The "Heel Edge Projects" girls competed in the Stash Gathering competition at Northstar. The stash is a park made totally out of wood and it was a fun day with lots of hiking and good results for us British ladies. Lynsey Ashdown came first, I placed in second and Kirsty Taylor completed the podium in third.
That night we celebrated our success as well as Simon Belson's birthday with a huge house party. (There are so many of us from the UK out here right now that we can have banging house parties without even needing to invite anyone else!) Needless to say, it all got pretty messy in the end and I woke up with fake tattoos and bruises all over me??! Apparently I spent about two hours doing gymnastics with Billy Morgan??!
While most of Europe have been pining for snow over the past couple of months, it seems that the skies have recently opened to reveal masses of the white stuff over in the states. Guess it's just as well that Katie Blundell and Rich Jonas have been there to shred it up in true Tignes Spirit style!
The Heel Edge Project gang went on a road trip to Mammoth, Bear and Vegas last week. I decided not to go as I wanted to wait for Rich Jonas to be back riding after his injury, and then go with all the boys instead. (Also, it wasn't a good idea for me to go to Vegas as I would definitely end up getting married to some random by Elvis or something!) So look out for the girls' edits from their road trip and then ours in a couple of weeks after our road trip. Cant wait to go to Bear... it looks AMAZING! So whilst the girls were away, we decided to have a mellow session on a wooden rail next to their hot tub. It was a rad little session and we'll be including the footage in our next "Herringbone Way" edit, which Rowan Biddiscombe is putting together right now!
Then the storm hit……and oh my god I have NEVER seen so much snow\! It was ridiculous! We had around eight to ten feet in four days, which was rad but this meant we were snowed in. Again! Seeing as we've got rubbish cars, we couldn't even get to the hill to enjoy it, so we just hit up some spots closer to home... and our garden gas pipe of course!
We joined up with the Westbeach lot and sessioned an A-Frame to reverse tranny. The amount of snow falling was kinda messing things up but the boys managed to get some cool shots on it. But story of my life…..I struggled for speed so didn't do very well. You had to have gangster legs to stomp things! Our friends from OZ Michelle Samuel and Gavin Sell have now arrived too. We met them in Perisher this summer and are stoked that they are here in Tahoe. They're loving the powder so hoping to get some pow turns in with them this week.
The next day we built a kicker off our next door neighbour's balcony. Luckily they were away somewhere else as I don't think they would have been too stoked about it! It was a pretty big drop and quite hard to land and ride out in the pow. I think it would make an ace photo but we need to wait for them to go away again now! Then there was another house party, and this time it was at the girls' house. This even topped the last one for messiness. What happened at this house party…..should stay at this house party!!! I will reveal no more!
To finish off this week, Rich and I went with the Westbeach boys to Reno and had the sickest street session EVER. We went to a school and honestly it was like hand rail heaven! At least three down rails and three down-flat-downs all within 200m of each other. One of the girls from The Peep Show had been there hitting the rails the previous day so I was really stoked to be sessioning the same spot! We started off with a down rail with a drop in. I was struggling with speed so did a lot of fire crackers down the stairs. We moved onto another down rail and doubled up two 10ft bungees which gave us heaps of speed and the rail was perfect. Then we went to a down-flat-down, with 24 stairs. This was immense and there was some CRAZY stuff going down………..Watch out for an edit coming soon. The Westbeach guys seriously kill it by the way. Thank you so much for letting me come along and Bruce Lerman for taking pics : )
Click here to check out the first and second installments of Katie's blog, as well as her recent interview.
