HUCK ASPEN: Colorado Freeride Series & Championships
“Get up you sissy,” a friend of Kiffor Berg yelled.
Aspen’s Berg had just stumbled after dropping the second part of the winning run Sunday in the Colorado Freeride Series & Championships at Snowmass ski area. Nonetheless, he won and took home $1,000 in one of the last IFSA North American tour stops of the season.
The stormy weekend made for difficult skiing conditions, but the organizers were all about “Gettin’ her done,” said Buck Erickson, Aspen Skiing Co. event coordinator. The first day of competition was cut short when a full-blown squall moved into the upper mountain blowing the signage down and causing whiteout conditions. The women’s ski contest got completed before the organizers had to call it. The men’s ski division was moved to the next day after 6 inches of powder had dumped on the venue, softening the hard pack after weeks without snow. Still dealing with poor visibility, the skiers hucked huge off the Hanging Valley Wall with 30-40-50-foot drops. The 110 competitors were cut to about 50 for the final day’s championships. A few more inches of powder settled on the Big Burn Cliffs on Sunday morning for the final, but the major part of the storm was still expected to roll in. Delay, wait, more fog, delay, meeting, call off? At about 11 a.m. as athletes started losing sensation in their toes waiting at the top of the venue for word, the first athlete skied down, and finally near 3 p.m. Berg – who was first going into the final day – closed out the competition with the winning run.
The line he took, called Triple Jump, is part of the rarely opened Big Burn Cliffs that are piles of rocks and pillows packed and stacked atop each other for more than 100 feet of vertical. Just to get into Triple Jump requires at least a 20-35 foot drop onto a bulls-eye pillow below. Then there are two more falls before emerging from the wall-o-scare. Berg hit the second patch of snow hard, bent his ski – it’s done, he said – and blacked out for a second, but pulled it together for the win.
The men’s third place finisher, Darrell Haggard of Summit County, pushed the limits of the venue with his single drop off the top two rock bands of the Triple. Got it? It was so big and burly that the judges awarded him the sickbird award, which was a chainsaw from presenting sponsor Stihl. Haggard hucked about 60 feet to a pillow of snow below and then dropped another 20-plus feet to move from 13th to 3rd place after the first day of competition.
On the women’s side, Aspen’s Jamie Britt took home $400 nudging last year’s champ Jane Somerville – also from Aspen – by 6-tenths of a point. Britt took a difficult line Friday during the qualifying round, sending it straight off the top of the headwall. The landing zone was less than 10 feet wide in between a rock band. When popping off the top at mach speed, there was no room for error. Two women attempting the same line were taken away on backboards by ski patrol. Britt took a line she was familiar with for the finals at the Big Burn Cliffs: a 10-foot drop onto a platform and then another onto the next bed of boulders. Somerville took her usual Triple Jump line, which has one of the highest line difficulty scores (no other women attempt it). But this time, she was only able to move from fourth to second place.
Men
1. Kiffor Berg
2. Frank Shine
3. Darrell Haggard
4. Charlie Gaylord
5. Tyson Buldoc
Women
1. Jamie Britt
2. Jane Somerville
3. Emily Teague
4. Kate Cardamone
5. Vanessa Pierce