This weekend is the Winter Carnival here in Rossland, and it is unboubtedly (is that a word) the most eventful weekend of the winter. Three days and nights packed full of events ranging from lugeing, mountain biking, bobsleding, and easily the best event of the whole weekend "The Game". A rail competition set up on one of the streets in downtown. This year's comp was bigger and better then last year with 7 rails set up down the street and enough speed (barely) to hit them all, the potential for some great skiing was huge.

unfortunately for me I didn't get my shit togeather in time and found myself without rail skis for the day. So I did what any ski bum without skis would do - volunteer for course maintinance to get free beer ALL day. With the course looking pretty good I was pretty sure that I was going to have it easy all day - but with almost every compeition, something was bound to happen. The course layout was two lines of three rails into a qp style stall bar at the bottom. The left line was a small box into a nice rainbow rail to an up-down-up death rail. The right line was a flatbar to a down-flat-down into a flat-down.

When noone wanted to hit the up-down-up they broke out the grinder and turned it into an up-down. ride on, ride off... basicly a useless rail, but with rake and shovel I made it the best shitty rail it could have been... I think two people actually hit the thing (although watching Berry try front flips off the up was entertaining enough to say the rail wasn't a complete waste). The other issue was the rocking down-flat-down... so we just took the now extra scrap metal from the cut up up-down-up rail and wedged it under the feet of the rocking rail to keep it somewhat in place (granted we were quite drunk by this point in the day).

As far as the compeition went, in my opinion, something went very wrong with the judging for the skiers. During the compeition there was a 15-18 catagory and a 19+ catagory. When it came time to give out the awards they condensed the two catagories into one - which is complete bullshit if you ask me.

"Elvis" was pretty much killing it all day with impressive dance manovers over everything (while smoking a pipe or cigg for each run) all day.

Also - Mike Hopkins won in my books with spins on and off rails, solid style and not to mention the hometown card (and the beer he gave to the judges).

But under unknown circumstances neither "Elvis" or Mike were on the podium.

As for the snowboarding side of the competition, I feel as if the judging was very fair and accurate. Karyn took it for the second year in a row for the ladies with her usual solidness of being able to land tricks. For the guys Berry got third with a front flip over the box ontop of skier like switch ups on the flatbar, while Tros was pretty much killing it all day with super smoth tricks over the rainbow and dfd for the win.

Unfortunatly the town decided to have like 5 events running at the same time, so while attending the rail jam, I missed out on watching the mountain bikers and bobsleders... but the free beer kept me happy, so I wasn't too concerned. When the comp was over it was time to... well - keep drinking for me. After chilling out at my friend Pams for a bit, and watching Aspen Extreme we made the move to the streets.

After trying twice to get into the new bar "Nowhere Special" and being shut down both times we made our way to the Miners Hall to sneak in and watch the "Toques". I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to put a very, very pregenent lady on stage and get her to dance around and sing, but I found it slightly disturbing. Luckily Carl was fucked on mush and his dancing on the speakers was more then enough to keep my mind off the stage.

It hasn't snowed very much this month of January. it's been sunny and warm for the past few days and the forcast is calling for more sunny sky's for another week. So I'm running off to Big White for a few days to go ride their snow taco. I will work on getting the video fotage up, but for now you'll have to just use your imagination.

And P.S. Elvis is my new favorite skier - ever.