Gabe Taylor Update

Warm in Jackson

Holy shit it’s getting warm. I’m in Jackson, Wyoming and all the snow is turning to hot pow. I’d never thought I’d use those two words in the same sentence, Jackson and hot. Last time I was here it was -32 in the morning. After a solid four days in Tahoe I was in need of a week of laying around doing close to nothing. So I did. Nothing. For days. It was everything I thought it’d be and more. My body was hurting after a few brutal slams over those last two film trips so the rest was needed. So our crew in Jackson is pretty sweet. Danny K, Sketchy D, Regis, Slater, Greg Wheelz, Clancy, Regis, Tim Zimmerman, Louie Vito and Alex Pashley. Good group. When a crew gets to this size it takes on a kind of carnival feel. Sometimes it can get out of control but for the most part it makes for some good times. Unfortunately the sun decided to take a vacation on this trip. I don’t know where the sun decided to vacation but not in Jackson, Wyoming. It came out for a few minutes the other day and we were on it, Danny sent a natty back three off a cliff and I rode down a decent chute. Then the clouds came back in and we free rode powder all day. While we're here Kyle Clancy is nice enough to let us stay at his house. It’s an awesome property and makes trips to this area extremely enjoyable. We built a jump in the yard and sesssioned it the other afternoon. Good times were had. After that we watched a bunch of VHS tapes. The DVD player broke so now we’re down to North Shore, Happy Hour and Fletch. Blaise Rosenthal does a bs7 in Happy Hour that’s huge, I recommend if you haven’t seen it to check it out. Then the next time you see him tell him he's the man. He'll smile.

Snowmofun

Sometimes my stories of filming and traveling sound glorious. And most of the time they are. However, today should provide insight into the other side of what we do, a not so amazing day in filming for a snowboard video. After 5 days of snow and clouds today dawned as blue as anything I've seen. Yesterday we snowmobiled into the mountains and built a jump. Normally that's a good thing so you have a jump ready to go first thing the next morning. We thought we were building a good jump, but in the snow it's extremely hard to figure out where to build and if a landing is steep or not. The landing we had scoped and built a jump on turned out to be a total pile of shit. The landing was flat as hell and our kicker was fairly poppy. Nobody landed a thing and everyone's bodies were beat up.

We started a mission to scope some new terrain and find something else to hit and this is when shit really started to go bad. First, Louie Vito drove his sled into a tree well. It took the crew an hour to get it out. Kyle and I were trying to forage through thick trees and gullies and got stuck in the deep snow too many times to count. I weigh 135 pounds or so. My snowmobile weighs four hundred and something pounds. Imagine trying to lift that thing up in three feet of snow. Over and Over! Brutal unless you're on steroids. By the time we got to anything that remotely resembled snowboarding terrain it was late in the afternoon and the crew was beat down from being stuck a million times, launching onto a flat ass landing and the effects of all these days adding up. Not to mention the mental anguish that is associated with not getting shit done.

On the way out Slater's sled shit the bed so we had to tow it. Louie's sled decided it wouldn't start after towing for a bit. It took us at least two hours to get those hunks of metal out of the mountains! Good thing everyone had a sense of humor about it all because we could've really gone mad out there. TWSnow's senior photographer Andy Wright had spent the last two days with our crew and I'm sure he'll have some good stories after this hellish day.

Monday, March 24th 2008 @ 05:12 PM.
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