The best story when YOU were a gaper!

One peice yellow ski suit. nuff said. some guy asked me if i was on newschoolers when i was in my first little comp. told him i wasnt good enough cause i thought it was some pro team. oh how badly i was mistaken....
 
When i was 7 and got my rental skis i was so excited because they had all of these diamond shaped dimples on them and said Bode Miller on them. I told all of my friends that they made the skis go really fast. One day i told my dad i wanted to race. I pizza straightlined while he sandbagged and tried to let me win. He was suddenly posessed by an evil parental spirit and passed me and kept going to the bottom of the run. Immediately as he passed me, I burst into tears and collapsed to the ground. He wasn't stopping to wait for me and was at the base of the lift. I decided to make him feel bad by making him think i was lost. I hid in the trees and about 20 minutes later i heard ski patrol calling "Jake!", "where are you, Jake!" This went on for about 2 hours until i was done crying and i went back onto the trail and my dad and ski patrol found me. I told him i never wanted to ski again because my skis were slow. We went home and later that night i took my brand new Cub Scout soap carving knife and I repeatedly stabbed my skis. Now, this was before too many knives had locking mechanisms and on about the third or fourth stab the blade folded in and cut my fingers really bad. I was convinced that the skis were posessed and made my dad drive to gart sports and exchange them for a non-posessed pair. I also specifically told him to make sure they were more aerodynamic than the posessed pair.
 
that doesnt make you a gaper, that makes you a pussy.

if i were your dad i would have left you in the trees and hoped a sasquatch ate your pussy ass.
 
Went completely out of control at Killington down a trail I had no business being on. Coming out of that trail, I entered a merger really fast and couldn't slow down, haha. Plowed through two 20-something snowboarders and a family of four. Skis first, lol.
 
I think I was 10 and I decided to take a run down the park. A snowboarder said he would run me over because I was going to slow!
 
decking every jump in sight on snowblades, and losing my shit when i saw a backflip. those were the DAYS! seriously, so much fun
 
I remember about 5 years ago I was skiing northstar with a friend. If anyone knows Northstar here, we were going down East Ridge and my friends decides we should go down one of the steep runs off to the side instead of going down the easier way. I follow for a second and then start freaking out at how steep it is, haha. I end up having to take my skis off and butt slide down the hill. Total Gaper.
 
describing something as "too steep" at northstar is pretty much the most gaper thing you could ever say, i think you might win!
 
Tried a three on a little kicker in my coat with a giant hood. The hood went over my face and I couldn't see so I ate shit and yardsaled all over the place. Directly under the lift.
 
my mountain had a table with two lips on it like 5 years ago when i was a gaper. it was a 30 footer or so on one side and like a 50 on the other. i could always do the 35 but one day i decided to go for the 50. bombed for so long, must have speed checked too much tho, because i made it about 2/3 of the way over the deck and fell 12-14 feet to flat, smacked my head on the jump, and slid down the entire landing. my friends are all coming over, WOAH DUDE HOLY SHET when suddenly - wild actual skier appears!!! some guy comes off the jump, and throws some spin i wasn't paying attention to. he fell and slid down the entire landing into one of my pals and me.

hahahahahah
 
haha yeah. I've only ski'd it once but nothing was steep in any way, some fun pillow drops though...
 
When we were about ten, a friend and I wanted to get some footy for this "dope" edit we were dropping. We filmed each other going down a groomer doing spread eagles and cossacks off head walls. The occasional safety that my friend would sketchily attempt to do was pretty much the coolest most impressive thing ever to us.

Yea, I peaked young.
 
My friends and I made an edit when we were about 12, it was during some school sponsored ski club. We went throughout the park a few times hitting the lip of rails as jumps (unfortunately I was one of those kids), and my best trick was a 180 of a tiny jump on the side of the run.

We went back and watched the edit this season andit was very cringe worthy, and funny as shit.
 
Went to a chute while skiing with my mom probably around age 8? Told her to go first, on my first turn I pole planted in the wrong spot and fell downhill overtop of my pole, rag dolled probably 150 feet down the chute and barely stopped before the tree line. But mom was stoked
 
i crashed trying a 180 and stayed on the lip, then another snowboarded landed on me. My dad and the patrol saw him and he got his pass ripped after a heated argument...
 
Hah - I have done plenty of stupid shit that qualifies as gaper status, though one in particular stands out... This was like 2001 or so. I'm skiing switch down a groomer towards the chair and there's this cat track that takes you back to the parking lot it's Cypress Bowl, bottom of black mountain, you go skiier's right to the parking lot and left if you want to go back to the chair. The other side of the cattrack is fenced off because it's dug out - there's a slope down and then the rental hut is at the bottom by the parking lot. You know that orange plastic fence stuff, held in place by bamboo poles stuck through it every 6 feet or so.

So I'm skiing switch and talking to my buddy who's snowboarding and I don't look behind me for a couple of seconds to see where I'm going. Instead of going towards the chair, I end up going off the side of the cat track, through an orange fence and down about a 15 foot incline. End up taking out a half dozen bamboo poles holding that fence in place, get all tangled up right behind the rental hut in full view of a bunch of people. My buddy - who could easily have warned me mind you - is laughing his balls off as I extricate myself from the fence. I got shit on about that for years. But fair enough because that must have been funny as hell to witness.
 
Tried to Ollie a fence right beside the beer tent at the hoedown throwdown slope comp in silverstar this season, took out 4 fence poles and got the rope tangled in my binding so bad it took me 45 minutes to get out and I barely made the last chair up to where the parking lot is
 
I used to do nordic skiing... with like 4 years it's kinda fun... but later on competing and shit gave me a reason to change to alpine skiing.

After a while I changed to Freeskiing. We were like the first kids to hit the local park on skis.
 
First of all, i'm dutch. Everybody in Europe knows that the dutch are the best gapers (thats negative) that are on the slopes.

second of all:

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im on the right (15 years ago?)

and last but not least when i was a little gaper i was in an ski class (ofcourse) but there were 10 kids and only one instructor, so some one had to go alone in the draglift and that someone was ofcourse me.

so i made it the first 100ft but after that the liftie couldnt see me anymore.

after that one point he couldnt see me anymore, i fellt on the ground and the draglift was stuck in my jacket dragging me in reverse, head in the snow all the way to the top where i got released by my instructor (alfred) and i stopped crying after an quarter of an hour.

thats pretty much it.
 
I'm most embarrassed by my early park skiing days, before I had really figured out what was cool; before that I was just a clueless racer kid and don't feel like there was anything wrong with that. But man, that first year of skiing park I was BAD.
 
When I was probably 6 I had just learned how to ski non pizza like and I would french fry the shit out of those racer skis I had but I never learned how to stop correctly and one day I was skiing with my family and I went french fry the entire way down. Unfortunately for me when I got to the bottom the guy in front of me stopped dead in his tracks and little 6 year old me not knowing how to stopped slammed my face right into this guys ass and blacked out for like 2 minutes and woke up to a bunch of people staring at me. Long story short some guy butt humped my face and I got knocked out
 
I was in this racing program when I was little, probably seven or eight, and they held this year end slalom sort of thing just for fun. At the end there was this jump, I'd say about three feet high, so it was super small but for a seven year old it looked like the biggest thing ever. I tucked into it and went like five feet down the hill and it was just a full out yard sale in front of all the other little kids and some parents. They gave me a big cookie though so it all worked out haha.
 
I was coming up to a small little jump that went onto the cat track. I hit that shit going way to fast and continued across the cat track and flew off the other side. However the cat track was the ski area boundary and i happened to tumble all the way down out of bounds off this cliff into snow. It took me 30 minutes to get up onto the cat track again.
 
Skied out of this steep chute like trail at Aspen but at the end there was a sharp left hand turn that went uphill back to the main trails, if you skied straight past the turn there was a out of bounds rope... So my friends said Matt do it first pussy, me being the idiot that I am, I tuck real fucking fast so I don't have to skate across the flat. As soon as I'm about to make the left hand turn, it hit a mogul with a sign that read "caution out of bounds line" I managed to do a quick 180 and I land switch, I try to make the turn but I was going way to fast. I hit the rope and flew out of bounds, double eject to perfect switch backie right to my feet, then I tomahawk really far, after a minute of saying what the fuck, I get outta there.

This was 4 months ago... I done goofed
 
who else desperately wanted one of those motocross style helmets with the chin guard? I thought they were the tits
 
The last day of my first year of freestyle, I went up to mammoth to shred with some friends who were getting me into freestyle and showing me all the tricks they could do. My good friend 7ed the bottom jump on unbound. I told myself I was gonna just go for the jump and see if I could clear it. I came up to the top of the lip to realize I had only half the speed I needed. Basically I landed at 30 ft of the 60 to knoll jump (No injury and spring slush). I was up in the air and yelled out a big "OH SHIT". My knees knocked my goggles off my head as well as my helmet. My friends were laughing at the bottom and so was I. They also mentioned the loud impact I made. Funniest memory for me while skiing.
 
I had to ride with my mom until i was 7 or 8. But, I would follow the freestyle team to observe what they are doing. I would try their stuff and knuckled everything.

I was pretty cocky back then.
 
When I was about 11, I really wanted to be a racer. I had been skiing for a few years, but I still didn't have a pair of poles. I figured that in the meantime I should practice using poles anyway. So imagine some gaper 11 year old with his 110 tan Elans planting his imaginary ski poles like he's freaking Bode Miller (my 11 year old ski idol).
 
When I was like 11 I didn't really understand the physics of jumps and thought my light-weight body could clear the biggest kicker after I watched a guy, my now good friend, throw a switch 9. I hit the deck so hard and the soles of my feet told me to go fuck myself
 
When I was younger I think I had a slight gaper gap due to poor goggle choice. Looking back I think it was both the helmet and goggles. I also thought I was the shit. I had skinny, "fast" skis and wanted to "race" Atomic. My first run through a slalom course kicked my ass. My skis came off twice during the practice. My ego was severely bruised because I thought I was good and this course ruined me. I blamed my skis(which was not the issue, since the skis were fine), I blamed ice, I blamed other bullshit.

I am happy where I am now. I worked hard, and progressed immensely. And thank god I don't have that same cockiness now. Jesus. I must have been a dick.
 
Oh, almost forgot, best part:

I used to wear a camelback and put yaktraks and food and stuff in there because I thought all the pros wore backpacks. I looked even worse with this tiny gaper pack on haha
 
I would just put my poles under my arms like im racing except they would point straight up. Then me and my friends would jump off the takeoff to the side of the rail and then go like "Dude did you see that SWEET air I just got"
 
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