November Cover Shot
He was twenty-years old, had never left the lower forty-eight and was a dishwasher in Alta living life as an average ski bum before this wild-haired Wyoming native woke up as a world traveling pro-skier. Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, besides gracing this year's Reader Poll for the first time, was presented with the POWDER Video Award for Best Performance by a Male for his role in High Life. The film shows Cattabriga-Alosa teasing 1,000-foot pitches, carving avalanche prone peaks, and hitting vertical lines while still performing precision new-school tricks.
As a kid Cattabriga-Alosa grew up in Grand Targhee, a ski town in Wyoming, where his coach Pete Jenkins said that for Sage, everything revolved around his love of skiing: waxing his skis at night instead of going out, begging his neighbors for rides to the mountain and working extra hours for ski funds. Jenkins describes Sage as "humble and passionate." "At a fairly early age was one of the best and hardest charging skiers on the mountain." Jenkins says "He was like a sponge hungry for skiing. He had a vision and he stuck with it."
In addition to being voted number one in this year's POWDER Reader Poll, Sarah Burke wins the POWDER Video Award for Best Performance by a female. As the only women in the The Poor Boyz Production, Exact Science, Burke raises the bar for women skiers. In the film, Burke is joined by riders, Phil Larose, Thomas Rinfret, Phil Belanger and Iannick B who together, exhibit the progression of freeskiing from the angle of the pros.
After years of competing against men (and winning), Burke was given the chance last season to compete in the first ever Global X-games Superpipe for women where she easily took home the gold. Although Burke is often criticized for only skiing the park, at age 21 she is way ahead of most women - busting cab 3's and 900's in the pipe while other girls are still struggling with 720's. In a few years Burke plans on bringing her jib skis to big mountain terrain, a move that would undoubtedly leave her as the top female skiers of our decade.