August 24, 2005

You can see Nick Halsey on the landing of the step-down jump, and it's bloody huge. We had to sneak out onto the roof of the hotel to get this angle of the photos, and we're far enough away that it's really hard to show the scale of these things. click for larger

So we're up in Whistler, and wanted to get a couple pics of the course online for you. The guys were just finishing up the last touches on the final jump today when we got up, and had a few guys testing out the final step-down jump and the final kickers. Mad Mike from Austin, Texas was the guinnea pig for those two final jumps, and the crowd that had gathered to see what this spectacle is was definitely pretty stoked judging by the sound of it. Later he did a turndown over the jump, and Justin from Twenty Magazine had his camera out and got a pic of it and he's so high in the air that the village barely even shows up in the photo. These pictures are really not even close to doing justice to these things when you stand near them. Everybody that's been by so far to check 'em out are freaking.

Here's another overview of the course. Again, the photos do no justice to the size of this thing, but it takes a few minutes to walk from the bottom of the course to the top if that helps at all. click for larger

As we've been hanging around the course, helicopters have been swooping in pretty close – Red Bull has hooked up helicopter flights from Vancouver to Whistler for their riders and some of the media. The helicopters fly over some of the glaciers on the mountains on the way up, swoop in over the course, and drop the guys off. Kye Forte and his brother Leo flew in with Vancouver's CityTV, so that must have been wild. The helicopter rides up to Whistler were a surprise for the guys that we've known about for a while, and Jeff Z was stoked on his trip in the helicopter. Well, I'm outta here for now, we'll see if we can get some riding pics up for you tomorrow night.