Words Tanner McCarty Photos Mike Azavedo A medium regular coffee ordered at Dunkin’ Donuts comes with three creams and three sugars. It’s a novelty item probably not worth the public bathroom visit when you land at Logan Airport. But I did it anyway. It’s just one of those things you do when headed to New Hampshire. shirtless hairy men with beards yelling, spitting, and throwing anything within reach, all hoping you’ll lose control and rag-doll off a berm. This may seem borderline violent. Water balloons full of marinara sauce, which looked like blood when they exploded, were flying at people. Once through the gauntlet of terror, the yelling turned to cheers and faded in the distance, with half of an icy hell-track still to go. A few more turns, then a knoll-drop to a hairpin left turn launched sev-eral riders onto the adjacent trail. Though the course ran in the 45-sec-ond range, it felt like a lifetime of emotional highs and lows. The win-ner was Scotty Lago, a snowboard legend from New Hampshire who literally shoots guns while he snowboards. Maybe he had blasted a few rounds that morning and a couple of sticks didn’t faze him. Half a dozen PBRs later and the dudes who were bloody from ac-tual blood become the MVPs of the day, and everyone hugged it out like a weird backyard-brawl-turned-barbecue. Those who had traveled from out of state either made two dozen new best friends or moped back to their cars for a solemn drive south to Boston or north to Ver-mont. The mayhem continued, but my mother was making dinner so I cruised back to the seacoast for a rest before the next day’s event. Live free and nap. TYLER DAVIS HIP JAM Nestled in central New Hampshire’s Lakes Region an hour south of Waterville, Gunstock Mountain Resort tops out at 2,267 feet over-looking the state’s largest body of water, Lake Winnipesaukee. It’s a family-oriented spot with 120 inches of average annual snowfall and 1,400 feet of vertical. Tyler Davis grew up in the area, boarding along-side Pat Moore, Chas Guldemond and the rest of New Hampshire rip-pers that trained with former U.S. Olympic Slopestyle Team coach Bill Enos. Everyone in that crew took very different paths when they hit the age of 18. While Moore and Guldemond pursued snowboard ca-reers, you can now find 32-year-old Tyler teaching English at the local high school and living at the base of Gunstock. He’s probably the best snowboarder in the United States as far as English teachers go. Watch him take a park lap and you can tell that the proper fundamentals of snowboarding are ingrained in his muscle memory. It was the middle of March, a time when New Hampshire’s finer mountains (and humans) host an unrelated series of events that make for a wild weekend and true representation of the snowboard scene in the Live Free or Die state. The plan was to travel from the NH coast to Waterville Valley for the Mike Baker Banked Slalom, then to Gun-stock Mountain for the annual Tyler Davis Hip Jam. I’d finish the trip at Loon Mountain for New Hampshire’s premier snowboard event, Eastern Boarder’s Last Call. Having grown up riding the East Coast, I’d completed this lap for a dozen years. I landed with couches for the weekend already secured, and pointed it for Waterville. MIKE BAKER BANKED SLALOM Former pro rider, master striped bass fisherman and father of three, Mike Baker embodies New Hampshire snowboarding. He’s fast, he’s loud and he’s surprisingly dialed. He knows the next move before the hand is even dealt. If you can’t catch him in real life, his footage in the Iron Curtain movies from the mid-’90s will give you an idea of his riding. In 2012, Baker and a few friends got together and cooked up an event. “[Jamie] Cobbett and Nelson [Wormstead] actually came up with the idea,” Baker says. “It made me uncomfortable to have my name on it and still does, but it gets the dirts together for a good day on hill.” Yeah, the name is a play on words, but the actual course doesn’t bear much resemblance to the Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom out west. Picture an Olympic luge race mixed with a fight scene from Braveheart and a bit of the notorious World Quarterpipe Champion-ships from the early 2000s thrown in. Take a normal banked slalom and flatten out the berms a bit because the snow is rock hard and you can’t get a shovel in there. Run 50-plus racers through the course and the speed factor is high. It’s an event most parents try to prevent their children from entering. When I ran this year’s slalom, I was gripped. Going faster than antic-ipated, I rounded the fifth turn and encountered a few pieces of debris on course, including a teenaged sapling. A quick ollie over the detritus revealed its source: 25 drunk men throwing snowballs, beer cans—and sticks. I’m talking full-on trees laid across the width of the course and 066 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 15.2: Page 66
