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A couple years ago, I fell in love in Jay Peak. An otherwise cold, windy and miserable day would also prove to be one of my best. There is something to be said about visiting places that were the setting for important moments of your life. Since November 22nd was set to be opening day at Jay, and due to the personal significance of the resort, I decided to get a car load of bros to go down there and ride.

The unusual suspects of the bro-down in Jay.

The road trip started out early, I picked up Yeti and Brad, and with Yahoo! directions in hand, we proceeded east for what we hoped would be a good day of riding (first for Brad and Yeti, second for me). The drive was mostly uneventful up until the Canada-USA border where we got pulled aside by the customs agent. He asked us if we were carrying more than $10,000 in cash (I wish we had that much scratch). I guess he wanted to search our stuff to make sure we weren't secretly part of the wealthy elite.

Normally a customs search would be no big deal, however, in this instance Brad really needed to use the restroom. So he asked the customs agent "do you guys have a public washroom in here?" To which the agent replied "It makes no sense for us to have public restrooms here because if you were smuggling drugs you could go flush them, or if we say something you don't like you can smear the whole place in poo." (no joke, he said that). Of course that's when we realized that Brad had probably set off a red flag with his request. Fortunately it didn't take long for them to search the car and they didn't make a huge mess of it. Once we were out of visible range of the border, we had to pull over to the side of the road so Brad could take care of business.

Yeti meets his doppleganger. What are the odds of seeing two of the same gaper.

With our urinal emergency behind us, we continued on toward Jay. However, we ended up taking a wrong turn (we turned up VT-105 instead of VT-242). Once that feeling of being in the wrong place set in, we decided we should pull over and ask someone for directions. Fortunately there was a pedestrian up the way. Yeti started joking how it was probably hillbilly with a shotgun. As we approached, we realized that this guy did in fact have a rifle slung over his shoulder. Not to be deterred, however, we stopped and asked him for quick directions. He confirmed that we had in fact taken a wrong turn and kindly directed us on how to get back. We thanked him and made our way. When we finally arrived at Jay, we were stoked to realize that it was snowing pretty heavily.

No sooner had we started unpacking did the gaper hunt begin. The first victim: Yeti. He decided to rock a purple one piece but because he does it in typical Yeti style, it had a certain panache that couldn't be ignored. However, Brad had been instructed before he left to make sure to spray a gaper wearing skier, so he looked at Yeti and said "expect to be sprayed."

Although Yeti's was the first, it certainly wasn't the last gaper we saw. In fact no sooner had we gotten our lift passes did we notice another skier wearing the exact same gaper. An instant friendship was forged.

For our first run of the day, we decided to go with the more difficult of the runs that were available to us. The snow was good but the moguls were large and the visibility basically nil. Which is probably why we hadn't noticed that we had ventured onto one of the closed sections of the run. This is when I fell in the creek (I seem to do this at least once a year). None the worse for wear, I tried to make my way back to the lift except I found the going to be tough (Yeti and Brad were already way ahead of me). That's when I realize that I have about 2 inches of sluch caked onto my base. I finally cleaned it off so we could resume our riding.

Gene Kelly sings in the rain but Yeti and Brad sing in the snow. The Jay clouds strike on opening day.

We spent the rest of the morning shredding up any run that was open until our legs were sore and our finger tips frozen. We decided to head inside for a while to warm up our fingers and take a bio-break. This is when things almost went south. While going to the restroom, Yeti's iPhone fell out of his pocket. He realized it was missing and we spent the next 15 minutes or so re-tracing his steps trying to find it. After asking pretty much everyone in the lodge if they had seen it, and only seconds before Yeti lost it and started throwing tables around, he realized that it had fallen into the hood of his gaper. Crisis averted.

The rest of the afternoon was a lot more of what we experienced in the morning: snow, lots of riding, some freshies, some gapers, more snow, and lots of laughs (did I mention it was snowing). At one point, while marveling at the heavy snowfall, we came upon a guy sitting in the snow, seemingly trying to fasten up his bindings. What was significant was that he was complaining that he wanted to go back to Delaware. I said "But there's no snow in Delaware!" "Exactly" he said which made me wonder what he was doing in Jay in the first place.

Finally when it was time to call it a day, we packed up all of our gear and made our way back toward the border. Four hours or so and 63 litres of fuel later, we made it back to Canada's capital craving massages and sleep. We were thankful to have benefited from the mystical Jay clouds for a truly epic opening day in Jay and to have averted any potential buzz-kill worthy crisis. I was happy to have gone back to a really important junction place of my life. The day was truly epic but at the same time made me realize how much I missed those who could not be there.

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Recently the AFP reported that China was experimenting on dispersing clouds to prevent rain during Olympic events. Conversely, officials claim that China has already set up an extensive system that may be able to make it rain during the games if needed. Now wouldn't this kind of thing be useful in the winter. Especially after the winter we've just had on the east coast with very little in terms of actual snow fall. A little rain would also be useful in fighting the forest fires that recently ravaged the western United States. On the other hand, this could also turn out to be just another modality to spread disease.

It was August 10th, 2007 when the AFP reported that chinese scientists were "conducting high-altitude tests to eliminate clouds and stop rain [from] spoiling next year's Beijing Olympics."¹ This was achieved by dispersing silver iodide and Diatomite into the atmosphere. These two compounds are thought to prevent moisture from forming into rain drops. Silver iodide is used as an antiseptic and diatomite is a naturally occurring, soft, chalk-like sedimentary rock so conventional wisdom would lead us to believe that the process is safe. At the very least, spectators at the 2008 Olympic games have little chance of catching some form of an infection while chinese scientist are pumping the air full of antiseptic. The idea of controlling the weather with chemicals does, however, raise a small red flag in my mind, although maybe I just watch too many James Bond type movie with over the top, megalomaniacal villains.

The one thing that I find most interesting about this is that silver iodide, having a crystaline structure similar to ice, can induce freezing to the moisture in clouds when disperssed in the air (in China they use old anti-aircraft guns to shoot cans of the compounds into the sky). The first idea that came to my mind when I learned of this was that this seems like a feasible way of making it snow. I suspect that if done properly, this could also be much more effective than arrays of snow cannons on your favourite hill, or even better, combine the two.

Apparently this technique called cloud seeding is not new which makes me wonder why I hadn't heard of it until now. Had I known about this, I would have focused my energies last year on cloud seeding the skies over Vermont and western Quebec instead of wearing my pyjamas inside out and flushing ice cubes down the toilet (which is commonly thought to be a fundamental part of the snow dance). Perhaps the researchers who study this know something that we don't such as: a) cloud seeding is prohibitively expensive or b) cloud seeding is a potential health hazard. In the first case, I feel bad for the people of China who will have to foot the bill for this when the Olympics come around in 2008. In the second case I feel bad for the people of China who will be exposed to cloud seeding and the side effects of this technique, probably even after the Olympics are done and gone. In either case, it looks like I feel bad for the chinese. In the meantime, I'll be accepting donations to the "seed the clouds to shred the gnar" fund in an attempt to raise money, kind of like a snow insurrance policy, to seed the skies if we are again in dire need of snow this winter. I give you my assurances that this fund will be used only in cases of emergencies, namely on days where I'm snowboarding and can't find any freshies. The governing body of this fund will not be elected for obvious reasons.

So next winter when your hitting the slopes and you notice a little precipitation starting to fall. Look up in the sky, you may be getting a random dose of anti-septic for a few fresh lines. One way or the other, the important thing here is to...

Keep shreddin' the GNAR!

References

1. China working to make clouds vanish during Olympics, http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070810/sc_afp/oly2008chnweathercloud_070810064642, Fri Aug 10, 2:54 AM ET.

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www.33mag.com/ wrapped up their 2007 season of 6 snowboard shows. Their shows include some tight editing mixed with different snowboarding footage mostly from the Quebec  area. If you understand French they have numerous informative interviews with different people from within the industry.

Pee the 6 shows at 33 WEB TV.

The 6th show covers the Telus World Ski and Snowboard festival.
The 5th is an interview with Brendan O'Dowd on the 2007 Empire Shakedown.
The 4th is am interview with event organizer Ben Ouellete, event coverage of contest “Snow Mission” in Rimouski, and a veteran’s pipe jam at Mt Tremblant.
The 3rd episode has an interview with 2006 Empire Shakedown winner Seb Touts and event coverage of Snowboard Jamboree; Qubec’s most notorious street rail.
The 2nd has an interview with photographer Mathieu Couture, event coverage of Stonehame’s Rumble competition, and Vermont’s 2007 US Open.
The 1st show features an interview with Mathieu Cowan from Sunset films on his standpoint on producing a snowboard video, event coverage of the Golden Bowl with Patrick Bernier, a Ride contest and much more.

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