Older Stock

Tina gave me an external hard drive for my birthday at the beginning of this month. I was in the process of moving photo files onto it and came across these two shots of Mike and Jerry playing around on some dirt jumps outside of Park City last summer.

Littering And....

No, not smoking the reefer. Super Troopers is a damn good movie, though.

If you've ever been to Las Vegas, I'm sure you'll agree that place is the litterbox of the US. It's probably the filthiest city I've ever been to. Even driving into Nevada, as soon as you cross over the border from UT into NV, the pavement turns to crap and you begin seeing garbage scattered about the sides of the road and tangled in the weeds in the median. How is it that people still think it's ok to toss waste out the windows of their vehicles?

The other day I was heading up I-80 to Park City. I checked my rear view mirror and noticed a kind fellow riding my ass, in his Audi Allroad. My standard reaction in this instance is to begin coasting, generally slowing down once I take my foot off the gas pedal. Usually, this frustrates the tailgater, prompting them to swerve into another lane, slam on the gas pedal (decreasing their MPGs, ooooh checkmate suckerz...) and leave me in their dust.

Now, even though I shouldn't, I give them the obligatory stare as they pass me and I'll typically just smile or wave, hoping to see them pulled over at some point on the side of the road. However, in this particular instance, while the driver was laying on the horn his ugly girlfriend decided to toss her beverage from McDoo out the window as they passed me - spraying backwash and ammo-dumping ice cubes onto the pavement at breakneck speed. Please also note that I was going 75mph in a 65mph zone; so these goodies were probably going 80mph or faster when they passed me displaying their utmost class. No, I didn't write down their plate number. No, I didn't tail gate them back. But I made sure to pick up the next piece of trash I saw later on that day and toss it out. I'm such a boyscout.

The point of this blurb is to say thanks to my Mom for instilling in me the fact that littering gets us nowhere. I remember riding home after Mom took me through the drive-thru at, ironically, McDoo's, when I was a wee sprout (probably four or five years old). I had finished my drink and went to toss the cup out the car window. Mom caught me in the middle of this terrible act I was about to commit just before I was able to release my excited hands - dropping the cup on the ground as we drove down the road. She told me I better not drop that cup or I'd be in for it when I got home. Instead, Mom let me know that I could instead throw the cup into the street from our driveway. A great compromise.

I sat patiently for the rest of the car-ride home. I was prepping myself, getting ready to throw this cup as far as I possibly could from the edge of the driveway. As soon as we pulled into the driveway and the car was stopped, I jumped out of the car, sprinted to the end of the driveway (probably 10 feet), spiked the cup on the ground like my child-hood hero, John Elway, and stomped it flat like a pancake. I proceeded to peel the cup off the pavement, grinning at my destruction, and hail-married that thing into the center of the neighborhood road.

The crushed cup sat in the middle of the road while I stared at it from the end of my parent's driveway. It wasn't transforming into something magical, it wasn't changing colors, it wasn't getting up and walking away on it's own. It just sat there. I became severely bummed. In the experience I had gained in my four or five years of life, I thought littering was the cool thing to do. Mom was smart - inadvertently teaching me a lesson without me knowing. Shortly after realizing the cut wasn't going to do any good in the street, I went a picked it up and tossed it in the garbage.

That's me; the litterbug.

Thanks, Mom.

Who Dat Soulja Boy...

Shut up. What a stupid song. I just randomly found out that my old car turned over 100,000 miles on it's spedomoter. I'll have to live vicariously through my younger brother, Brian, who was most likely driving the car when it rolled over the 100K mark.


I bought this car when I was 19. It was right after my freshman year of college and I thought I was going to be transferring to a school back east. Little did I know that I'd be heading back out to Utah to finish school six months later, with a two-wheel drive car. Great. I've since wised up. My madre now has this little gem and I'm proud to say it serves her well as her daily grocery-getter. Besides, my mom looks way hotter in this car than she did in her old Explorer. Yes, my mom is hot and no you cannot hit on her. She's happily married.

But damn do I miss driving this thing....


Yes, "randomly" there was a car somewhat identical parked right behind mine when this picture was taken many years ago....

Land-Locked Seagulls

From birth until the age of 11, I lived just outside of Denver, Colorado. Probably the single-most confusing thing about my childhood was the fact that there were seagulls in Colorado. I knew this to be strange due to my infrequent trips to the Jersey shore whilst back east visiting relatives - seagulls belonged at the beach, not at 5280 feet above sea level; no, that's just not right.

However, here I've been in Salt Lake City, Utah since I was 18 and these silly birds are here too. I don't get it. They're clearly not here for the skiing. Following are some botched attempts at capturing these displaced water-fowl:






*Ed. Note 5/6/08: Great - so Utah's state bird is the seagull. This just keeps getting better and better. Thanks for this tip goes to one of my faithful blog readers.

**Ed. Note 5/7/08: Again, this post has stirred up more than I could have really hoped for. Apparently these birds worked "miracles" back in the mid-1850s. Check out wikipedia's facts HERE.

Ah Ski Ski Ski

Here's a picture of me summing up the 2006-2007 ski season:
Photo: T. Felton
That's right. This season was all-things not great in terms of snow.

Now, here's a picture of me summing up the 2007-2008 ski season:
Photo: T. Stark.
Can you tell the difference? That's right. So, this winter's been good. And when I say, good, I mean it in the sense that I don't care if I'm using proper grammer or not (good vs. well...yeah, whatever). Just look at that picture - I'm so happy that I could be peeing my pants and you wouldn't even know it because it's literally been balls-deep all season long.

Maybe this year just seems so much better than last year because it hardly snowed at all last year. No. That's not it. It's the fact that nearly every Friday Ullr has turned on the storm spigot and lets the flakes fall all-weekend-long. This past weekend, especially...some of the dryest snow I've skied in my life. I'm going to shut up now.

The Love Affair

I first became acquainted with Brighton ski resort in 1992. Our family took a ski vacation out to Utah during spring break that year. Early one morning on our way to Big Cottonwood Canyon I saw a road sign for the University of Utah - I told my parents I was going to come to college out here. "Sure, Joe..." they said, I was 9 years old.

In 2001 I packed up and moved out to Utah for, ahem, college....and the skiing. Little did I know that I would reacquaint myself with Brighton that winter. Though not having not seen her for a little over 9 years, I wasn't surprised that we hit it off almost immediately. It felt great to be cradled by her back bowls, deep snow and laid-back crowd.

There's no way that back in 2001 I could have told anybody I would still be skiing at Brighton today; 7 years and nearly 550 ski days later, we still get along as well as the day we first met. Sometimes my affair with Brighton reminds me of Greg Noll, a big wave surfer featured in the movie Riding Giants, who moved to Hawaii after high school and fell in love with the huge waves crashing along the breaks at Waimea Bay. Sure, a bit of a stretch, water vs. snow, beaches vs. mountains, Hawaii vs. Utah, but whatever.

Brighton is good.

ph: Evan L.

Yeah, "I used to skate"

So many people make this claim if and when skateboarding is brought up in conversation. But how many people can truthfully say this and, at the same time, actually mean it?

This past weekend I found myself flipping through a skate mag while I was waiting for a window to be fixed on my car. It was probably one of the best things that I have done for myself in a long time (read the mag). Silly - you ask? Not so. I spent the better part of my adolesence with a skateboard under my feet. Outside of my playing lacrosse in high school, skating was what I did with all my friends at that time. We skated every day after school, all weekend long and even talked, somehow, our parents into shuttling us up to Philly, from Delaware, to skate the FDR skatepark under I-95 a handful of times each summer.

Back to the mag - I wish I knew then what I know now. It really hit me, reading the articles and appreciating the pictures, how anti-establishment skating really is. Between the ages of 13-17 I never really took in, evaluated or understood much of what skating meant as a whole. Rather, I knew what it meant to my friends and I and that's all there was to it.

We all grewup in middle-class families that lived in the suburbs. We didn't know squat about anti-establishment and didn't give a damn about anything outside of our own neighborhood. But now, looking back, after finishing college and being thrust out into the 'real world', I can only wonder how and who I would be now if I was truly anti-this and anti-that at a younger, more impressionable age.

This is my buddy, Matt, circa 2000.


Cheers to the youth. I know I'd give anything to be a kid again.

November is Many Things

Hello everyone. Joe here. November is many things. The first thing that happens in November for me is my birthday. I turned 25 on Friday, November 2. I've made it. I'm half-way to 50 and only need to work another 45 years before I can retire. Actually, I'll probably never retire.

Being 25 has given me mixed feelings about growing up. I feel like there were so many things I missed out on while growing up and while in college. Those that know what I'm talking about, well, you just know - and those that don't, don't worry about it.....'cause I'm over it.

I've started paying my own car insurance (I know...a little late jumping on this train; thanks Mom and Dad for helping out way longer than you should have). I've also started paying more attention to the world around me and am starting to become more aware of how my actions today could affect how I may be living in the future. Before this turns into a rant on carbon footprints and whether or not global warming is blah blah, so on and so forth, just know that I've started to open my eyes a little more regarding the decisions I make about how I live. Ok, when you boil it down I just try to keep the lights off at home except in the room I'm in. The bottom line, I have a ways to go in becoming globally conscious, but it's a start.

November also brings colder weather. And colder weather in Utah usually means snow. Last year this wasn't the case, as our winter was, well, what winter...? We're due for a good amount of snow this year. I can feel it. The winter crew is assembling and we're all starting to get excited for the season ahead of us.

Until next time....