Raging River

Raging River is the Cougar Ridge of King County. Long climbs and some scary bits. Exactly what we like.

leight

Hello Fellow Mountain Bikers

I have issues with mountain bike trail names. Stuff like Slingshot Wookie and Radical Dragon are straight out of a bad name generator, like a grandpa Netscape Navigated to an x-treme sports glossary. There are too many dick jokes and shitty puns. The pop culture references are out of date by the time the first tread hits trail. Tough guy names only work if there's a self-referential wink, but they're kinda like having a mustache: it may be an ironic joke to your friends but to the rest of the galaxy you're just a guy with a mustache.

This keeps me up at night.

"New Mountain Bike Trail," though, this is perfect.

What else to call $1,168,000 of Evergreen Certified™ MultiUse VersaSwitch℗ ActiveSidewalk that is this Olallie trail? Optimized for your Fun Lifestyle! That same left turn, over and over. And again. For five miles. Our algorithm has determined that the existence a human soul is merely a construct. A complex protein chain, an amino acid. Trust the robots. Trust us.

Maybe the best name ever.

sprinter van sport hammock outdoor simulation eat pray love live laugh ride unify singularity borg leight

My How Things Have Changed

It is 2017 and I will admit to understanding pretty much nothing.

After a ripping day at Stevens Pass Bike Park,* I left the Moj unlocked. Ferrying gear back up to my apartment, pretty burnt from lap after lap after unbelievable lap of aggressive mountain bike assault, I guess I spaced hitting the lock button. 

I got got. Streets is definitely hard in Madison Park.

A couple weeks have passed and I've compiled a comprehensive list of what's missing:

1: Spare sunglasses from the glove box. Smith. They were a little on the J-Lo side of things, blue frames and really tryhard, made me look like Mr. Worldwide. Got them free, so I'm cool with it.

B: A box containing a couple dozen Diamondback Bicycles discount cards, kept in the center console. I'd hand them out to anyone I saw riding a DB in traffic or whatever. I could probably get more, but everyone knows that these weren't usually even the best deal, so fuck it. 

III: Nothing else. Nothing. Not my sponge-wheeled cruiser board, not my airhorn, not my BB gun. Nothing!

Dummy. I'd say "dummies," but it's v.obvi that if there were more than one thieving bastard involved, one of them would've convinced the other(s) that they should'nt've left my CASE LOGIC CD case sitting on the passenger seat. Talking CASE ILLOGICAL, bro. 

I'm from a time where the CASE LOGIC CD holder was in your Top Ten Possessions. Even a CASE LOGIC cassette holder was important. Not in 2017. Let's breakitdownrealkwik of what these vools missed, bearing in mind that I've only ever had about 30 CD's and they're from a certain non-record-buying era: 

Dstyles and DJ Flare: Pharaohs of Funk. 

The skratch tape that killed skratching. For me and for everyone else. As soon as this came out, it was obvious that D was the mainest man forever, and this is how you'd want to cut. It's Gonz in Video Days. No question. No point in continuing. Toadman on the intro. 

Michael Jackson: Thriller Demos

Holy shit, forgot about this. The song "Thriller" never made sense to me, and hearing this explained why. They came up with the whole horror movie angle after the fact. The song started as "Starlight," some space disco shit. Off The Wall is better than Thriller, but these rougher demos are so cool. 

Unlabeled: Lil Wayne, Phirpo, Mango

This is hott. Lil Wayne freestyles and some latin stuff I must've stolen off a music blog.

Baker vol.2:

Looks like this was made for a drive east on 542. Break Fest vol.1, a Beastie Boys-themed sample mix, Prince Paul's Confessions of a Beat Junkie, and Soulman's The Truth is Forever. Gimme a break this rules.

Gravediggaz: Six Feet Deep

Comeonbrosrsly. Classique.

Monoxide Records: UK Representing Mixtape

I believe this is a WEAK_SAUCE creation. First place I heard Blak Twang's "Red Lettaz." Perfect!

Unlabeled: 

Oh my word. So sick! This has a great rock mix on it. Bam.

Five blank CD's from J-E: 

So these will be weird drum'n'bass. We don't need to put these in just yet.

MURS: F'Real 

I bet I could handle listening to this in the oh seventeen. For a bit.

DJ Giant: homemade paper label

A weird kid from Texas or New Mexico or somewhere, from early message board days. Creepy vocal sample-based skratch tape kinda album. I wonder if this guy is still cutting with alia_S on PalTalk. 

Mr Dibbs: Turntable Scientifics

Mr Rubber Nipples or whatever. I love everything this weirdo ever made. Rad.

Waxfactor: Remixtape

More cool shit from messageboarders.

Devin the Dude: Just Tryin' Ta Live

Probably the last rapping CD I bought. This dude rules.

Monoxide: Back to the Basics

A fucking golden era rap mix by the greatest eNets man of all, WEAK_SAUCE. The guy has jokes and knowledges. Do you know he's someone's dad now? Insane. Love ya man!

Can: Unlimited Edition

I have zero Can records, they're always too expensive. Obviously this rules.

Wu-Tang Clan: Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers

Another one I can listen to in my head, but I suppose there could be a situation in which I put it on for a sing-along. If this did get stolen, I'd probably repurchase it on principle.  

Outkast: Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik

Never actually seen a legit copy on wax, and you kinda should must need to have this no matter who you are. It's like 90 minutes long, full of amazing songs you forgot. This may be my favorite rap album. I can only listen to the really good stuff or the really bad stuff these days. This is a good one. 

N.E.R.D.: In Search Of

Holy shit! I will listen to this next time I drive. This was great.

Unlabeled CD:

Yes! Lookie here, this has four Blak Twang albums and the Cenubites EP I ripped from my record. This is going on the iPod immediately.

Can: Ege Bamyasi

Again, I don't have this record. And you are required to have this. So boom.

Ol Dirty Bastard: Return to the 36 Chambers

My copy of this record smells like cigarettes. Actually listened to this front to back a couple months ago. It's better than ever. This may be my favorite rap album. 

Misfits: The Comp with the Scary Skull on It

This is always good for a laugh. Do you think Glen Danzig can even go to the grocery store without being mercilessly clowned by pretty much everyone? Fuckin Danzig, dude. What the fuck.

Okay. 

That about covers it. There's another half-dozen or so but I don't feel like putting them into this shitty computer's shitty DVD drive to check what they are. Not today, at least. Be happy you got this much from your favorite blogger: a partial list of CD's that weren't stolen from my car.

leight

*describing a day at Stevens as "ripping?"--told you 2017 is weird.

Can't Handle It vol. 1: Toaster Oven

It's a specific and tremendous pain, knowing your inability to refrain from putting shit on top of the toaster oven exceeds your love for melting cheese on bready things. A good 37% of the recipes I know involve melting cheese on stuff. Panini, pizza, banana splits. But the next reheat could burn the place down. A reversed "CELLULOSE SPONGE" forever seared onto the top of the oven is the giveaway: I am unable to live safely with this technology.

leight

Cory Henry: NaaNaaNaa

This guy is not a Russian bot:



leight

Yikes

I think I get it now.

The teevee babies have morphed into something new. No longer the earth people I understand, they've entered into a symbiotic relationship with their smartphones. Physically, psychologically, everythingly. Take a step back, become that Martian biologist, and tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what you see as you walk down that ramp from your flying saucer and look around: the fleshblobs trade electricity, info flow, and software upgrades for microboosts of adrenaline and counterfeit human contact through the jeejaws.

We're dummies. Arrogant animals. And we're addicted to our phones.

Okay, sure bro. Sounds like an overreaction, and, who cares? I'm'a stay woke while they stumble around looking at their facebook all day, giving themselves scoliosis and nightmares about running out of battery. I overstand. Right?

Oh, here's why it matters: this is how Donald Trump became the President. Holy shit.

Read that. And the stuff linked within.

Double holy shit. Triple stage mega holy shit. Level seven.

The amount of information out there available to marketers is staggering. Every day at work I get creeped out by our ability to target people based on their activity on facebook. The bands they like, where they live, the stuff they casually click on while browsing around. It's all in there, they put it up themselves. We're just selling bikes, trying to remind you to pull the trigger on that next dust collector, but even our clunky efforts work. We sell more bikes when we get sneaky about it.

Imagine what could happen if, instead of selling bikes, we were psycho evil billionaires with our sights set on the biggest cash and power grab of all time. If we automated a process that figured out what turned people into one-issue voters, regardless of what that issue was. Set up some gnarly gray market of anonymous Russian botpeople to agree with Auntie Doris. No matter what crazy shit she drums up in her teevee brain. Zero in on that one thing she just could not stand, and convince her to forget all the other shit, just vote for Donald Trump. Look, there's another story about that pedophile pizza place, I mean where there's smoke there's fire. Right? We're living this:

“with a mere ten ‘likes’ as input his model (Kosinski) could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”

We're living this?

Cool!

I guess we did it to ourselves. Not letting these people off the hook, they're still the ones that voted for Donald Trump...shortsighted racist xenophobe sexist anti-intellectual dummies (who apparently got a little nudge). It's just learning about this whole side of it makes me understand how we got here a little better. Whatever that does.

leight

I'll Tell You How This Doesn't End...

It does not end with 60,000,000 Americans saying, "yeah, you were right. This guy's a piece of shit and we were wrong. We are sexist racist xenophobe dummies. We are ashamed of ourselves. Sorry."

I want out.

leight

I'm Not A Trekkie, But...

This knocks:



I'm on an email with BigLee and WEAK_SAUCE, talmbout ancient drum machine parts. This popped up.

leight

Blogg Snowboarding Day

Nobody told me it was Galactic Go Snowboarding Day, do I need to be on facebook for that? Because that's not happening.

Both lowercase snowboarding and uppercase Snowboarding are better than ever. Here are some reasons why:

ONE: they've finally loosened up. I think a lot of the big money's dried up, so the Jock Factor has been dropped down a bit. There are still SuperAthletes and shit, but one trip to Stevens Pass (the Northwest Capital of Snowboard Marketing*) was all it took to show me there's a new style. I'm not sure these Evo motherfuckers are really having as much fun as their hoots'n'hollarz indicate, but it's way better than aggro viber jocks. There's definitely been a trickle-down effect from the pro dorktrickers in the last five years. Everybody's on short pointy pow boards, doing those "well this terrain is boring as fuck lemme manufacture a face shot" stuff, and hey, that's generally pretty okay.

I've heard reports from Japan that impossibly cool powder ninjas are riding with a front binding only, and a gas pedal-looking surfboard pad out back. That's gotta be sick.

II: the fucking videos this season are so good. Energy drink budgets seem to squash the stoke. Slo-mo helicopters and one-off cheese wedge gonzo porn is whatever in 2017, I want to relate. I wanna get stoked!

This french fotog went behind the scenes and delivered perfection. Absolute perfection:

This dude is 29 years old. I guess the Beatles were done by that age, but his self-awareness is so refreshing. Maybe it's because I'm a manchild, but boom this shit is so rad!

I caught this one for free on Frequency's site. It stoked me out to triple level seven:

FREE- Trailer from Wonderberry on Vimeo.

Mr. Mueller is definitely the mainest Nico after this (finally surpassing the Alien, and leaving the VU chick in the dust) :

FRUITION - The Life and Dreams of Nicolas Müller from The Orchard on Vimeo.
It has it all. His tripped-out Bruce Lee shit, a sense of humor, and his riding. SNOWBOARDING. This dude always does what you want him to do. He pops around off lumpers, throws roosts on his way to impossible transfers, he rides just like you wanna. He's on some majyckal shit.

(note: if I were to find myself in Japan, and my crew just so happened to be sharing a small ski area's runs with only one other gaijin crew, and that fucking crew looked like this,

Such a legendary crew of people who I have looked up to forever... Thank you @absinthefilms @nicolasmuellair @mikkel_bang @deanblottogray @chocorompe and @ripzinger being in Japan with you all was unreal. Powder heals the soul and this trip brought some much needed balance to the chaos of life. 🌨🙏🏼🌟 Congrats to Nico for the release of his movie Fruition, make sure to download  it today! Link in bio 🏔❄️

A photo posted by Kimmy  Fasani (@kimmyfasani) on Jan 17, 2017 at 5:16pm PST

YOU'D BETTER GODDAMN BELIEVE I AM GETTING IN THERE. B.RICE: HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT?)

Love it!

THIRDLY: the bloggs are super good. We got WWD and the one you're reading now. What more do you need? Wamp wamp.

Also: as the world burns, the waves in the jet stream are tweaked. The snow in North America has been FIRING this season, providing plenty of STR9_POW to one and all. Silver linings in the End of Days.

And the gear. The gear is amazing. Look at my shit, JUST LOOK AT IT:

I'm back on Mervin, and I don't really see me finishing out my career on anything else. Nuff said. From that first Litigator I got from Bob at Bikefactory, to the Emma Peels and the Cummins and that J.Lynn, to that Altered Genetics I got from FloRida (!), to the BLACK BASE SNOW MULLET, to this motherfucking BIRDMAN BIRDMAN AKA ALPENTALEX PRO MODEL, this is my shit.

Those Unions are the best bindings that'll ever be produced. Solved. The only weak spot in that pic are my Voile split bindings, like seven years old, and you know what?--all they do is work. Definitely angling to keep it brand loyal with the splitboard clampers (cough, WWD), but goddamn if everything isn't so fucking dialed. And super cheap. #outsideisfree

SO YES: some old motherfucker said some shit on my instagram about snowboarding being dead, about Snowboarding being dead, and I'm like fuck that noize bro that's not even a joke-able. Break yourself, vool.

leight

*I still need to go a couple more times to pay off my Stevens Passpass, so I can't really go off on them yet...

Wolverines

My Red Dawn fantasy always had me camping out in the Alpental Valley. We'd have the box canyon to ourselves, probably have a sick compound where we'd build some snake runs. Jumps. Winter Spring Summer Fall: that's the spot. We'd have sentries up on the ridges, monitoring I-90 for Chinese troop movements, ready to pin em in, maybe blast rocks down on them if they tried to barge. It wouldn't be too bad. Never figured out the food situation, or who'd be the eye doctor, but comeonsrsly this is a childhood fantasy, not real life!

Turns out it's not the Chinese. It's the Russians. And Donald Trump. Yeah, that same guy--Donald Trump! And xenophobic sexist racist asshole dummies. Surreal.

And a few hundred yards away from Lot 4 is not even remotely remote enough to create and sustain New Alexandria.* And there's too much dogshit. Way too much. And some clueless noob would leave their GPS on--or actually, just livestream trying to find a place to sled^--and blow the spot before Ivan'n'dem even finished the barbed wire fence around the Issaquah internment camp.

But that's where I've been. Me and my buddies. On our snowboards. On our splitboards. Can't do nothing but.

leight

*of course I'm in charge.

^srslybro: there's the blind downswinger corner, and the very end of the grooming, under Trash Can. And 30 foot closeout drop-ins off the snow wall, over a car reef. You drove past so many other superior sledding zones! What are you doing?

Pants Off Dance Off

I wanted to go straight Haminal on Dr. C when he grabbed his bag out of Emoji Car, inspected its contents, and announced (in his trademark laconic style): "fock dude. I forgot my pants. And my transceiver's in them."

I don't really know how to rage with any confidence, and I'd live-grammed leaving my boots at Skull Mountain only four days earlier, so I just kinda blanked out. Shaky ground for a freakout attempt.

We got skunked at lost'n'found and felt actual physical pain looking at overpriced Burton pants in the ski shop. My suggestion to just throw my sweatpants over dude's jeans was met with a stare.*  

Then it hit me:

The Snoqualmie Pass Chevron struggles on Yelp. Sounds like the restrooms are bad. I believe it, but what kind of person reviews a gas station restroom on Yelp? That's psychotic behavior, right?

The shitter may be gang diarrhea level seven, but they sell everything in there. They got snax and diabetes drinks. They got tire chains and corndogs. Sure. But they also have clothes: booty pants ballcaps sweatshirts bandanas sunglasses snow pants SNOW PANTS--this motherfucker came up on some sick pants at a gas station! 40 bucks. Cargo pockets and everything. You KNOW A-Man's got a spare beeper, so the plan was back on, with only a short delay. Hashtag let's roast it. Chevron for life.

Our skin track was in from the day before, so we powered up and easily ripped off a couple in Drone Zone, hit Matty's Run and be'd out in time to beat traffic back to the city. Dr C did a 40mph roost that set my gram on fire:

A video posted by 🅰 (@comeonsrslytho) on Jan 2, 2017 at 4:58pm PST

Boom. Sick day. Sick zone. Sick pants.

The capper came a week later, when Dr. C tried to return the pants. Dude brought a receipt and a dream up to the counter:

Comeonbrosrsly. For real.

This is a gas station. The fuck you thinking? They're not doing returns. And those pants are sick! Magic pants! You keep those forever!

leight

*it was pretty windy and cold. Like single digits cold. Dude would've probably froze his legs off and been Lieutenant Dan for real if he would've followed my cottony advice.