The following post is a journey through my year on the USC Ski & Snowboard Team narrated with 100 photos and some explanatory words. For those interested in joining the team for the 2009/2010 season – feel free to scroll through the post and see what your year can be – all while living in LA and earning a top rated education. This post is the second of three that will make up the complete 100 photo reminiscing.

January and February were full of a good combination of really sweet powder days and some fun sunny weekends in the park.  We had 2 SCCSC competitions in January and then the regional competition up at Diamond Peak in Tahoe.  Our 4th SCCSC competition in February was canceled due to excess snow.  For the the MLK competition we had a great turn out, which made for great weekends up on the slopes after the races with everyone riding together.  There was one weekend when Kristen’s dad headed up and met us all in Canyon lodge for some pizza lunch he brought.  We tried to help pay for the BBQ during the Rose-Bowl but he turned that money around with pizzas for us all.  He came out and skied along with us while we played in South Park.

Andy Bui made regular appearances on the slopes on his work breaks – he’d usually run with the Forest Trail crew for a while.  One day he busted out Nelson DeCastro’s grandma outfit and rode around.  A while later he was watching snowboard films online and spotted himself riding with the grandma in one of the clips! Hilarious.

SCCSC ski races are always pretty sweet – we all get out there by 9:30, run our two runs at 10 and are usually done by 11 – this always gets a bunch of fun people up to Mammoth first, and out to the slopes early.  It’s fun to have large crews out on the mountain post races.  The USC Ski & Snowboard team made a bunch of new league friends as well this year, which made for even more good times out on the hill.  Our races were always pretty laid back, so it was good to see new faces out there each weekend trying it out for the first time.  I think we also saw Katherine O’Brien hit up pretty much every race we had – good job!  If you didn’t race this year, you should get out there next year, it’s always a good time.

Of course skiing only takes up the first part of the day, so over half of the Ski & Snowboard Team/Mammoth experience is in the house and interacting with friends off-hill.  We had nightly baking sessions with Katherine, lots of Vons bags constantly being unloaded nightly, and just some good clean fun. When the Aussies were in the house over Christmas break they decked the house not in bells of holly, but in Australian paraphernalia.  Little koalas hung from every light fixture, every single ski in the garage had an Australian flag sticker on the tip, and the Australian flag blanket hung down most prominently in the central part of the house.  Also during this time, team treasurer and now president Chris Nelson, was growing a huge mustache as some sort of bet I think.  After going through the entire Spring rush week on the row being the creepy guy, he kept it strong and displayed it for us up in Mammoth.

After some sun, the snow returned giving us some really great days of powder riding up on chair 22.  We had our new GoPro cameras in hand and brought them out in the snow to test the waterproofing.  By now we were skiing down the road from the house to the village gondola daily, and skiing back to the house from Canyon lodge.  Up in the powder it’s always an endless search for sweet cliff drops.  With big snow falls the good areas are changing all the time – more snow covers up some, but makes some other ones now doable.  There are always good ones on the face of 22, in the woods in South Park, and off on 9.  We had our side yard rail set up for anyone to practice some rail action as well.

Again, the sun came out intime for another weekend of fun and races at the beginning of February.  USC was doing great representing our school and getting a lot of good participation.  Alex Clarey, being the team’s Monster Energy representative, would do his job by providing all the athletes with plentiful amounts of energy pre and post races.  Sam Kislevitz, former president, was out there being race coach yelling out names and helping us all with tips and encouragement.  After the races we had our huge crew sesh in South Park with the GoPros.  This is the weekend we created the “Epic Weekend” edit.  Everyone was throwing down for the cameras where we’d capture 2 or more viewpoints of every trick.

Powder was back again for a busy weekend.  On Thursday and Friday nights when it’s snowing hard and people have just finished long drives, the last thing they want to do is shovel out an entire parking spot.  The parking gets all haphazard and inefficient.  Tim Thatcher learned this the very hard way on this weekend.  We got a doorbell ring at around 5 in the morning – a police officer was hanging out and just wanted to let us know that a grinder snow plow came through and mutilated one of our cars…great!  Well, lesson learned – insurance eventually covered it – but it was a pretty big buzz kill – they have no mercy!  Funny thing was when we were cleaning up the house in May, we found a ton of little bits and pieces of car lights and metal scraps about 100 feet down the road from the driveway in the front lawn.. It took a second to figure it out, but the grinder actually grinded it and shot out pieces of the car down the road! Intense.

With the loads of snow we were getting, chair 9 opened up some epic powder lines.  We had day after day of open lines down the face, face shots in the trees, and crazy steeps from up above.  We trecked up the high traverse up to Dragon’s Back and Tail to hit the couple hundred feet of virtually untouched powder.  We even took one line to get into an untouched ridge that required slipping down into a rocky outcropping and leaping down over the sketchiest 10 foot drop ever – Cody and Billy were daring champs that led the pack.  Out at the edge of Dragon’s Back, Chris Nelson and I both took some good tumbles down some rock faces.  Another one of these days we also went off the back side and hit up Hole in the Wall – the backcountry run that goes through a giant cave!  All in all, a lot of epic riding went down on 9.

At the end of February, we had our regional competition up at Diamond Peak in Lake Tahoe.  To compete at the National level, we had to go to Regionals.  A few of us skiers went up for the slopestyle competition for fun, unsure if we wanted to do Nationals yet.  Skilled snowboarder Ethan Peskowitz went up as well to qualify for the National Boardercross competition.  We all practiced in Mammoth and decided to just drive up for the day to Tahoe to keep costs down.  Robby Thorpe graciously drove super early in the morning while we all passed out in the car.  It’s about 3.5 hours from Mammoth up to Diamond Peak, and the comp started early.  We were graced with Robby’s usual great choice of music as his former carpooling companions can attest to.  I think we all actually still owe him some gas money for that trip – don’t worry Robby I still remember – I also owe you for that uber sick tall-T.  Anyway, the morning drive was serene and the competition super fun.  Clarey busted out some sweet switch cork 7′s, and Leita held it down as the only girl from USC.  We all met up with Clarey’s relatives that owned a little pizza place and were treated to an awesome dinner – thanks!

People are always bringing homework up to the house over the weekend and trying to get things done.  Caleb and Ben always zoned out for hours with their super strong headphones in at the middle of the dining room table.  It’s a must when you are so dedicated to getting up to Mammoth but care so much about a great education as well!  Leita had a bit more fun getting her school work done – she brought up a ton of film and got awesome shots all weekend while skiing for her film photography class!  Her shots all turned out really awesome and we were stoked to have her follow people around and work her magic.  Be sure to check out the full gallery in the photo section of the website!

The National competition has never really been something a lot of people think about on the Ski & Snowboard team – I have some new experiences that will hopefully turn this all around.  Since a few of us competed in the Regional competition, we had eligibility in the National competition.  Clarey earned a free entrance for being the top freestyle skier in the SCCSC league, but the rest of us were questioning the costs, time away from school, and the level of competition.  It was a last minute decision to accompany Clarey by Caleb, Chris, and myself out at Winter Park Colorado.  We missed a week of school, met a ton of awesome people, and had an all around really great experience.  Unfortunately this was the same time Clarey had his season ending neck injury which put a big damper on the week; however, we were stoked and relieved to have him up and walking and enjoying the end of the week banquet dinner and awards with us.  The awards we all got belong to him as well.  We expected it to be up tight and extreme competition – while the competition level was indeed high, it was really just a time for a bunch of different people from different places to get together and share the passion of snowsports.  We were all sessioning the parks and practicing tricks together.

After taking home the overall team championship title at the end of the week for freestyle skiing, it was a huge morale booster.  This is the highest level of collegiate freestyle competitions in the US and we were able to do it all really on multiple whims.  Every day was another set of competitions that we weren’t really committed to entering.  We ended up entering halfpipe, slopestyle, and skiercross all relatively unexpectedly and did well in all of them as a team.  We can’t wait to see what the team can do with new talent and more presence in the coming years.

The beginning of Spring Break in Mammoth was marked with an awesome collegiate team slopestyle competition put on by Mammoth and Redbull called SnowWarz.  Our week started off in LA at the RedBull headquarters where they hosted a nighttime party with waxing, DJ’s, and free drinks.  They loaded us all on huge buses and drove through the night to Mammoth with a bunch of other LA area college kids.  We had 3 teams  entered in the competition and just went out there to have a good time.  We all got sweet free jerseys, lunch, and a buffet dinner and party at Canyon lodge.   The following days were super fun park days in South Park.  We brought out Nelson’s camera to snap a ton of photos of the fun.