Time was, kids on a ski hill or mountain bike would buy a helmut and attach a small (or sometimes huge) camera to the side with a wad of duct tape. Sometimes they’d balance the lopsided weight of the camera with an actual, real weight on the other side — carrying a literal sack of potatoes while ripping up the mini back bowls of Southern Minnesota. Now, Liquid Image is offering a pair of goggles for about $150 designed to serve this very need with a built-in camera above the nose piece. These goggles, nearly identical to my first pair from 1988, are about two steps away from a built-in blue tooth to answer phone calls or offer a heads-up GPS-generated virtual trail map on the inside of the lens. An alpine version of StreetHawk. No more icy cameras, glove juggling, or sacks of potatoes.
Amidst some company transition and expansion, I’ve taken advantage of some sporadic downtime by watching bits of ski movies online. Ski movies are great: 90-minute music videos interspersed with comedy bits and slow-motion helicopter shots of gorgeous mountain powder. You probably know by now that I’m a huge fan of the uber-popular underground flick “The Blizzard of Ahhh’s.” And what better than a ski movie trailer featuring a remake of Rush’s Tom Sawyer? Well here it is. Bonus points for filming in Colorado.
Named “The world’s most recognizable skier,” Glen Plake started out skiing in the mid-80′s and quickly became a cult phenom among skiers and ski shop owners and ski movie buffs. Here’s how he made the leap from just skiing to making money skiing.
In celebration of so much snow around the country, here’s another clip from the famous 1998 Greg Stump ski flick “The Blizzard of Ahhh’s,” arguably the favorite late ’80′s wintertime movie from the Skyline neighborhood in Mankato, Minnesota.
I learned to ski in Southern Minnesota, and in the late 1980′s, this was the movie to watch — Greg Stump’s “The Blizzard of Ahhh’s.” In the world of ski movies (most of you’ve probably seen Warren Miller flicks on a Sunday on ESPN), this marked the beginning of the documentation of (what is now “so-called”) extreme skiing. For the uninitiated, this movie has an enormous cult following among skiers. With a soundtrack by the German techno-pop band “Act” (which later became “Propaganda”) and lots of neon, it’s pretty sweet. It also introduced Glen Plake, the world’s most recognized skier (he’s the guy with the mohawk), to the world. A little 5-minute ski zen for you on this snowy Friday. You can thank me later.
