Intro by Oliver Nermerich
Text by Andrew Smolak
Edit by Kyle Couture
Pics by Dylan Shippee
In any extreme sport, it’s a never ending adventure to find new spots. A good amount of people search for extended periods of time trying to locate that one mystery place that has been haunting them everyday. If your reading this you know what I am talking about. That one place that is not the stunt you’ve been looking at for years. It’s not another ledge, gap or rail, and it’s definitely not the local hot spot. This place is something completely different. Something you may never go to again in your lifetime.
My good friend and room mate Kyle Couture texted me about a month ago telling me of this ridiculous spot he had seen online. Of course I was immediately interested mainly because I was sitting at my cubicle wishing I were blading. He informed me that this obstacle was wild but he had no idea where it was. With my anxiety starting to kick in, he sent me the pictures. My jaw dropped. I had never seen anything like this before.
A few days passed and Kyle had gotten more intel about the spot. He had found out from a close friend that it was somewhere in Connecticut at an abandoned ski resort. I immediately started doing research. I started looking at all the pictures online. After looking through them all I discovered that there was a picture of a Five Guys burger joint and faintly in the background I could see a sign for a U-store self storage facility. Hours later I had found my location with the help of google. The predicted location made sense but I had to confirm that this was the exactly the place we needed to go. That’s when I saw this picture.
I like to be prepared. Weekends are my time to get the fuck away from the office and do what I love. I didn’t want this to turn into the unfortunate flakiness that happens more often then not, or run out of daylight and be stuck in the middle of the woods. It’s winter time in Boston, it gets dark around 4:30 – 5. So with me being super annoying and proactive, I made it clear that we were leaving Boston at 5 am. If your not here then we are leaving, I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for somebody to pick the lint off their socks on my only two days off. It takes two hours to get there as well so literally all you have to do is get into the car and I would take care of the rest. After pleading my case to my friends it ended up being Gabe Holm, Dylan Shippee, Ariana Gilmore, Eric Woods, Andrew Nemoroski, Kyle Couture and myself. We arrived at about 7:30 am but still had no idea where the structure was. We also had no clue where we could park or how far the walk would be. Luckily it was pretty self explanatory and we found it easily. As for the terrain, it was as hard as you could make it. First the cement was super rough and would most likely rip jeans right off. Second, your on top of a mountain going down this slalom run at about 25 is one of the scariest things ever. If you had too much speed and flew out your falling 3 or 4 feet into woods and thorn bushes. Finally, there was absolutely no where to go with the speed you pick up. Going back and forth side to side down hill does nothing but make you go faster so as soon as you felt a chance to stop yourself you have to take it. We got a solid 4 hours out of this trip and nobody got seriously hurt. Success in my book until a cop came up and said we were all getting tickets.
At any rate this trip cost all of us 92 dollars but in my book it’s 92 dollars well spent on a spot we all had the privilege to shred. (Somehow one of us just kept quiet and the cop did not issue this person a ticket! Bastard!)
