January 16th: Nashoba Freeride Series Rail Jam

              I had heard about the rail jam from Matt Ciampa when I was just skiing for fun earlier in the week. I showed up at Nashoba at 9am ready to work. I went up to the office and saw Ciampa and Jon sitting at the long desk, side-by-side, watching footage for the website. Ciampa is a kid, maybe two or three years out of high school, who is the filmer and video editor for Nashoba's website. He has a similar job as me, only he goes all the time, he actually edits the footage together, and he gets paid to do it. Jon handed me the still camera, handed Ciampa the video camera, and we were off.

                I rode down the park, taking pictures of all of the features in the park so that Jon could update the website. Then I went to the first feature of the rail jam. The kids had an hour to warm up, and then the competition began. I hiked around the box, taking pictures of the competitors as they practiced. Everybody seemed to just be having fun and getting each other stoked; I could hardly believe that it was a competition.

                Once practice was over, the first round of the competitions went down on the flat-down box. There was a large range in age, from about 9-20 something years old, but everybody was throwing down impressive tricks. Obviously there were a fair number of kids who didn't really know what they were doing, but the amount of talent that was there performing was really incredible. I didn't expect to see the caliber of tricks that I ended up seeing at such a small mountain. After that round came round two on the doghouse box, then the final round on the "tank turret."

                After the competition, I took photos of the awards ceremony, where the first place winners were given their prizes, and random prizes were thrown in the air during the product tosses. All of the kids who competed were having a great time, and the park staff that judged the competition was having just as much fun.

                The final part of my day was going back to the office in the lodge to upload the photos to the mountain's server. I ended up taking something like 1200 pictures that day, so I deleted the useless pictures, and kept the good ones. Once I was done with that, the pictures were uploaded onto the official website and the park website.