One of my favorite stories involving skateboards and life is when Tony Alva first showed up at Coronado. Apparently, he waddled his dreaded and 40-something ass up to the side of the bowl and said "Daddy's Home". This is maybe 9 years ago before there were killer skateparks on every corner. He proceeded, on his first run, to rip that flow bowl by the water by the bridge right down to it's foundations.
Well, it wasn't my first run at Eldo today. Doing the basic math, I'd say it was about my 11,000th (I did the math - I think this is fairly accurate: 85 days a year for 21 years averaging 6 runs a day) but it really is opening day for the inner wood snipe in me. As related ad nauseum in these digital pages before when Eldo is good - it's grand. And the sticks in the faces nad the rock scrapes and the pungees to the face and all the WIND - did I say wind - really pays off. With the season - or NON-season we are having - or I should say we had been having - my favorite parts of the mountain...what I would refer to as the furry backside, even more accurately the furry butt-cracks of the backside - well they have just been unsafe, and plain gnarly and not do-able. You can't jump off a ten foot rock in tight trees without a certain amount of fluffyness. It doesn't negate the risk - it just reduces it.
So, today, I finally got to what I think I will now call 'steez' rocks, and did launch said rocks. There are lines that I hit today that I haven't ridden in 10 months...so it's such an amazing feeling to come ripping into places, doors open in the mind and you recall (hopefully accurately) that you veer slightly left on the first two pillows, then right through the narrow aspens over the third, and that you need to go straight out on the steez rock, and turn about 30 degrees right to avoid the branches and deadfall at the bottom. Tight trees, woods, unknown and untracked or trammeled places. Sounds like summer. Only, there's no pedaling.....just a steady feed of gravity, silence and bliss. It's puking snow like it means it....it's gonna get deep.
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