resorts spread across 4 different continents. 12 were located in the US and the remaining 14 were in Austria, Switzerland and France — The reward for the first 10 people who accomplished this goal would be a Vail Resorts Lifetime Epic Pass. Of course, when I first heard about this randomly awesome competition in early October I knew it would be a fun endeavor to attempt to win what would be known as “THE” ski pass of all ski passes! What I didn’t know is that when it came down to the final day of the FINAL resort to open in Brides-Les-Bains France… was that there would be 131 people from across the world contending for this most EPIC of Epic Vail Passes. Vail Resorts didn’t even expect this kind of final day outcome… and even though Vail has stated that we would all know the final results from this most epic of epic races by end of work day today, I’m happy to announce that they have decided to take some “EXTRA” time to review all the content and all the angles from this 29 day race!
To summarize what Ashley Cooley, Devin L Rhinehart and I have all accomplished in the last month is pretty difficult to comprehend. I think it can best be described as a test in school, like your final final of the semester. Only if you didn’t pass this final, there was ZERO chance of you passing… or “winning” in this case – which all made sense to us. So I basically used that approach to find some motivation to get our team into and through the final day. All three of us from “Team Fun” were in the top 10 percentile through school as we grew up… so we simply needed to apply these rules of life to the final day and if we succeeded and tried our best … we should probably be ok on the final leader board. Sounds simple enough, however there were some additional requirements to get you to the top. 1 – time, 2 – paying attention to detail… and 3 – being sure all your previous content for the race was up to snuff. Of course there is always LUCK involved too, but we had plenty of that on our side with Ashley being the lucky one. Devin was our Time freak, and I was pretty much Mr Detail. Put us all together and we find ourselves at number 20, 21 and 25 on the final “unofficial” Vail Resorts Epic Race leader board. However, when you throw a little detail into it you will notice that 9 people in front of us automatically get tossed from improper uploading on the final day — Two of those don’t even have video links. Add another level of detail and 4 more get dropped for not following resort rules – aka “you can’t hike outside of resort hours”. That brings Rhinehart up to number 7, me at 8 and Cooley as the top girl finisher just out of the top 10 at 12.
Of course, these are unofficial results — even by my count. I have no idea what Vail Resorts will ultimately choose to do or how nitpicky they are going to get in judging this most EPIC of epic races! When you start digging into 26 mountains of content it becomes pretty overwhelming pretty fast! How do I know? Because I’ve done it. One of the cool things about this race is that everyones piece of content from accomplishing all 26 ski resorts is public which is why I am happy to see them taking the extra time to get the correct 10 finishers on top of the board. After jumping into the 52 photos and 26 fifteen second minimum videos from each contestant, I know who gets tossed and who sticks around. And almost every other racer knows too… Except for the one element that is publicly unknown in this race, which is who actually emailed Vail Resorts a photo of their completed European ski stamp passport by 11:59:59pm on December 20th, 2013. Assuming everyone in front of us accomplished this 1 simple task … I see myself finishing in 7th place – Rhinehart moves to number 6 and Cooley… well there is a super slim small chance that she could pop into the top 10, but even though I know there are technicalities with some uploaded content between us, I do not expect Vail to jump to that level of detail to pop her into the top 10 — If they do choose to go that route, then I would probably be dropped for having goggles or sunglasses on in one of my photos or videos. Sunglasses were never actually addressed, but goggles were recommended to be off your face as you must be visible in all photos and videos and you must include #epicrace in your titles and your Facebook posts and you must choose 1 video and 2 photo locations from a list of required elements at each area and have all your content upload by midnight of the time zone of the mountain you were visiting and you must have lift scan data from the given mountain on the given day and you can only ski 1 US mountain or 2 European mountains per day and you must accomplish this all during resort operating hours and you needed to shoot horizontal video opposed to vertical iPhone video and you need to talk loud through plastic on GoPros and and you can’t promote other brands or use copyrighted material on and on and on… can you see how run on and on this contest could get let alone judging it all!? Either way, at some point there needs to be a line drawn in the final judging criteria in order to release the official leader board and award the top racers their Vail Resorts lifetime season pass!
If we are on that list — Fantastic! If for some reason we don’t quite make the official top 10, then we will still enjoy the experiences that have been had and the Vail Resorts Epic season pass for next year that will be awarded to anyone who completes all 26 Vail mountains in the 2013/2014 season. In keeping with the original spirit of “Team Fun”, I will end this post with the 1 simple rule we had while blowing over 2700 miles in the car and almost 14,000 miles in the air to accomplish this 1 impressive task of skiing 26 ski resorts in 29 days in 4 different countries — “Skiing is fun… and that’s about all!”
It was amazing meeting so many *awesome people* on this incredible adventure! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
*Awesome People*
Nick and Scott Annis
Joe Jensen, Weather Man Steve Sacco and John Victor
Michael Lahey + Epic Race Mom Sharon Mcmonagle
Devin Rhinehart, Ashley Cooley + Greg Hydle … “Team Fun”
Bill and little man Charlie Fiveash
London man Steve Curtis
Japan master Zoe Huebner
The Beard of Ando!
Golden locals Michael + Nila Ferrone
Newlyweds Jessica + Dave Schnoll
Sister + Brother team Jannah and Jeff Din!
The Wilson Duo
The Beard of Sean Regan!
The Jackson Hole Greece of Nick Greece
My manager… Kim Jackson!
Windy Wendy Smith
Ultimate video bomber Parker Jackson
The always proper Carolyn Pope!
Crazy Face Troy Martinez
The child in Annie + David Childs
The always Rad Rad Roubeni!
The hair of Tom Slazinski
Epic start with Matt Dority
Webmaster Will Tran
Crazy Man Kai Whittier (never actually met but heard ridiculous stories)
The Curls of Kim Klopp!
Tera + Garrick Keatts
The Silent JK Johnny Kuo
Sock Firestarter Zac Irwin!
The Humor of Jason Walence
Master Ski Sabbatical Jay Irwin
The entire Liu Family!
Will you marry me Matthew Walence
Ryan Garnett, “Pets Heads Falling Off” Colin Dean, and Backflip Trevor Posey!
Green Icelantic Machine Hollis Carter
Our Shit Got Jacked Alexandra Malkin + Aaron Marks :(
Completed the Epic Race Right Jessica Jackson Hill!
The Finished in Fine Fashion Lawrence Bayer
The Dreads of Jonathon Blair Ermer
Yellow Man Giovanni De Francisco!
The Ned Man Kip and Legitimately Last Place Final Day Finisher Kip Lagorin
One Take Timmy Jarred Simpson
The One and Only Man of Epicness Himself … Adam Warot!
Way to crush it out there Devin Rhinehart – you Vail Resorts Epic Race Winning Engineer of the Day. This one just might simply be worth an I Love Awesomeness Award.
Blockquote for Google cred:
Devin Rhinehart has been selected by his peers as Wednesday’s Engineer of the Day for the Denver office. Devin is a mechanical engineer and has been working at URS for five and a half years.
Devin was nominated for his willingness to learn and his ability to apply his knowledge to his work. Devin demonstrates a passion for the engineering profession. He has shown great leadership in the mechanical group and goes above and beyond what is expected of him.
Devin enjoys skiing, biking, fishing and hockey. He won a lifetime pass to Vail Resorts in the Epic Race this year. Devin graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently pursuing a MBA at the University of Denver.
[YouTubeUlar] <— 9,119
Today Ashley Cooley and I purchased two tickets to the 2014 Craig Hospital PUSH Dinner where Snowboarding star Kevin Pearce will be the recipient of the Craig Hospital Inspiration Award. Pearce was recently selected as one of the National Geographic Adventurers of the Year amongst several other, and somewhat crazy adventurists...
Adventure Educators - Amy and Dave Freeman
Alpinists – Raphael Slawinski and Ian Welsted
Big-Wave Surfer – Greg Long
Climber – Adam Ondra
Community Builders – Stacy Bare and Nick Watson
Explorer – Sarah Marquis
Long-Distance Swimmer – Diana Nyad
Skier – JP Auclair
Sky Runner – Kilian Jornet
Snowboarder – Kevin Pearce
If you haven’t taken the time to watch “The Crash Reel”, which documents Kevin Pearce’s recovery from a crash in Park City, Utah where Pearce sustained a traumatic brain injury, I would highly recommend you point your iTunes or Apple TV this direction.
Pearce was attempting a cab double cork while training in the halfpipe on December 31st, 2009 — only 49 days before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Pearce spent 34 days in critical care at University Hospital before being transferred to Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado to begin his rehabilitation.
“The Crash Reel” documents Kevin Pearce’s remarkable recovery while educating about the effects of traumatic brain injuries specifically tied to Action Sports. Defining the art of snowboarding and tracking Kevin Pearce from childhood to a professional career as the only snowboarder with the ability to beat Shaun White, the dynamic story line of The Crash Reel brings together every emotion related to overcoming such incredible odds.
I personally can not recommend a better documentary film for anyone to watch and am excited to see what Jake Manley and the media team at Craig Hospital have created for the upcoming 2014 PUSH Dinner.
[VimeeeeeO] <— 1,500,000
Wow - This is hypnotizing. Having recently visited the Chamonix valley in Europe and getting to whitness Mont Blanc up close and personal… and now with this single genius camera shot, Speed Riding Mont Blanc doesn't seem that far fetched :)
Well, today was pretty close to one of the most mind blowing days of skiing I’ve ever had. I am not even sure if the English language has words for how incredible the Alps are. Maybe there are words in German that can accurately describe them, but in English I don’t think anything does justice.
The Alps are Huge. Beautiful. Vast. Insane. Steep. Heavenly. Gnarly. Happy. Lonely. Fun. Scary. Intense. Scenic. Insane. Commanding. A skiers paradise, and probably an original explorers dream and nightmare combined. I can’t explain this place other than until you see it in person, there is no proper way to explain them.
We had the best time today. We had a team breakfast here at the Apart Korona, and then headed off to the mountains. Our first stop was the Information office at Lech for our Epic Race stamps. The staff there was so friendly and even gave us the Lech keychains for free!
We ran into some fellow Epic Racers in the parking lot, of course they all recognized Hydle, and we shot the shit with them for a minute, and then parked the car and got everything ready to ski. After a quick playful jaunt in the playground (aka the guys terrain park), we walked over to jump on the first lift of our lives in the Austrian Alps!
Just the ride up alone, we were all in awe, like I already said, I can’t explain how grand this place is. It was a perfect, bluebird, glistening gloriful day!
Within the first 100 yards on our first run (for the record, it was his first run of the season) – Francis ATE it on the side fluff of the run, which I got to witness. Nice work Franics!
After that, we charged down amazing huge groomers with nobody on the runs, and headed to our three spots at Lech – the Kriegeralpe which is a cute lunch spot with a fake cow out front, the Weibermahd lift station where some European skiers asked Greg if he was Mc Fitti – again. When he said no, the guy then said “well if you were, or if you at least said you were his brother, you’d get a lot of chicks!” haha. And then we took the Rufikopf tram – HYDLES first tram ride!!!! – up to the Rufikopf panoramic view restaurant where we ran into several different groups of Epic Racers who all recognized Hydle of course!
Then, we went up to the panoramic view at the top of the Rufikopf tram. As Rhinehart appropriately described it, “This is the most panoramic view I’ve ever SEEN!!” Again, no words can describe the grand and vastness of this view, and of all things, we saw it on a perfect bluebird day!
From there, we cruised down the raddest, most fun cat-track ride I can confidently say I’ve ever been on! It lasted forever, and we had a blast zipping in and out, off the side of the run, taking videos in the sunshine, and tearing up some huge fast turns.
That brought us to the Zurs village – equally as cute as every other village we’ve seen so far, but just a bit smaller. We headed into the information office, partied with Elina and got some stamps, and then we were on our way up our first (and only) Zurs lift which was still huge.
At the top was one of our photo spots – the Madloch lift. DUDE. I WISH this lift was open. Holy crap. It was gnarly steep, took you straight to what looks like the top of the Zurs mountain area (but who knows, this place never ceases to surprise you!) and it flows back down into a canyon with a bar/restaurant overlooking what is now a frozen lake (but it must be so beautiful in the summer!).
So we took our videos, and then headed over to the bar/restaurant at the top of that lift called the Bergrestaurant Steepkopf. Insane mountain views from every angle of this place, it felt like we were in a movie!! We ordered a round of drinks from one of the coolest waiters we’ve met yet – ADRIAN! He was so cool, he played with the camera, and chatted us up in his best English. We also had our first Austrian dessert – an Apple Steudel with a vanilla cream sauce. Basically heaven in my mouth!
We shut down the place (they have to close when the lifts close and download the lift with the lifties) so we took an icy, but equally icy but gorgeous ski ride down with insane alpenglow views of the Alps on the way down.
We grabbed the bus back to Lech to get to the car, hit up the grocery store, and headed back to our hotel. I cooked up some spaghetti, the guys edited, and then Hydle and I decided to check out the sauna. Ok. I thought it was going to be just a sauna. What we didn’t realize was it’s basically a spa. It was a huge room with relaxing beach chairs in a warm room, a hot as shit sauna, a steam room, relaxing music playing, decorative plants, window shades that are on a three rail system that Hydle admired, and a shower with multi shower heads in all directions. Apart Korona – straight up killing it!
Now we are editing/blogging/uploading/listening to Mc Fitti, and there is some talk of the Moosewirt next. It’s late, but we are also kinda still on Colorado time, so it’s like 1 pm at home still…so whatever, we might rock it!
Monday was our Heavenly day, and they had the mountain closed due to wind hold, as a storm was coming in later in the day. We hit the mountain and played around in the village taking what pictures we could to still have some fun and give the guys content for a good video edit later.
We ran into my friend Heidi in the ticket office, took some videos with them there, and then Rhinehart rocked out 10 Daffy’s all over the village. After that, we headed over to Lake Tahoe TV to film the Hi Sierra Report – my friend Crystal who works there wanted to interview us for their weekly segment.
At Lake Tahoe TV we filmed a 2 minute segment for me, and they showed my Gold Coaster video, and then Hydle was up. Hydle was hilarious as he was wearing his white sunglasses, ear muffs, and red hat while being interviewed, and he started things off with recording himself while being filmed for TV. Then Rhinehart was up, which was also hilarious because he was wearing his full ski gear including his gloves for the interview.
Once we were done filming, we had to get Rhinehart to the airport, and decided to stop at the Boulder Lodge on the Nevada side on the way to the airport just to get some final shots.
Everything was closed, but the guys still took some more video, and then Hydle said “Hey Rhinehart, film this” while I wasn’t paying attention, and he bombed a snowball right at me and drilled me in the shoulder all on camera. This made Rhinehart’s edit in case anyone wants to see me get smoked by a snowball (nice shot Hydle!).
On the way to the airport we grabbed lunch at my favorite Mexican place in Carson City where Rhinehart ordered a Mexican coffee that he said “tasted like high school” haha.
We dropped him off in Reno, and said our goodbyes, of course rubbing it in a little bit that he was going back to work and we got to go back to Tahoe to ski and hang some more!
On the drive home we found out that Hydle won the first week’s GoPro – congrats Hydle! The corporate team at Vail seems to really be enjoying Hydle and Rhineharts edits (along with all of us obvi) so I’m stoked he was the first to be recognized for his awesome content!
I’m bummed Rhinehart didn’t get to ski Heavenly, it really has the best views of any ski resort I’ve ever been to, and it’s my home mountain! Oh well, next time Rhinehart! Tahoe til you know!!
I just wanted to send you a quick email and photo about how awesome operation elevation is at Heavenly!
It was my first time ever getting to ski the amazingly beautiful Heavenly yesterday … Although it was frigid cold, I couldn’t help but nearly freeze my hands off snapping photo after photo on this first day to heavenly adventure. The overlook on the way up the gondola is gorgeous, but the highlight of the day was definitely being selected to take part in your operation elevation experiment. Riding in “the beast” to the top of the mountain during sunset to experience all of what Heavenly really has to offer was a completely unexpected treat for Ashley and I. Chris Hansen killed it in giving us an awesome ride in “the beast” and I even turned him into a little photographer to help us document the adventure at the top!
I will have a complete write up and video of our experience available online soon as we progress our way around the world for Vail Resorts Epic Race. But I just wanted to reach out to you now and say thanks for the perfect ending to this Epic Day. Operation Elevation is the shit!
Check out this bad ass photo we snapped :)
UPDATE: September 1st, 2014 … unfortunately Todd still has yet to reply… WTF Vail.
The drive to Northstar was Rhinehart’s first real view of Lake Tahoe “til you know!” It was a sunny bluebird day so the lake was beautiful, and Darin Talbot narrated our drive around the lake so Rhinehart could learn some facts about Lake Tahoe!
Once at Northstar, we rode the gondola up to the mid mountain and took a total of 4 runs, two of them were through the park so Rhinehart could do his daffy of course. By then it was time for the Bronco’s game to start, so we headed back down the gondola to the village.
We went straight to the Rubicon pizza place in the village and sat at the bar to watch the game and ordered some pizza. The game started off with the Broncos down, but after halftime they started to get it back together and pull ahead. A mom from outside kept coming in to watch the game while her son was skating at a birthday party, so we eventually bought her a beer and celebrated the Broncos together.
At around 3:30, the smores people came out, so we ran outside to get our photo with the smores (it was one of the items on the list) and then went back in to finish up the game with a Bronco’s WIN!
After the Bronco’s win, we finished our beers and headed out to take some spins on the ice skating rink. It may have been the beer, or it may have been that it was the end of a cycle before the zamboni came back out, but I was pretty shaky on the ice. We messed around a bit and took some spills, which I’m paying for today with some bruises, but it was worth it!
Finally, once we were done with ice skating, we headed over to Tavern 6,330 which was our last photo spot (we had taken a pic there earlier but we wanted to hit it while it was open). The bartender Trever was telling us that the signature drink there was a Bloody Mary and that all the other Epic Racers that were coming in were ordering that, so we decided to go against that and told him to make us his other signatures, which he did, and they were all three delicious!
It was a long day, but super fun and worth it with the Bronco’s winning, and we drove back to my place where the guys powered down some soup from the night before and edited their videos.
This morning we got up to check the snow report, and Heavenly is CLOSED due to wind…ugh, what a bummer, especially for Rhinehart considering it’s his last day here and he’s never been able to ski it before :( But we’re off soon to go play somehow before we head to take him to the airport!
You must be logged in to post a comment.