March madness is over now and that marks the beginning of the end of the ski season for us as it seems. The weather is getting warm, clocks changed, and the rain has started….at least for us in the east. We may be early, but we’re going to take a look back on the season we had.
Weekly Flavor
- Mario: Sip of Sunshine (Lawson’s Finest Liquids, VT) : Legitimacy IPA 6.7 ABV
Rated a 100 on Beer Advocate, This lupulin-ladin India Pale Ale is packed with juicy tropical fruit character, bright floral aromas and delectable layers of hop flavor.
- Brian: Heady Topper (Alchemist Brewery, VT) IPA 8 ABV
Rated a 100 on Beer Advocate, An American Double IPA 75 IBU. Drink from the can.
Ski News
- Resort Closures – Telluride and Jackson
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The US Government to invest 1.5B in Banff National Park (APRIL FOOLS)
In a joint announcement with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Barack Obama announced a large tourism investment project that will help American visitors enjoy efficient and affordable access to the Canadian Rockies.
This innovative form of international travel will allow U.S. tourists direct access to Banff and Lake Louise with a single lift ticket thanks to the construction of a high-speed chairlift in each U.S. state over the next 5 years.
Economists estimate the current value of the project at 1.5B U.S. dollars or 750B Canadian dollars.
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Wolf Creek is One Step Closer to Expanding its Expert Terrain – Curbed Ski
A plan to expand Wolf Creek on the backside of the ski area is one step closer to fruition. The president and CEO of Wolf Creek, Davey Pitcher, just submitted a proposal to the San Juan National Forest that asks for an expansion of the ski area’s permit boundary.
That’s a bold step, as even ski areas that look to expand within their current permitted boundaries face a long and arduous review process. But the Denver Post reports that the Kevin Khung, the San Juan Forest’s Pagosa district ranger, will now lead a 60-day review of the Wolf Creek expansion application. After two months, the application will be deemed a formal proposal and spark an environmental review and public scoping that could take two years.
The difference between Wolf Creek’s development proposals and other ski area master plans is stark. Instead of focusing on real estate and over-the-top luxury amenities like on-mountain restaurants, Wolf Creek is all about the skiing. The bulk of the new expansion is into expert terrain that will only be used by a small proportion of the skiing population. But that’s what Wolf Creek wants: to serve as a destination for people who are all about the skiing and snowboarding.
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Jackson Hole Tourist Steals Pizza Delivery Car To Make Last-Minute Flight
A 21 year-old Vermont tourist stole a Pizza Hut delivery vehicle and skipped town on a last-minute flight Wednesday. According to the Jackson Hole News & Guide, a tourist visiting Jackson Hole from Vermont stole a Pizza Hut delivery vehicle that was left running outside his hotel following a drunken argument with friends and took off for the airport, where he booked a last-minute flight back home to Boston with cash and took flight, leaving the Toyota Rav 4 in the parking lot at the airport.
Police were alerted to the unique circumstances of the vehicle swiping, and contacted airport officials at Chicago O’Hare to attempt to apprehend the 21 year-old Vermont resident before he made his transfer to his flight home to Boston, but police ended up at the wrong gate and missed the suspect.
The vehicle theft does not qualify for grand theft auto as the suspect had no intentions of keeping the vehicle permanently, and Jackson police stated that anywhere from 6 to 12 times a year, drunk people in town will steal an unlocked taxi as its driver goes into the bar to finds their fare. The suspect would only be charged with a misdemeanor, so Jackson’s prosecutor may not bother charging him and incurring the cost of extraditing him all the way back to Wyoming.
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BELIEVE IT: TANNER HALL IS IN THE NEW YORKER
You might never expect Tanner Hall – the legendary skier, famous stoner and the world’s most whole-hearted embracer of the caps lock function – to be found in the pages of The New Yorker, the record of the zeitgeist of white, nerdy, wealthy, and liberal America. Nonetheless, Hall’s newfound status as the second active professional athlete to formally partner with a cannabis company – he has his own line of rolling papers and smoking kits with Black Rock Originals – has plunged him into the larger cultural conversation about marijuana in the modern era.
In Tanner Hall and the Athlete’s Case for Cannabis, T-Hall talks about his career-long dependence on weed to lighten his mood and calm his nerves, telling the magazine that he was high while winning all 11 of his X Games medals.
Topic: Is it Over?
Ski Bum Week 2016
- Beer
- Killington
- Burlington (instead of Stowe)
- Smugglers Notch
Killington
- Demo Day
- Brian’s New Skis
- Our buddy George
Jackson Hole
- Great Trip
- Tommy Moe / Backcountry
- Corbet’s Couloir
THIS FAILED CORBET’S SEND WILL BREAK YOUR ANKLES
Tony from Salt Lake City, who came to Jackson this past weekend with the goal of ski immortality, stomping an air into Corbet’s Couloir.
We were pretty sure his right leg was broken. Too proud to go out in a burrito, he one legged from the bottom of Corbet’s, down to Marmot, up Marmot then downloaded the Gondi and off to the hospital we went.
A broken fibula, an extended vacation and a little dent to the pride is what he gets in reward. In Tony’s words “it’s a line I’ve wanted for a while and I figured no better time than the present, my only regret is that I wish I had gone a little bigger and not landed in the goat path.”
Near the end of sesaon skiing
- Outer Limits
- Skipping Mogul Challenge
- End of season look back
Around The Horn
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We are in a Massive Vanilla Shortage
The nectar of the gods that is ice cream is about to get a hell of a lot more expensive, and we have the distinguished spinster that is vanilla to thank for it. Prices of Madagascan vanilla are skyrocketing and the ice cream industry is worried.
In fact, prices of vanilla surged 150 percent last year because Madagascar—the number one producer of vanilla—had a really lousy harvest.
Vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world, following saffron, and the best stuff comes from Madagascar, Mexico, and Tahiti. It’s not easy to cultivate vanilla either: The beans are hand-pollinated from flowers in the orchid family, which open for just part of a day, one time per season. If pollination doesn’t occur then, no vanilla pod is produced. If things do work out, the pods have to be cured for three to six months in the sun during the day and in a box at night.
One ice cream maker, Charlie Thuillier of the British ice-cream brand Oppo, told The Guardian, “The price has doubled in the last month. We were paying €35 (around $40) a liter in February but now it’s €76 (around $85).”
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Brussels Airport Attack Is 2nd Major Bombing for Utah Teen
A Utah teenager who was injured in the Belgium airport attack survived a similar horror three years ago at the Boston Marathon.
Mason Wells, a 19-year-old from Sandy, Utah, is expected to make a full recovery, after the bombing at the Brussels airport Tuesday left him with a surgery scar, a severed Achilles tendon, a head gash, shrapnel injuries and severe burns.
Finding himself near the center of a major attack yet again — Wells was standing within feet of a bomb that exploded at the airport. The blasts in the Belgian capital killed 34 people and wounded scores at the airport and a subway station.
Three years ago, Wells and his father felt the ground shake from an attack in the U.S., when a pressure-cooker bomb exploded a block away from where they were watching his mother run the Boston Marathon.
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MIGALOO SUBMERSIBLE YACHT
Normally if your yacht goes underwater, it’s a disaster. With the Migaloo Submersible Yacht, it happens all the time. This incredible watercraft combines the luxury of a yacht with the underwater capabilities of a U.S. Navy submarine. It comes in five models, ranging in size from the 72-meter M2 to the massive, city-like 283-meter M7. Each is built to military safety standards, uses a modern acrylic pressure hull for a wide-open interior space, offers incredible views of the ocean, and is one of the most private spaces you can find — after all, not many people are going to be looking for you under the surface of the water. Best paired with one of the company’s Kokomo private floating habitats.
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Here’s What Brazil’s Drought Means for Coffee Lovers Around the World
Though it has been a difficult couple of years for Brazil’s coffee crop, it looks like things are beginning to look up – at least temporarily. Following a ravaging drought, coffee experts predict that this year’s crop will be bountiful and beautiful. For consumers, it’s a win-win situation: better-tasting coffee at low prices.
Jason Sarley, a sensory analyst for Coffee Review, a California-based online publication and consulting group for the specialty coffee community, said that the temporary relief for Brazil’s struggling crop is largely thanks to El Niño conditions, which brought much needed rain to the region.
Though this is great news for coffee enthusiasts, Sarley is quick to emphasize the ephemeral nature of Brazil’s bountiful harvest.
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Microsoft deletes ‘teen girl’ AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours
A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11’-proclaiming robot.
Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as ‘The AI with zero chill’ – and that she certainly is.
To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe.
She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being ‘creepy’ or ‘super weird’.
Tay also asks her followers to ‘f***’ her, and calls them ‘daddy’. This is because her responses are learned by the conversations she has with real humans online – and real humans like to say weird stuff online and enjoy hijacking corporate attempts at PR.
Other things she’s said include: “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got”, “Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong” and “Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler…that’s what I’ve heard so many others say”.
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FREERIDING BOTTOMLESS TRAILS IN THE HEART OF THE ALPS, SINGLETRACK SWITZERLAND VERBIER
In the second episode of Singletrack Switzerland, a new Teton Gravity Research mountain bike project produced in partnership with Swiss International Air Lines, Switzerland Tourism, and BMC Switzerland, two American mountain bikers – pro rider Brice Shirbach, and pro skier Carston Oliver – venture to Verbier, Switzerland, where they ride open alpine singletrack, full-blown bike parks, and thousands upon thousands of vertical feet with the help of Epic Europe.
Verbier is infamous as one of the rowdiest ski and snowboard resorts in the Alps, hosting the Verbier Xtreme big-mountain contest on the imposing 50º face of the Bec de Rosses. Verbier’s growing bike park is looking to match the winter freeride experience, with flowing jump lines in the open alpine and technical downhill tracks falling through the forest. A little bit of work on the pedals, however, nets you a day-long tour down into the Rhone Valley, or down the puckering, switchbacking trail to La Chaux, which runs through mountainside villages and alongside steep, cliffed faces on its way down, down, down to the bottom of the valley.
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I have Witnessed Some Horrifying Things as a Ski Resort Bartender
a 22-year old bartender who spends the ski season behind the bar at La Grotte Du Yeti, the most popular après-ski bar in France, and a place where some of the craziest patrons show up.
eat, snowboard, work, party, sleep, repeat” lifestyle
Jägerbombs are selling like crazy this year, because one of the bartenders found a way to drop the shot into the glass with Red Bull using only his penis. He makes a row of ten shots, and by knocking one over, all the other ones topple over into their glass like dominos. Once he does that once, all the guys in the bar want to try it and show the crowd how manly they are. As a result, I’m seeing a lot of small dicks.