Weather check with Marco and the Pirates crew

Macro in Washington

After our previous blog from Salt Lake City, Fichtl and I headed up to Seattle in search of the pow we had been hearing so much about from the other side of the pond. Unfortunately while we were in SLC it had rained to the top of Mt Baker and the surrounding resorts...But we were hopeful and motivated so we hung out at Sickle's ( team manager of ride snowboards) place in Seattle a few days to see if it was gonna snow.

It didn't... It was Bluebird for 10 days... Not a single cloud in the sky and on top of all this is was on average -10 Celsius the whole time. And seeing as it had rained just before we got there everything was SOLID ice! We couldn't even do a jib it was that icy! We had a day up at Snoqualime of scrapie sketchiness and 360 carves, fun times!

Shot on the ContourHD Camera by VholdR

So finally the forecast said we were due some snow up in Baker so we gave Pat McCarthy a call and he told us to head on up! Pat put us up in his cabin at glacier, was so nice, beautiful warm fire place and plenty of food to do us a while. The first day we went shredding at Baker there was about 10cm of fresh on literally blue ice! The next day it didnt snow more but somehow the ice didn't seem as bad as we'd had it so far and that night was forecasted more snow so finally things we're looking up!

But no... It wasn't to be... It rained to the top again.... woooo...not!

Up until now we hadn't called upon a filmer or photographer for the simple reason that you could not shoot a single worthy thing... but our luck was about to change! After getting back to the cabin all sad and soaked to the bone by the rain, Pat started phoning around see what the situation was elsewhere and strangely enough Stevens Pass stayed cold and it kept on dumping! Normally in the north-west Baker is the place that gets more snow than anybody else. So like grease lightning we packed up our shit and headed out. Scotty Witsil hooked us all up with a place to stay and seeing that we were surrounded by almost 2 foot of fresh we called Eric Brant to come film the silly things us dudes do on our thin tech planks of wood.

We had 3 sick days shredding pow and getting shots, It was hard work being that it was the first trip of the season and our hiking legs in waist deep pow had a hard time keeping up with our motivation levels. On the last day there was a jib contest and after our day in the backcountry we decided to have a few beers. Scotty however decided he was gonna not enter but shred the contest a little, unfortunately after doing a cripler 7 over the wallride he landed straight legged and hurt his knee which was a real bummer after the 3 previous sick days we had. Hope you get well soon buddy!

Then it was time to return the car and head home and start planing the next trip!

Big thanks to Pat, Scotty, Sickles, Eric and Cass for letting us crash on our travels, Jordan Ingmire, Shafer and Scott for coming to shoot with us and also to Bataleon US for hooking us up with the car!

TC, Fichtl.
Story from Pirates site