VERBIER EXTREMES: Shroder Baker's take on a crazy Euro comp
Friday February 17th. The Bec de Rosses face in Verbier was in better shape than it had been in years on competition day. But it had looked even better a week before. “We had such good pow here this past week,” said Jeremy Jones, last year’s Champ in the snowboard division. “But the north wind came in and scoured it a few days ago. Otherwise it would have been full-on Alaskan style sloughing conditions.”
The contest was pushed ahead a day to ensure bluebird weather for the premiere big-mountain event in the world. It’s hard to grasp how big this comp is without seeing it firsthand; the entire town is turned into a freeride circus, with closed streets chocked full of thousands of fans, enormous tractor-trailer jumbo-tron screens blasting rider segs and past contests’ footage. And up on the Col de Gentianes, where the actual riding takes place, it’s much the same. Helis flying everywhere, placing photographers and cameramen on long-lines in impossibly precarious spots on the face, and even chasing the skiers with a Tyler-mount gyro-camera, broadcast live on another big screen on the col.
Shroder Baker was the only North American in this year’s Extreme, with last-minute pull-outs by Ted Davenport and Ian MacIntosh. Coming off a 3-week trip with TGR throughout Switzerland, he arrived in Verbier Wednesday and got his first look at the Bec. “It’s a huge cheese-grating monster, with sharp jagged rocks all the way down,” Baker said. “It’s pretty much unlike anything I have ever skied before. There doesn’t even look like a clean way down the thing. It’s like 5 North Shores (an infamous Jackson Hole huck zone) stacked on top of each other, but way scarier.”
Shroder settled in at the Verbier Lodge and tried to prepare for the task at hand. “Steve Klassen was the first guy I hooked up with here in Verbier,” he said. “He’s done this event 11 times, and won it 5. He told me that the most important thing in your first comp was to show the judges that you can get down the face safely, and not be a loose cannon. He also told me you have to watch out on the bottom runout, that it eats people up. Well, I found that out the hard way. Manu [Gaidet] had also been here a couple of times, and he helped me out with finding a line. This was his third time in the contest, and the first year he tumbled the whole way down it. So he told me where not to go.”
The strict invitation-only format of the Verbier Extreme loosened slightly this year with the addition of a Rookies Quest contest series, held in Andermatt (Switzerland), Mayrhofen (Austria), and a final in Champery (Switzerland). Two men and one woman (in both ski and snowboard divisions) would join the list of European freeskiing titans to take a shot at the 5,000 Swiss Franc top prize. One of the most interesting parts of this contest is the fact that after the judges award their prizes, the riders gather in the town the following night to watch the runs and judge themselves. Both awards are given equal weight, and prize money. This year, Nissan kicked in for a new pickup truck to be awarded to the overall best rider, decided by the athletes as well.
By 10AM, 18 snowboarders and 16 skiers were on top of the Bec, ready for their start. Veterans like Seb Michaud and local Philippe Meier joined Bec virgins Baker and rookie quest winner Argentine Oscar Sosa. After the forerunners and the snowboarders, Sosa stepped up with bib #1 and skied a clean line right down the middle. Baker was up next with bib #2. At this point, the surreality of it all began to catch up with him.
“That was the most f*&@ed up thing of all,” said Baker. “I’m on top of the gnarliest face I’ve ever skied, just scared the shit out of myself hiking up there, and I’m in the starting gate, and I look down and see some guy in jeans with a camera, and his girlfriend is next to him on this rock in a bikini taking a nap! And the starter asks me where I want to go (for the helicopter) and I say ‘down, I hope!’ It’s unreal up there.”
He chose a relatively clean line down the skiers’ right side of the main central couloir. “The first 200 yards or so of my line was a definite no-fall zone; they say it’s 55-57 degrees. My biggest concern was trying to get down the thing in one piece.” After negotiating the tricky top section, he made a few wide open pow turns on a sunny ramp before re-entering the dogleg couloir. Another technical section at the choke, and Baker could finally see some daylight. He pointed it in the runout, and following Klassen’s prediction, hit a chunk of old avie debris and lost a ski at the bottom. “I exhausted myself so much before I even made a turn. It’s that intimidating.”
Loris Falquet, the younger half of the infamous “Huck and Chuck” team, took a fresh line skier’s left of the dogleg couloir, picking his way through the billygoat zone before throwing a 70-foot crotch-grab at the bottom. A local Valais Swiss, he and his brother Nicolas regularly throw down the biggest airs in Verbier. He would get 4th for his effort.
Bruno Compagnet delivered the scare of the day, hanging up at the top and tumbling out of control through rocks for the upper 100 meters before self-arresting above a sizeable cliff. A ski short, he gathered himself and made the first one-ski descent of the Bec de Rosses, a feat within itself.
Chamoniard Aurélien Ducroz was up next, flashing a smooth run before lining up two huge Lincoln loops at the bottom, the first time anyone had landed a pair of technical tricks in one run like that on skis. He looked to be the crowd favorite for the moment.