Pond skimming 2009

This Saturday we went to The Canyons ski resort to check out the annual pond skimming event. This is one of our favorite events in Park City.

Several thousand people came to watch the 100 participants head down the hill and try to ski or board across a pond of very cold water.



All the participants dressed up. They ranged from fairly simple things, like a chicken...



or this guy who seems to just have a duck and little floaties...



to something more complex. This horse was two teenagers. How they managed not to ski into each other boggles my mind.



One of the more entertaining outfits was the Octomom. You can't see the media without hearing about this lady who added 8 kids to her existing batch of six.



It was a guy, dressed with big, ugly lipsticked lips. He had little baby dolls attached to him everywhere. He was pulling a raft that had even more kids and some signs. Quite the timely costume. You can see some of the dolls came off and are floating around in the pond.



I wasn't in a place to capture many of the big splashes. Too many heads in the way. However, you can get a sense of what it was like from this guy. He was dressed up as the black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.



Some were a bit crude. This guy was quite proud of his thong draped butt. If you wanted to see a guy in a thong, this would not be who you wanted to see.



Entry number 69 took his position to heart...



Some old style. This guy found an old Nevica one piece ski suite and was skiing a monoboard.



And now my favorite. This race car was built with a wooden frame riding on two skis. The driver sat on the frame and his friends put the cardboard race car on top. The problem was steering It seemed to go to the right at quite a clip.

To make it more interesting, he started an orange smoke bomb before the car got going.



Almost immediately, the car crashes into the barrier that kept the spectators off the course.



In an obvious hit a run, the driver gets out and runs off. He eventually dove into the pond to complete his run.



The ski patrol guys running the event grabbed the car and took it to the pond in an effort to extinguish the putrid plume of orange smoke. No such luck. This must have been a military grade rescue smoke bomb. It was quite happy in the water, air or snow. It just kept on going.



Not great pictures, but great fun. The Canyons somehow managed to time the event to squeeze one day of good weather between several serious snow storms. It was a wonderful day for hanging out and watching the show!