Eating Shit

Excuse the language, but there's really no other way to describe what happened Saturday night during night boarding. We went to a place called Mikata Snow Park that has a fairly decent night run with rails, jumps, and even a large quarter pipe (the crummy half pipe was tried, but it was falling apart).

The night started out ok, but the first few jumps I tried were just not happening. Couldn't stick a landing without almost stopping, and I was digging a few holes with my butt out there. The big screw up on my part, though, was my attempt to go over a barrel jump. Basically it's just a barrel that sunk into the snow with a small kicker going up to it. You're either supposed to go up and over the barrel slowly, or use the barrel's side as an extra ramp and jump even higher. I'd seen a few folks go over it and thought I could do it. It looked like this:

I rolled towards it with some decent speed, and hit the barrel going decently fast. Being an inexperienced jumper, I wasn't ready for the way the shape of the barrel was going to affect me and I apparently ended up like this:

I laneded on my left shoulder and head, though to a lesser extent, before the rest of my body hit the ground. I sort of crawled over to the side a couple of feet before collapsing. It definitely hurt, but not as much as one might think when 170 odd lbs and a snowboard plus gear falls from about 6 or 7 feet in the air onto a single shoulder. My friend found me and made sure I was ok, then I got down the mountain with my goggles and beanie in my hand and took a break before continuing til they closed, though I only managed one more jump and it was a small one. On my next trip up, I checked out the landing, and found the main indention of my body was about 9 or 10 feet beyond the barrel, meaning I was in the air the entire time. My buddy Gabe said he could see my head above the barrel and that thing was at least 3 or 4 feet high.

Suffice to say it was very scary.