Haines AK, day 3

Wake up this morning and man oh man do my legs hurt. I think I’m some what in shape too. Got a bunch of days on the hill, been swimming laps at the pool a couple of days a week since July and have hardly been boozing up here but what the fuck, I’m a pile of shit this morning. We got two days in so far, 13 runs and I’m work-eyed. Stoked, though on how every things working out. How can things get better?

On the way to the airport we peep a moose foraging in the woods. Pull over and get our “moose” shots for the trip. Check that off the list. Put that in there with all the eagle shots we got too. We’ve seen the Bald Eagle along with three other real rare species of Eagle hardly seen. The Black Eagle, Sea Eagle and the Dwarfed Red Belly Eagle. Combo those with that shot of the dead moose on the side of the road that smells like my ass after a night of saucing and we’ve covered AK animals. Needless to say, we’ve seen some wildlife.

Anyway, we get to mile 33 and our guide Cody rolls over to Brad and me and goes “what ever boys, sell me out. I understand. Have fun with T.B.” We’re like “huh?” But he was stoked when he told us that. Then Sean Dog comes by and says that the wish I had asked him for on day 1 was coming true. Tom Burt was gonna guide our asses today and we were going to have “Porch Mikey” join us as our tail gunner. Basically a tail gunners there when you got a guy like Tom taking you to shit that could have some consequences and Porchy's there for clean up. Meaning he goes last after everyone gets some.

We’re going back out to where the film crews are at so we can keep the bird flying efficiently. On our way out, we get dropped at a line called Hangover Helper. It’s this huge ass face that comes down to this funnel at the bottom. Run 1 and Tom says that were gonna have fun but at the funnel get the fuck out of the way cause all your slough comes thru and you don’t want to get churned out the bottom. The runs retardedly good. Pow in the AM. Lots of it and its not scared to follow us down. We all get thru the funnel fine, that is till Porchy comes down and throws a hesitation before the choke and gets blindsided by his slough. He gets rolled 40 – 50 feet down the hill with all of us laughing at his ass. Al the pilot picks us up and had watched the whole thing go down. He proceeds to heckle Porchy too. Back up for a same but different line for run two and the confidence is kicking in.

That is till we get to the next zone. It’s like the first two days with Cody were High School and College in AK, and now with T.B. its grad school. The whole riding dynamic was completely different now. Everything was about slough management, getting across the bergstroms and tow in landings with the helicopter. For the next 5 runs, all I can say is that my fucking heart was pumping. Hard. Getting into shit where it was top to bottom, working the slough paths, making sure you didn’t cross them and get washed into the abyss.

We had one bad run, where the light went bad and we all struggled. But after that, home boy pointed up to this knife edge, had Al do a fly by and holy shit man, that helicopter was freaking hovering as we got out of it. There was no where to stand, had to lay flat on the ground so the rotors didn’t shred you into pieces, no moving back cause you would fall 4000 feet to the bottom over exposure. It was get out, shut up and lay down over the equipment. Al took off and we were all freaking. But once we got strapped in and got turn two set, things got fine.

We got back to the heliport and Cody comes up to Bowes and says, “You guys are fucking rock stars. You roll in on Friday morning, get half a dozen runs, Saturday pull full blue bird then finish up with Tom Burt. I was listening to the radio and you guys weren’t doing ‘client’ runs. He had you guys in the shit. What ever you do, don’t EVER come back to Haines because you’ll never be able to top these last 3 days. I’m sooooo stoked for you guys.”

And there it was, after 23 years of snowboarding, I finally had a definitive BEST day of my life snowboarding. And it was today.