Its an annual tradition 3 years running- warm weather, slushy park features, awesome sunsets, and good times in Sun Valley, ID. Gathering our crew in Sun Valley usually signals the end of a long winter and the beginning of Spring, and in Chris Logan, Parker White, Tim McChesney, Adam Delorme, Spencer Milbocker, Niklas Eriksson, Sig Tveit, and uber-rookie Torin Yater-Wallace came well prepared with extra sunscreen. By the time we rolled into town, mid-summer temps (mid 80′s, what?!?!), a lot of rain, and what had amounted to below-average snowfall totals over the rest of the season left us scaling back our monster-sized park feature plans and getting creative with what little snow was left. Challenging conditions? Yes, but not something that couldn’t be worked around…

For a few days prior to our arrival the Snow Park Tech crew farmed what seemed like all that remained from a season’s worth of park features into a single two-feature line, which eventually became a single strip of snow on an otherwise grassy Dollar Mountain.

After a few revisions the top feature turned into a classic 110-ft stepover, reminiscent of old-school summertime Mt Hood jumps that we grew up watching in our favorite shred flicks- clean, simple, trickable, and big.

Pulling inspiration from Danny Way’s megaramp rainbow rail, also of yesteryear, Brian Callahan and the SPT crew put together one of the most impressive park jibs we’ve ever seen- A rainbow box on a spine nearly 24-ft off the ground with zaugged walls, trannys, and landings on the left, right, and center, which provided nearly infinite options, even for those that didn’t want to take it straight over the top.

With the snow on Dollar melting fast we moved the operation to the top of Bald Mountain to set up our last feature, pulling inspiration from a stepup-gap-stepdown feature that’s appeared in several Crankworx mountain bike events over the past few summers. The construction of this gap to butterpad to whale-tail box suspended on logs over 12 feet up was no small undertaking- more then a few angles had to match up, the logs needed to be perfectly leveled and positioned, and the inrun and outrun dialed in just so.

A few rain-filled down days kept us honing our bowling skills and hedging our bets racing rubber ducks in the overflow streams that run through the Sun Valley Lodge condo complex, while the park crew rallied to keep our features from washing away…

When the clouds cleared on the second to last day the heli was called in, and things once again came together as well as we could have hoped for. Futurespin-free sessions ensued, tricks were stomped, and shots were logged.

Much thanks to Brian Callahan, Mike Fitzpatrick, and the entire Sun Valley and Snow Park Tech crews for hosting another amazing shoot!

It’s BACK! New and improved, the long-awaited followup to the original Mile Hi Hood has a re-designed fit, finish, detailing, and new colors and sizes! Simple clean design that goes all day, on and off the hill.

Custom cut-and-sew construction allowed us to dial in the sizing adding a little extra length and slim up the width- these are a taller fit then your average hoodie! We also added some extra embroidery detailing, custom tagging, and flat hood-cinch lacing. Super soft 9.5oz 80/20 cotton/poly blend holds shape and stays soft!

Available exclusively in the Level 1 store- Order up!

Brand spankin’ new flavor! The Block Stencil T was just done up by our friends at Tall T in 4 fresh colorways. In stock and shipping! Available exclusively in the Level 1 store!

Alright- we know what you’re saying- how the #@%$ did someone who wasn’t even a finalist walk away with the win? Well, first off, Lucas should have been a finalist, but somewhere during the process of selecting a dozen of the top vids from nearly 100 entries some signals got crossed and Lucas got the short end of the stick. Once his vid went live, it was pretty much the unanimous top choice of all the athletes in our crew, and with this year’s contest being such a tough one to judge we offered up our input and handed this one over to our riders to make the final call.

There’s no doubt that this year’s field was the most talented to date and any one of the Finalists could have easily walked away with the win- Dom Laporte arguably has the most impressive urban shots this contest has seen; Mikkel Jøraandstad has the deepest bag of tricks and some of the smoothest jumping style out there; Torvinen, Boville, and Doan crush everything with super unique style, and Emile Bergeron and Alex Beaulieu are well on their way to becoming the next big QC exports; and we could go on…

“You could put together a crew from this year’s entries and probably make a movie that rivals any pro flick out there- the level of talent was insane,” said Level 1′s Josh Berman. “A few years ago we’d be able to narrow the field down to the top 2 or 3 entries, but these days its almost impossible to say that one Finalist is more deserving than the others. Every one of them will undoubtedly be destroying edits and vid segments over the next few years, landing on top of podiums, and otherwise making names for themselves on a global scale.”

Last year’s Superunknown XIII winner Sig Tveit had this to say: “Honestly my pick out of all of them would be Lucas Stål-Madison. In my opinion I think he is the rider who would have the most to give Level 1. He definitely offers some creativity and different flavor that has been unseen for the Level 1 viewers, and viewers of any other production company in that matter.”

Parker White: “Lucas has completely his own style and seems like a hilarious kid, he’s really got something unique going on with his skiing. My Vote is Lucas.”

Phil Casabon: “It’s hard (to pick a winner since the) talent pool is so deep. My favorite is not a finalist but I think has most flavor and uniqueness out of all- Lucas Stål-Madison.”

Ahmet Dadali: “I thought he was ill man- from the moment I saw it I said there’s something different with this guy that keeps my eyes on the computer screen. So many entries were ill, but Lucas brought his own style into the mix.”

Mike Hornbeck: “LSM’s Superunknown entry was a video that I re-watched a couple times and it still left me wanting to see more. His style, edge control, and his tricks are all so dialed, and you can really tell he knows what he is doing because there isn’t any pizza in his video.”

Lucas had the following words and pix to offer:

“When Berman told me I won superunknown , I lol’d. I did’nt even make finals how could I win? But then he said the whole crew where really stoked about the video and I was like, wait he’s serious. HE IS FUCKING SERIOUS GAAAAAAHHHH

I was so damn suprised and so damn happy, that my hand started shaking like crazy. So all the words that I was gonna write back to Berman got all messed up and his first impression of me was probably pretty wierd, haha. At first I wasn’t even sure I was gonna enter the contest or not, since I didn’t have any big tricks in it. But decided that I’d put together an edit of shots that I think is ill and we’ll see what happens. And boy, am I glad I did!

Can’t wait to go out next season and put all my energy to try get something that stands out!

I wanna give a shout out to all enteries this year, especially kids like Austin and Dominic and everyone else killing it this year! Also shout out to all my friends who believed in me and pushed me to keep doing my own thing.

Peace!”

A highlight reel of the biggest, best, most tech, creative, and innovative tricks from the Superunknown IX contest. We went back through ALL the entries- Finalists, Honorable Mentions, and the rest, and pulled 19 shots that really stood out.

Whose trick takes the cake?!

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About Superunknown:
The first video talent-search contest is still the biggest and the best, pulling in entries from across the globe- 9 years deep!

Superunknown IX brought in nearly 100 entries from 15 different countries as the hungriest and most talented up-and-comers in the game try to follow in the footsteps of past winners like Tom Wallisch, Corey Vanular, Mike Clarke, Niklas Eriksson, Logan Imlach, and last year’s winner, Sig Tveit.

With a low snow year in the lower 48 of the US we decided to mix things up and head to the north island of Japan to one of the deepest cities we’ve ever visited… Sapporo. Our crew was Alex Bellemare, Mike Hornbeck, and Tom Wallisch joined along with photographer Chris O’Connell and Armada TM Josh Bishop. Here’s a few random images from our adventure. Be sure to check out the fall release of our movie for some more action.

This is a few from our hotel room in downtown Sapporo. Population 2,000,000

One of the many interesting meals on our trip.

“MegaSlide” was the first feature we shot on the trip.

Hitting this double kink ended up getting us all a free ride in the back of the Sapporo PD’s paddy wagon

We got exclusive access to the behind the scenes of the Sapporo fish market.

Hornbeck, Bellemare, and Wallisch were asked to sign this fish calendar at the fish market.

When it snows it pours in Sapporo. We ran into many people with clear umbrellas to combat the snow.

How many cops does it take to figure out what exactly we’re doing? Unfortunately none of them spoke Engrish.

Theres a police paddy wagon cruising somewhere around Sapporo with this Level 1 sticker

Hornbeck enjoying some chicken neck with our guide “Bull”

The man, the myth, the legend… Chris O’Connell cruising around at night shooting some scenics

They’ve got a bit more than beef jerky at the gas station

After a tough day of rails being buried, we stumbled across this feature to pickup the spirits

Bellemare with his new pet

Interesting menu over at McDonalds. I wonder what they think of America?

Are you excited? Because we are! Excited to announce the 13 Superunknown IX Finalists. After the release of our 11 Honorable Mentions last week, we’re shifting gears, presenting you the 13 most impressive videos of this year’s contest. We’ll be dropping two Finalists daily this week (and three on Saturday). Stay tuned!

This year’s contest was probably the toughest yet for our judges, at least as far as making the call on who was chosen as one of the top 12 finalists and 12 honorable mentions. In fact, even after sorting out the top 24 we went back and pulled one last entry from the runners up into the finalists, leaving us with a grand total of 11 Honorable Mentions, and 13 Finalists. We’ll be dropping two Honorable Mentions daily this week (and three on Friday), then taking a break before doing the same thing with our Finalists next week. Stay tuned!

Photos by Tim Lloyd Photography
Words by Josh Berman

It’s no secret that North America stole pretty much all the good wintertime precip from Europe during the winter of 2010-11, and this year they’re getting their revenge by racking up massive snowfall totals in a seemingly endless storm cycle marked only by a few blue-sky days here and there, while the winter in the US and Canada, well, leaves something to be desired.

With the tables turned, Wiley Miller, Parker White, and Chris Logan joined me for a three-week cheese/meat/bread-fueled romp across Europe. For those that recall the Champéry segment in Eye Trip, the resorts of Portes Du Soleil include over 200 lifts spread over 14 valleys, and connecting 5.2 million skiable acres (this is an exaggeration, but who’s counting?), point is, there’s more awesome accessible terrain then you can ski in a season, or two, or a lifetime for that matter, so we made arrangements for a return trip, posting up for a few weeks and making another small dent in our hit list.

When we arrived Europe was in the midst of a bitter cold spell- (you’ll probably remember seeing some of these pix in worldwide news coverage- that’s Lake Geneva, which was about 10 degrees warmer then where we were up at higher elevation) bringing outdoor life in many places to a grinding halt, and shutting down chairlifts across France and Switzerland when the diesel engines powering them refused to deal with the cold. We saw at least one lift evacuation during the first few days of our stay- looked like a few people were stuck up there for a few hours in -30 degree temps (and that was without wind chill!). While we suffered the cold it did make for some awesome snow conditions, and though we arrived 4 days into a 10-day dry spell there was still untracked and COLD pow to be found until we got that much-needed reset.

A unique climatological phenomenon across much of the Alps this year left massive tears in the snowpack at the base of most slopes- heavy early season snowfall on the still-unfrozen ground caused the accumulating snow to simply pull away from the steeper sections, rendering a lot of the go-to lines unskiable, or unsafe by our standards. So while we were shut down in some venues, we quickly adapted by stacking up cheese wedges of every shape and size, making use of Champéry’s rolling terrain and north-facing landing zones in an area affectionately dubbed “Trannyland” by CLo- not to be confused with the red light district bar/club.

After two solid weeks of fondue parties and tranny hunting (again, not to be confused with…) we packed up and hit the tracks for a change of venue, hoping to take advantage of the record snowfall that most of Austria has been reporting since the beginning of January.

Original plans to head over to Bad Gastein were foiled when we were informed the night before our departure from Champéry that lodging had never been booked, and because of the Holiday scheduled all across Europe we were pretty much SOL. Absolut Park/Flachauwinkl to the rescue.

Now the train system in Europe is pretty slick and gets you just about everywhere you want to go without too much of a hassle, unless of course you combine an all night binge-drinking marathon at La Crevasse with a continent-wide party (Carnival), an ill-fated itinerary with 90-second connections in some of Europe’s largest rail stations, and really poor advice doled out by the conductor on the first train of what should have been a 12-hour travel day. Wiley tells it like it is HERE- well worth the read.

8 trains, 4 missed connections, 2 buses, at least 10 different itineraries, a visit to the country of Lichtenstein, a 2-hour taxi ride, 1 van breakdown, and 21 hours later we finally arrived at our accommodations halfway up the mountain and less then 20 feet away from a highspeed lift. Fortuitous timing with the weather in Austria brought us in right on the heels of a 3-foot storm, setting us up nicely for our last few days before crossing the pond back to the US of A.

A huge thanks to Marion Drouet and Ben Walker for taking care of us in Champéry, and Nico Zacek at Downdays, Seppi Harml and Bernd Egger at Absolut Park for hooking it up in Flachauwinkl!

Took a while to get these dialed in, but the final version of our Jiberish collab track jacket finally showed- lookin’ fresh! Inspired by our first Jiberish collab piece ever, the latest in our collab series is ready probably our favorite yet! Lightweight, with a silky smooth satin lining, and Level 1 and Jiberish applique and styling- this one is not gonna last long.

Available in 3 colorways, sizes Medium through 4XL.

Available exclusively in the Level 1 online store. Check it!