...He along with many of his friends have been in many ski movies and they were known as being the biggest and most influential skiers in the California ski area more specifically Squaw Valley. Squaw Valley is known as the birth place of the book Squallywood. And this book is mainly about the nuances of every line that you can do there but more importantly and what I want to talk about is the game of GNAR. This is an acronym the stands for “Gaffney’s Numerical Assessment of Raddness”. Robb Gaffney was another very famous extreme skier and the author of this book but the idea of GNAR is mainly credited to McConkey. This game is known for how over the top self-centred it can make people appear but the real purpose of the game was to take the mickey out if you will of people that took the sport of extreme skiing to seriously. For example one thing you can do for bonus points is the Raddness Yell. The idea with this is to get everyone’s attention around you so they know your about to do something awesome or Rad, so just before you go down a crazy line you yell at any random stranger “Hey! Check me out! I’m about to rip the shit out of this”. The idea is to once again really take the pressure out of skiing and make the people around...
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...There’s a myth that those in my world would like to keep alive. That what we do is treacherous, daring and only for the reckless; that only an elite group of us who eat deep fried grommets for breakfast are worthy of taking on such a challenge as this. Certain companies will tell you this is not true. They will say that the experience can be suitable to most abilities and that no guide will take you to death defying terrain, unless of course your sponsor is Red Bull. The first time we stepped into one of those giant machines was in Girdwood, Alaska. We were an absolute wreck the night before. We starred mesmerized at hours of footage from the company’s website, biting our fingernails, hoping that the videos of other people’s experiences would help dull our fears and instill us with super human powers. We were convinced that we would have to huck ourselves from under the whirling blades into the endlessly deep powder below. Warren Miller and Travis Rice have a lot to answer for, as the truth was far less extreme. We leaped from the chopper landing with a muffled thud on the thick landing pad of snow. Our heli guide grabbed our snowboards from the helicopter basket and stopped just short of strapping our boots into the bindings for us. After we heard the last clicks of our straps echo through the mountains and watched the helicopter morph from a massive machine into a tiny dot floating in the sky miles away, we stood alone and abandoned at the top of a snowy ridge, staring down...
Words: 514 - Pages: 3
