ECES 2002
by: Jack Michaud
1/02
The third annual East Coast Expression Session at Stratton Mountain Vermont.... third annual, makes it sound like a real thing doesn't it? Well, that's because it is. With discounted weekday lift tickets, discounted mountain accommodations, an official raffle, video, photo, and web coverage, and roughly 60-75 carvers on the hill per day, the '02 session further established the ECES as a bona fide alpine happening.
The mountain reservations people had the event on the books and extended a nice discount for a room at the Liftline Lodge. The Liftline turned out to be a perfect situation: simple enough not to be crazy expensive (rather dorm-like actually), and a short walk from the lifts and the base village. Park your car and forget it, if you want.
Despite rolling in to the hotel lot with plenty of time to get in some quality Z's before board time, I was too excited to meet everyone and lay down my first real carves of the year to even be tired. When my roomies showed up, we gabbed about carving and snowboarding and the Carving Community and everything else until past midnight.
Trying to sleep was nearly futile. The hugely disappointing start to the season had given me only one day sliding around on a manmade stripe of snow the weekend after Thanksgiving, and a weekend of pretending to have fun on bulletproof ice over the New Year. So the next day would really be day one of my season. I do it every year; I lie in bed and pray that I haven't forgotten how to carve. I was also praying for good conditions. The stoke made the 6:45am wake-up call a welcome one.
Walking through the base village of the Intrawest chain resort, one is all but forced to believe they are strolling through an old high alpine European ski-town, complete with walk-through clock tower, and packed with dozens of boutiques, eateries, pubs, and multiple ski and snowboard shops. The village is obviously designed to make you feel like you've set your watch back a thousand years. It does a good, no, great job at that but the uniform newness of the village reminds you this is an American franchise
In the base lodge, the collective of carvers was assembling, sprawling out over the tables, and leaning long carving decks against the walls. I thought I was all macho walking in with my new 186, but my bubble immediately burst when I saw all the mega-long sticks on hand, including a few 197's, a 205 and a 210!! Meeting up with friends met at last year's session reminded me of returning to youth summer camp, but better now because of the internet that keeps us all in touch.
Unfortunately, my first impression of the Stratton staff was a particular drone who happened to be walking through our corner of the base lodge when he knocked over a couple boards. Had he not done that, he wouldn't have even noticed us. But he did, and rather than politely remind us paying customers of the rules, he decided to brandish all of whatever authority he thought he had, and probably rarely gets to use, and gave us all a good tongue-lashing. "If you don't like it you can go snowboard somewhere else", was his ultimatum. Fine, maybe next year we will, plebe. Thankfully, the ticket salespeople were helpful and gracious.
Out on the hill, we enjoyed surprisingly good carving conditions, given the dismal start to the season. Luckily the skies had opened up with a 14" dump the weekend before, and it was well packed for carving by that Friday morning. The iron-legged folks who had been riding all week rubbed it in that the best conditions were had on Tuesday and Wednesday, but coming off the heartbreaking boilerplate two weeks earlier, I was as fiendishly excited as a 16 year old with a freshly laminated driver's license.
Imagine being able to wave a magic wand and rewrite snowboarding's history books. Imagine that carving and speed were the "cool" and popular parts of the sport, and freestyle was the sideshow. If an alien probe decided to do a study of snowboarding on Earth, and they decided to survey Stratton Mountain from their spaceship during the days of the ECES, that is exactly the conclusion they would draw with our legions of carvers spread out over the entire mountain. Riding up the chairlift, you would see a steady supply of carvers arcing their way down the mountain, making up a significant portion of the on-slope traffic. At the ECES, alpine snowboarding actually looked, dare I say, normal.
But is that what we want? To become mainstream? I don't really think so. I think Bob Russel put it best when he said to me, "the vibe here on the hill with this whole thing... you can just walk up to any carver and strike up a conversation and go take a run... it's just so cool." Indeed, Bob. There once was a day when if you saw any other snowboarder on the hill you could do the same thing. Now that snowboarding is mainstream, our fellow snowboarders have become strangers. So as long as alpine snowboarding is a niche, fringe, cult, whatever, we will always be able to have this camaraderie, and we will always be able to have these events. So long as it takes commitment and patience to become an alpine snowboarder, it will always be safe from turning mainstream.
Lunch and apres-ski took place at Grizzly's, conveniently located on the second floor of the base lodge. Friday, they let us hook up the video camera to display some of the great carving footage captured by the volunteer videographers.
Staying at the Liftline made grabbing a nap, shower, and street clothes easy, in preparation for the nighttime activities. Friday night a good number of us descended upon the Green Door pub, which boasted "Voted best bar in Vermont" on the sign out front. Inside, it's a textbook ski-town hangout, replete with foosball, pool, air-hockey, and even a regulation arm-wrestling table. Vintage snowboards adorn the walls and ceiling, including a Snurfer, Burton Safari, and a Gnu Race Room, among others.
After everyone imbibed a sufficient ration of liquid immaturity, Todd whipped out a stash of BomberOnline stickers, and we set upon the task of tastefully pasting them on, well, whatever we felt like. But when a certain blonde nubile wrapped in tight black polyester/lycra and an eye-popping red sweater made her appearance, the mission became clear. Thus, the first annual "Pin the Sticker on the Best Ass" contest was conceived. (my humble apologies to the women who attended the event - sadly alpine snowboarding is mostly one big sausage party) The manly Ralph "Shred Grummer" stepped forward to make the first attempt, and it would prove to be the last one needed. With a solid, well placed hip-check and a palmed sticker, Shred proudly branded the girl's left buttock. Obviously thinking she had just been humped by a prowling polar bear, the girl turned to see what was going on, but Shred coolly played it off as an accident. When I left the bar a few hours later, the sticker was still in place.
At one point in the evening, Ken Boivin made note of the fact that the only one of us attracting any women was Kenneth, which was a gross injustice because he was also the only guy wearing a kilt. Being married and therefore having nothing to lose, I pulled one of his four groupies aside and asked her why the only one of us scoring any points with her and her friends was our man in the kilt. She answered matter-of-factly, "well obviously it's because he's gay!" After I stopped laughing, I did my best to convince her of the contrary truth, but it was a hard sell.
Saturday, the weekend crowds arrived and conditions got choppy a bit earlier, but there were plenty of hours of quality morning carving to be enjoyed. Stratton handles the crowds with, among other lifts, an 8 person gondola and four, count'em four high-speed detachable 6 person chairlifts. If you've never sat on a 12-foot wide chairlift before, it is some experience. The skies remained overcast and the top of the mountain never came out of hiding, but that had no ill effect on the fun we all had.
Saturday night, we took over the Jamaica town hall for the raffle. Jeff Caron from Catek was on hand to dole out his prizes and sell a limited quantity of Catek bindings at a serious discount, and I filled in for Fin to hand out the Bomber prizes. Fin couldn't make the trip at the last minute, due to the timing of his production of the new Bomber telemark binding. The Cloyes family cleaned up, all three winning prizes, and the lucky winner of the full custom Donek was one of the videographers - a softbooter! That's one good way to convert them! After the raffle and some video screening, many of us headed to the Red Fox Tavern, where the Pin the Sticker on the Best Ass contest continued, this time with Catek stickers. Vlad disqualified himself when he confused the rules (see picture).
Next year, the ECES will no doubt be bigger, even more fun, and not to be missed. The only thing I would change is to have it later in the season, to improve chances for good snow. Were it not for the 14" dump the weekend before the event, carving conditions would have been desperately bleak - and we would have had to spend more money in the bars! So a big thanks goes out to Todd Brown, Alan "Shaggy" Schroder, and Curt "cmc" DeBartolo for organizing the event, and to everyone who made it the great, friendly carving party it was.
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