5th Annual Kootenay Coldsmoke Powderfest
I've been lucky enough to attend every single Coldsmoke festival that's ever been held, and it's been cool to watch the festival grow and morph into what it's become today. We've uploaded a bunch of photos of the festival to our Flickr site, and you can find them all in the Coldsmoke 2011 set. Special thanks to ARC'TERYX, Mountain Gear and Whitewater for putting on such a stellar event. Laura, Phil and Anne you've again put together and awesome event that is running way smoother than it used to! Every year I get super stoked for the festival, since it brings a bunch of great energy focussed on skiing and mountain culture to Nelson, BC my home. A brief summary of the festival below with some highlights for G3 and thanks below. If you haven't been to the festival, check out the video here and here to get a sense of it.
Thursday night, we kicked off the festival with the first official event being the G3 Ski Graphiks opening that we were lucky enough to have Touchstones Gallery host it and Whitewater cater and help coordinate it. The coolest coincidence was that there was a glacial exhibit on at the time. We displayed our favorite ski graphiks submissions from the contest as well as the winners of the 4 competitions we've held this year.
Friday night the coldsmoke film night opener at the Capitol Theatre was great, the boys from KMC magazine put together a great show, and I could really feel the momentum of the festival building. Thanks to Pete Moynes for doing a great job hosting and for having bigger hair than me (see below for proof). Great submissions with some highlights for me being Eric Hjorleifson's headcam footage, cross country snowboarding (watch out for skootchleg), and of course true north from Steve Ogle and Kari Medig.
One challenge for the festival wasdefinitely the frigid temps (-20C and lower) on Friday and Saturday, but it didn't prevent the ROAM randonee race from being held. Twenty eight brave souls showed up and finished the race (results here, thanks backcountry skiing canada), and I can say that of all the times I've done this race it was the hardest due to the temperature and the windslab on west ymir. 80% of people in the open course wiped out during the descent, and I'm sure laughter was the only thing keeping Randy Lall and Graeme Marshall warm up there. Thanks to ROAM, Nelson SAR, LV roger's Atlas program, Backcountry Skiing Canada, and everyone else who contributed to making the race such a smoothly run event. Later that day was the Valhalla Pure Powderkeg Slopestyle which from the photos looked like an awesome event! I missed it, but am sure it was a sight to behold.
Saturday night was a blast with the legendary Buff-eh dinner, and the new for this year multimedia face-off. Selkirk College's resort and hotel management program cooked up an amazing meal which was themed "mountains of the world," I'm sure it's the best Dal Bhat I've ever eaten outside of Nepal. Mitchell Scott as always put on a great show and surprisingly showed a bit of restraint, but thankfully still diverged from the script and dived into interesting subjects like "cheetah balls." Nicolas Teichrob won the multimedia showdown by not only supplying amazing content, but by also applying wild effects and trickery to it, his show and the others were a real treat to watch. Thanks to the nelson brewing company for such good beer! Another highlight for me was Wren McElroy's dress that she had tailored out of skin material, it only took 8 gin and tonics but by the end she was wearing it with pride (sorry for the crappy iphone shot, no offense Mitch).
Sunday had the final two comps the SCARPA poker run and the Gerick's Banked Slalom which were the two event's left to determine who would be the King and Queen of the coldsmoke. As usual, the poker run had a great turnout with tons of creative and funny costumes. The banked slalom was a great event with a super fun race course I believe Kirk Jensen won the open men's and Genevieve Pomerleau won the open women's event. Ullr also answered the call by starting a mega dump on sunday and not stopping until yesterday...typical, just as the festival is ending the good snow arrives. Scott Jeffery and Dustin Eheleston both defended their titles as the king and queen of the coldsmoke for another year! Awesome job guys!
Special thanks to Phil Best of Best Photos and to ARC'TERYX for photos used from the coldsmoke website, lastly a thanks to Mitchell Scott for his crappy iphone shot of Wren which is better than what i could manage!
