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19th January 2012

After my trip to Sweden , a week in Revelstoke, Canada. A sweaty plane trip from Ume to Kelowna and my old buddy Jethro picks me up in our friend Si Reeves car, who has been in Revelstoke long enough that Canadians call him a local. My body is complaining that it has only just got used to the European time zone and now Ive dragged it back another nine hours, almost the opposite side of the world again. But I cant complain; Im almost in Revelstoke the place of legendarily large snow falls, with a great crew of friends and a flash hotel provided by the Freeride World Tour! Still the stoke isnt quite enough to keep me awake for the three hour drive there from the airport and I doze off in the passenger seat just after an audacious offer to Jethro that I could drive a part of way. Theyre not big fans of road reflectors in Canada, the only shiny thing Ive seen since we left the airport was a sign to advise motorists of moose.

BOOM! I jerk awake and start yelling; Moose, moose, we hit a goddam moose!, the windscreen has cracks all through it, it looks like its barely holding on, and the blood/moose bits have obscured our vision for all except the lowest section of windscreen. Jethro hits the brakes pretty hard and Im scared were going to skid into oncoming traffic, but he brings it to a breathless stop on the side of the road as safely as you can with that much red stuff covering your vision. But then I look closer and the red stuff isnt blood, its the bonnet. The red bonnet has come open and hit the windscreen. Fail. Sorry Si.

I share my hotel room with my old buddy Sam Smoothy, and we choose the same line for day 1 of the competition too.

My Old mate - Sam Smoothy

I land in a bomb hole and fall off the next cliff of the planned double drop. That fact that it was probably the forerunners bomb hole irks me somewhat, but then Sam proves it was still do-able by sticking it after me... I shouldve just gone faster. Heartbreakingly though he crashes in the runout and were both out of the competition. It doesnt help us feel any better that Kye Petersen skis the same line, sticks it and sits first after day 1.

Dropping the Double

Crashing the Double

 Watching finals instead of skiing in them is always a bummer but it was a great show, with kiwi CJ Wright sending a double and taking the bottom air 30m/100ft plus! But crashing :( Check out the highlights vid on www.freerideworldtour.com. Kye Petersen (aka the All I Can guy) won overall but there wasnt a lot of success for the kiwis here, Si Reeves crashing on the qualifiers day and Janina Kuzma unlucky not to qualify for the finals either.

Si 'Zven' Reeves has a fan club

The man himself Zven Reeves

We make the most of the days we have remaining to us to explore Revelstoke, with the help of kiwis Mickey Ross, CJ Wright and Nat Von Loy. Unfortunately Si Reeves hurt his shoulder in his fall on qualifying day so he couldnt come and show us how to play in his home terrain. Thanks so much to him and the kiwi crew for hooking us up though- couch space when needed, photos (Mickey Ross), gnarly spots (CJ Wright) and most of all a warm welcome. Everyone is Revelstoke is super friendly too, even helping me get the 4:30am bus to the airport at a time when I needed help because I had come straight from the afterparty.

Myself and Sam putting on a smile after a bad day at the office

Anyway here is a vid of our time there. Im in the black jacket and white pants, Sam the other way around. The last two shots are both me (all the helmet cam is- Sam feels like a robot wearing one), I just had to get a different set of skis and poles after that crash. Enjoy.

Now i'm back on the road again and have just arrived in Austria and will be here for 4 days for a team shoot with Fischer, stoked! Then back to Chamonix for the next FWT competition. I feel that I might be riding my luck too hard though- I booked my flights from Geneva to Salzburg last night and got them cheap (theyre both small airports), got the last seat on the early airport shuttle through a friend of a friend, and then text messaged my team manager when I got here which happened to be when she was driving past the airport- so she picked me up dropped me where I needed to go. How long can this last? Its been happening for years. Thanks to all of you who help me make that luck, read my blogs to the end and are the wonderful people that I feel I am constantly surrounded by, I love you all. As an odd end note while I was waiting for dinner tonight I picked up an Austrian magazine, of course I couldnt read it but it had a double page spread article with a picture of each of Barak Ombama, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden and Hitler. Ive never wanted to be able to read German so badly, Id love to know how they linked those characters together.