Casey & Tats: The Show

The athletes and organizers of the Freeskiing World Tour had a powder day today, choosing to use the optional weather day to wait out the surging storm. Revelstoke Mountain Resort is offering up the use of their helicopter to shuttle athletes to the landing zone (LZ) at the top of the almost 2000 vertical feet of spines, chutes, and cliffs. With everything on hold for the day, the mountain was abuzz with the whoops and yells of roving groups of freeriders dressed in baggy, bright clothes.

If you had a chance to ride the 8-seater gondola from the mid-mountain lodge today, you would probably have seen some frozen waterfall lines being sent by shredders in full-face helmets. Or snowboarders slashing some turns down a steep, powdery face. Not much sun out, so most folks were taking advantage of their low-light goggle lenses to battle the drab greybird day full of indistinguishable clouds. With all the gladed, steep tree skiing on the main aspect of Revelstoke’s frontside, poor-visibility is not an issue.

To wrap up our day, some friends and I ate some good burgers at Nomad’s and finished it all up with a hot tub session.  The yoga from the other night can still be felt in my muscles, but the hot tub definitely helps.  Tomorrow, the comp wraps up; I’m hoping to get some interviews with fellow POC athlete Arne Backstrom , while he sits in third place going into an epic finals.

"Hello readers. This is Julie Weinberger checking in on Tats’ blog from Revelstoke, BC. Qualifying day of the Canadian Freeskiing Championships wrapped up this afternoon under chilly, but bluebird skies. Around 90 competitors took to the Separate Reality venue, and while it may have lacked in options, everyone crushed it. We’re all super pumped for day one of the Freeskiing World Tour event tomorrow on the North Bowl venue. Unfortunately, it looks like the bluebird weather is not going to be sticking around for long, so hopefully, everyone gets his/her runs in before it starts dumping."

Tats will be posting photos and blogs on the Powder Highway Ultimate Ski Bum website this winter.  Check in on what he’s up to by visiting powderhighway.com .  He just qualified 10th today and will be skiing in Day 1 of the FWT live broadcast on backcountry.com all day tomorrow.  Watch the skiers and follow along with Tats as he ski bums it in Canada, eh!

It’s been a full two days since I received the best call of my life.  I was sitting at an early dinner in Irvine, CA with my mom.  She was planning on coming to the Warren Miller ‘Dynasty’ show we were playing on the UC campus, and we met up ahead of time to hang out and grub down at a café just across the walking bridge from the theater.  We ordered some turkey/avocado/chorizo sandwiches with side salads, and took our time to chat up a storm about all sorts of topics.

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