Holy OlyThe Northwest's annual tribute to a giant beer can
One would think that at a contest named for a giant can of beer, drinking would be slightly more important than snowboarding. And one would be right, sort of. Most of the drinking at the Holy Oly, the Summit at Snowqualmie’s annual quarterpipe-anti contest, was actually an evening occurrence. On February 25, people descended from as far away from So Cal and New Hampshire for the event, which was essentially a cross between the World Quarterpipe Championships and the Banked Slalom. The quarterpipe likened it to the former and the duct tape used to hold on bibs to the latter. But what’s more important than the contest is my level of blowing it. Apparently Summit East is only open on the weekends. We had already blown it on Friday, which was a sunny powder day by not getting up to Washington until the afternoon. We did, however, skate the Arlington park, which is equivalent to riding powder. Anyway, about blowing it, we missed out on pow on Friday and assumed that Saturday’s riding wouldn’t be that hot. So we got up to the mountain at noon. Incase you can’t put two and two together from this disjointed paragraph, no one had touched the pow that had been accumulating all week at Summit East until Saturday morning. And as we were dining at the Family Pancake House, rad was getting seriously shredded.
But don’t fret, when we rolled in at noon there were still a few turns and we got them all, then headed down to the giant QP to watch the shred action. Snowpark Technologies was on hand to shape a perfect quarterpipe, but more importantly, the event’s main sponsor Mervin Manufacturing had brought in Mr. Cory Grove to feed everyone Cobra Dogs all day long. Although no one knew what was going on at any point, the action was pretty non stop. Dudes were shredding and the win was a tie between Luke Mathison and Allister Schultz. The format of the contest and judging were somewhat of a mystery, but both dudes we totally ripping so that part made sense. Also, the bigger mystery was regarding the cases of Olympia beer that were allegedly in existence. As it turned out, they didn’t come out until the awards, and they cost $2. That was weird, but the rest of the contest was a true Northwest good time and a better excuse for a bunch of crusty industry folk to rub elbows and talk about being awesome.
-BG
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