Canyons Pond Skimming 2012

Every year I make sure I get to the Pond Skimming competition at Canyons' Spring Gruv.  If you're bored, the past years are fairly entertaining: 2011, 2010 and 2009.  This year I was especially lucky and got to move inside the spectator fence so that I could capture better pictures. A huge thanks to Cliff Boltz for making this happen!  Sadly, Julie was at work and couldn't join me.

If you are a Pond Skimming Competitor and would like your pictures, send me an email with your number (or numbers for a group) and a description of what you were wearing. I have at least something for almost everyone. My email is "sjoyce" over at gmail.com.

There was a huge crowd and Canyons has gotten really good at building huge "snow bleachers" so everyone gets a decent view.  A 60 degree spring day didn't hurt the crowd appeal.

Most people are either skiing for the day or just rode up the gondola in their street clothes. Of course, some people have a very different set of street clothes.

This years judges included Miles Rademan, one of the two heads of my Leadership Park City program.

I'll start with one of the big disappointments: Boozie the Clown.  In the past, he has been a real crowd pleaser with his ability to cut hard and put up a huge wave of water, normally aimed at the judges.  This year it was closer to a flop and everyone remained toasty warm and dry.

Getting to sit inside the fence seemed like a good idea for taking pictures, until this guy came blasting across the pond and nearly ran me over.  That was all the motivation I needed to get up and move to a spot beside the pond instead of at the end of it.

Skiing across the pond is hard enough.  Doing it as a one legged pirate is impossible.  This guy gave it an excellent attempt.

Tim Tebow never goes a week without being in the news.  This event wasn't to be any different.  This was the first of two Tebow competitors.  Even though it looks like he is just taking a knee in the snow, he is moving quickly and about to hit the jump.

This was probably the most stylish mid-air pose I saw all day. 

There are three balance approaches to try: leaning back, leaning forward, and somewhere in the middle.

First, we have the knee stretching technique of leaning back, a lot.  You end up killing a lot of your speed, but you look cool doing it.

Then we have a friend of ours, Diane Carson. She went with the "never to be recommended" forward lean.

Here's why.  I've never seen a good ending to a ride using this technique.

Here's a balanced approach, but come on!  How can you not make it across the pond if you are dressed as Jesus Christ?  When you lose momentum, you just walk on water.

A different technique is to try avoiding the water completely.  This requires using the bigger jump, a lot of speed, and a ton of enthusiasm.

Not a frick'n chance in the world!

Perhaps to generate lift, this guy tried to helicopter off the jump.

With the same result.

Perhaps you just need more vertical and less drag (hence the small bathing suit)?

Sure....

Now an exception....  Over the years I have watched the Pond Skimming, I have never seen anyone get anywhere near as much air as this guy.  Not height. Distance. I think he was literally trying to fly the entire pond.  In this photo, notice where he is with respect to the jump and the Canyons sign. This is about as far as anyone gets.

Now still in the air...  Notice how far he has gone past the Canyons sign. He could have skimmed the pond if it had ended over at the gondola. His challenge was stopping before killing people in the crowd.

This guy didn't get the same air, but used his board to keep a lot of speed going across the pond. Rather than braking in the snow, he hit the brakes in the last few feet of water.  This was quite the surprise for all the spectators on the other side of that wall of water. This was where I started taking pictures from. 

I'm not sure quite what this guy was doing.  I don't think he was a legitimate competitor. He ran and dove off the jump into the pond. No skis.  No snowboard.  No costume.  Not much of a bathing suit.

And it wouldn't be a pond skimming without some bare butt.  The bathing suit wasn't all that sturdy.

Let's go to some of the prize winners, and those that were close.  There is an award for the Best Crash.  Relying on destiny for this, three people dressed in a giant cardboard ship, the Concordia.  If the name doesn't ring a bell, this is the cruise ship that recently ran aground, killing about 25 people.

The ship didn't survive half way down the ski run. They fell and it shredded.  They left the debris, went off the jumps, and got a big round of applause, but it wasn't enough to win.

A bigger group came down the hill dressed as a Chinese Dragon. This one was even more entertaining.  Not only did the dragon fall apart, it seemed as though it was intentionally taking the skiers with it.  Clearly a winner.

One of my fellow Leadership Park City class participants, Matt Mullin, was dressed as the Honey Badger, complete with a "Honey Badger Don't Care" shirt and a cobra.  If you haven't seen the famous video, watch at least part of this.  It has 40+ million hits on Youtube.

Matt won a pair of skis for "Best Male".

Last year, two young guys created a great cardboard Delta plane and went as pilots. This year they were back with two guys in a horse costume pulling a gladiator in a cardboard chariot.

They made it down intact, at which point you have the challenge of going off the jump almost simultaneously without killing each other.

They spread out enough to land safely and took home the prize for best costume.

Last year's best prize went to a guy who came down the hill with a step ladder rigged as a diving board.  It's at the end of this post.  This year it got scarey.  He built a big structure that came down the hill on snowboards, very slowly and very awkwardly.

At the bottom, he kicked off his board and took his rope swing through the structure, and into the pond.

OK, the part about "into the pond" was the plan, but not the execution.  What actually happened was that the swing broke all four supports.  He landed hard on the snow at the edge of the pond and the entire structure collapsed on him. He did eventually roll into the water.

Fellow spectators and close friends:  Bill, Loris, Arnie, and Manette.

Another year, another tremendous event by Canyons ski resort and one hundred whacky, clever, mostly inebriated participants!

Another quick trip to Antelope Island

I wanted another day to test out my new 500mm lens, so I headed off to Antelope Island. The forecast was for sunny skies and low winds, so I thought it would be nice to catch some of the migrating waterfowl at sunrise.

As you can tell from this picture, the sun is a good ways above the mountains, and yet it is cloudy and dark out.  Also, there is a good one foot chop on the Great Salt Lake.  Good call guys!  These are the same weathermen (and women) who screw up the snow forecasts all the time.

When my mom was here in early winter, we had to look long and hard to find this bird, a Chukar.  Now they are everywhere, sitting up on top of rocks so you can see them. He's actually a long ways off, but I sure do love having a nice super telephoto lens.

If you couldn't see them, they would start calling so that even a blind man could find them.

The bison were all over the island.  As usual, the males were off by themselves or in groups of two or three.  The ladies were in a pretty large herd.

I wonder if this is the same porcupine I saw in November.  He was in roughly the same spot. His fur and spikes seemed pretty and fluffy, but his scabby face is one only his mom could love.

He was gnawing the hell out of this tree.  His long, gnarly yellow teeth seemed tailor-made for the job.  I should have captured video of him moving around in the tree to find new branches. Given that this is how he lives, he really is a klutz.

I ended up seeing four coyotes.  They were in the same general area of the island, but they weren't traveling together.  Down by the water, they were hunting for birds or whatever dead thing washed in. Up in the grassland, they were hunting for mice, moles, or anything remotely similar.

I think this is a Golden Eagle.  I kept watching him, hoping he would dive on something, but he just floated around. 

My prize find for the day didn't result in a good picture, but it is my first photo of an owl.  He was tucked way back in the trees, and try as I might, there was no angle that got all the branches out of the way. To get this, I was sitting on a slope with my feet in the edge of a swamp.

It's a Great Horned Owl and if you haven't seen one, they are quite large, about two feet tall, with a 4 foot wingspan.

I'll head back later in the year to try and get him with his wife and hopefully, children. There are two other owl species living on the island, but I haven't found them yet.  During nesting season, they tend to hunker down and in the blustery winds everything was hiding.

Sage Grouse

I have two days to test out my new lens for problems, so I decided to try it out on something practical.  This time of year, the Sage Grouse gather at a place called a "lek" to find mates for the year. If you haven't seen a male Sage Grouse do his mating dance, you are missing out.

This is a fairly crude video I shot with my DLSR.  I have no idea where all the background noise was coming from, so please ignore that.  The video gives you an idea of the male's show.

It's all about strutting your stuff, and strut they do.  This is quite a show for a bird that is closely related to a chicken.

But these birds have big moobs (man boobs).  They have advantages over humans in that their moobs can be inflated to huge sizes, and then put away when they aren't needed.

The snow in the area has all melted, but the nights are still cold enough to freeze all the puddles, and freeze my hands on the metal camera lens.  Almost all of these shots were done with me using the Honda Pilot as a blind and popping my head through the sunroof.

They have decorations everywhere, including dainty little feathers around their head.  They reminded me way too much of England's queen.

This seemed to be a tribute shot to women getting older. I don't know how old he is, but his moobs are sagging big time.

All puffed up and ready to flash cleavage...

I was struggling to follow the birds in flight with such a long lens.  This is about as good as I got. Practice, practice, practice.

You never know where your shots will come from.  This was taken from the gas station on the drive home.  He was hanging out at the top of the tree while I was filling up.

Tomorrow's trip:  Antelope Island for waterfowl and some owls (hopefully)

No more photography excuses

If you read my blog, you know that I occasionally whine about not having a big enough telephoto lens for the wildlife photography I do.  Fortunately I have a loving, supportive wife who suggested I go ahead and alleviate my source of whining.

Here we see four of my main lenses, from left to right:

• 35mm
• 10-24mm zoom
• 24-70mm zoom
• 70-200mm zoom

Now add the new big boy.  It's a 500mm f4 super telephoto.  Awesome!

This is the lens with its lens hood on, attached to my seemingly tiny camera.

I actually picked the 500mm f4 over its two brothers, the 400mm f2.8 and the 600mm f4, because the 500 is "smaller and easier to carry".

Lots of good pictures in my future!

Really spring?

Everyone has their own way to mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring.  In DC, it is the Cherry Blossom Festival.  In Wilmington, NC it is the Azalea Festival. For me, I finally went out and unplugged the timer for my outdoor Christmas lights.

Winter, I declare thee over!!

Norm and Ginny bring good tidings

Two of our Raleigh friends, Norman and Ginny, stopped by Park City for a few days after a week of skiing in Colorado.  Fortunately, they brought some great things with them. Most importantly, they brought snow.  Last week we had days in the 50s with brilliant sunshine.  It was cooking off the snow so fast that it was starting to look like May.  When they arrived on Saturday, it was actually raining, which is much worse for the snow pack than sun.

However, over the next few days, we got about 20 inches of snow in Park City.  Alta had closer to 4 feet. Sunday was a nice day at Canyons, but the snow was still a bit heavy.  Monday at Deer Valley was the best ski day of the year!

Julie, enjoying an overnight foot of fluff.

And Ginny enjoying the same.

Julie and I have both adopted a new fashion on the mountain.  No more blacks, blues and browns that you can't see.  Julie has two new pairs of ski pants, one pink and one yellow.  Both are easy to spot even on cloudy days.  In addition, they just look a lot better than black from head to toe.

Yesterday was a fantastic groomer day at DV.  The sun was out.  It was warmer, without being warm enough to melt the snow.  The food was great at Royal Street and the skiing was wonderful.

The other nice thing they brought, although you can never be certain how much credit all the fans should get, is a basketball win for NC State!  The game was being played on Sunday while we were skiing.  I had the TiVo set to record the game, but I can't tell you how hard it was to stay oblivious of the results.  There was a TV in the restaurant at lunch.  There was a TV in the locker room at the end of the day.  Friends sent me texts,  My phone gives me automatic score updates.  But through all that, we got to see the Wolfpack down the number three seeded Georgetown.

Go Pack!

Park City goes Hollywood

It's a very long, very ugly story about property rights, zoning, self righteous state representatives and senators and campaign contributions (bribes), but Park City is getting a movie studio complex.  More accurately, Park City is getting a movie studio shoved down its throat. The short version:

There's a guy who owns some property just outside of Park City, at the intersection of 248 and 40, over by the new hospital.  The land was zoned for some minimal development, but he wanted to build a lot more.  Meanwhile, the Utah government wanted to encourage the movie industry to expand in the state.  So the landowner went out and found Raleigh Studios who wanted to build a new studio. To make this work, all you need is the wonderful state government threatening to pass legislation that completely ignores and overrides the local zoning.

Rather than getting absolutely no say in the matter, Park City and Summit County succumbed and are allowing the zoning changes.  Of course, this isn't just a studio building.  It's a studio, hotel and retail space.  Park City really needs another hotel?

I went out when the planning commission and city council did a site visit with the builder.  I think they will end up building something decent, but because of all the legal bullshit that went on, the builder isn't having to follow the same rules for set backs, open space, trails and density that everyone else in Park City does. Must be nice to be so special.

Several lessons:

• It's not what you know, it's who you make campaign contributions to.  Again, I would prefer to be honest and just call them bribes.  If you want something unusual, start bribing the politicians early and often.
• As much as the Utah government talks about keeping the federal government out of the way and making decisions locally, they only mean that when they get to have their way.  They are more than happy to override local zoning. "Make decisions locally, unless you aren't deciding the same thing I would."

Given that it's going to happen, I hope they do it well and make it successful. It could be a nice addition to the city, but the way it was done leaves everyone with bitter feelings about the whole deal.