Washington part 3!
You'd never expect to be excited after 4 hours of sleep and a long day in the backcountry, but as the alarm rang 5:40am...I picked myself off the floor and got ready for the next adventure. We hustled to load the truck and get all our slightly damp clothes on. 6:30am we were officially on the road and as the sun began to rise, we new it was going to be a good day. After a quick stop at shafers to grab Tim Carlson and Kurt Jensen...we headed to the spot, just a bit east of Stevens pass and unloaded the sleds to get ready for what I would soon find to be one of the longest days snowmobiling ever.
After our mellow 10 mile sled ride in through some hectic trails we arrived in a meadow with perfect north facing shelves all around. The next step was to agree upon a place to set up camp and where to start the riding. With yesterday being a day of mini golf little lines, we knew we wanted to build something and try to catch some air. We found what looked like a decent spot to build a jump, and headed up to take a closer look. The original jump spot didn't work out, but as we were looking around we found a nice spot for a step down jump.
After around an hour of building Nick, Kurt, Forrest and I put the finishing touches on the jump and got the cameras in place. Nick hit the jump first and put down a perfect frontside 3 first try, we all sent the jump a few times, and each put down at least one stomped trick, including myself getting a decent front side 360 as some cool snow glistened in the sun.
As we were finishing hitting the jump the rest of the crew rolled around and found some other spots, with Kurt hitting a pretty sweet gap to pillow and Forrest heading up the hill to hit a good sized cliff. Now not sure if you know this or not but with most things along with accessibility comes some issues, especially in the case of snowmobiles. See as awesome as snowmobiles are, there are also a lot of work and tend to get stuff pretty easy. You pretty much have to figure you will get stuck atleast a few times every day you break trails. And with that said Andy Stern went on a little snowmobile mission as the crew built the jump. What we didn't realize is that he got stuck, and was trying to dig out his sled for most of the time we were building the jump. So unfortunately for Andy with the combo of being a bit under the weather and working to get his sled out for awhile he wasn't to in for sending a jump. With that said Andy did manage to muster the energy to send a little spine and atleast stomp something for the day.
As the hours and light went down, Andy and I sat at the base camp trying to figure out what was going on. We had sat there for about a half an hour with no word from the rest of crew, we had made a fire, chatted for awhile and were starting to get nervous as to what happened with the crew...
As the light was beginning to set Andy decided against his better judgement to go sled up to where he thought the rest of the crew was, a few minutes he returned, with the pack not to far behind. We came to find out that forest's sled had broken down and we now had to tow it back out. Mind you that it was a legit 10miles plus ride in, with plenty of sketchy spots, this was going to be no easy task. After what felt like eternity we arrive back at the trucks at 10pm to finish up our mellow 14 hour day in the back county. Now to drive back to Bellingham and get ready for the next adventure
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