Sun Valley Spring Fling!
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!
