The Adventures of Luke Tanaka: April 2009

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Poorboyz Amateur Hour 3 Webisode-Grizzly Gulch

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Whitefish Round 2

My buddy D-Wall is a choice filmer and invited me up to Whitefish this last weekend for a little park shoot. I ended up staying for three days with one day of pow pow and two days of park. Big Mountain is sooo sick on a pow day because there are hundred of cliffs to throw yourself off of. Their park is also surprisingly good . Troy and Iain took some sweet pics....

Switch 5 trucker

Switch 7 nose

Switch 9 nose mute

Switch 7 mute

Switch 7 nose

Rodeo 5 critical

Rodeo 5 Nippon

Wall Stall

Another rodeo 5 japan

Idaho

So after a couple weeks of hangin with Durtschi in Bozeman, we headed down to Brundage Idaho to get some more shots. Ross and I stayed at the Becker residence for a couple of days. They were very hospitable and I had a grand ol' time staying there! Brandon took us out on the sleds near Brundage, and I must say...this place is awesome! Its fun in a different sense because they dont have huge mountains, but rather super playful zones. After Brundage we made our way up to Silver Mountain for an event called Silver Sessions. Once again I met up with Collins and the rest of the 4bi9 homies. The event itself turned out to be the biggest joke ever. The features were below sub-par and everything in general was unorganized. On the plus side however, we got put up in one of the nicest hotels ive ever stayed at that included a full on indoor water park. After about a day, everyone ended up leaving and i caught a ride with Sir. Blake Nyman back to Bozeman. Lesson learned.....

Road Gap in Brundage

I did a helicopter

My new hair-do a.k.a the mushroom

Rimeazine

Open publication - Free publishing - More hat

Jackson Hole

At the beginning of the year MSU has a one day deal for a 6 day pass at Jackson Hole. I bought one last year and it was very much worth it. While I was in NZ I called and reminded Alannah to pick me up one also. Its a good thing I remembered to do that because Lonna and I had an excellent time in Jackson this season. Jackson itself is only about 4 hours away from Bozeman so its rather easy to get down there for a weekend of shred. We went down three separate weekends with the last weekend being the deepest. Jackson is easily one of my favorite spots in the world :)

Jackson Hole slackcountry in the backgound....epic

Lonna, ain't she adorable??

Warm up line on Cody Peak

3rd try, finally got it...I was getting sick of hiking...

Little shifty on the warm up line

I think Lonna shredded this harder than a lot of the dudes

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Utah

So we left Montana to Salt Lake City to film another webisode. We stayed at the 4bi9 house and skied Grizzly Gulch the entire week. We ended up meeting up with Timmy Durtschi to hit some jumps. We spent a few days hitting random features and eventually got talked into building up Pyramid Gap by Tim. The build for this gap takes an incredible amount of work, it took us two days to build the jump and inrun. Collins and I ended up not hitting it because the inrun is so gnarly. Tim however decided to throw a double rodeo 9 over it....buhhhhhh.

Tim claimin it. As you can see, this jump is somewhat large

Shot from across the valley. The black spec next to the jump is a person

Dig Dig Dig

The crew Collins, Witt, Ross, and Paul

This zone was fun......yayyyyy

Little jump carved out of a windlip

Top of Grizzly Gulch

Are you beeping??

Really fun zone on the backside of Grizzly Gulch

Switch 5

Artsyshred

Timothy and I

View from the top....yikes

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Montana

So I moved to Bozeman and took the semester off in hopes of getting residency to make my tuition at MSU cheaper. I've been able to do a ton of filming around the Montana area. This year is the first year that I've ever filmed with any professional company. I started making webisodes with Poorboyz Productions early in the season. We did some filming in Whitefish and Big Sky.

Heres the link to the webisode:

Amateur Hour 2: Collin Collins and Luke Tanaka

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Handdrag in Whitefish

Tap-er-oo

Inversion in Whitefish

Cliff Shifty in Whitefish

Alaska

After Hawaii, I made my way back home to AK and was greeted with the best opening week I've ever skied. Something like 100 inches in 4 or 5 days...madness. Alyeska is so cool at the beginning of the year because the terrain hasn't been filled in by the crazy amount of snow that accumulates over the season. When it dumps this early, the result is fluffy, creamy shred with features that usually disappear by mid-January. The skiing was incredible but was soon haltered by the longest/coldest cold-snap that I can ever remember Anchorage having. Temps dipping down to -22 degrees quickly dampered the fat pow vibes as frostbite became a major issue. Usually I spend a ton of time in Turnagain Pass around this time of year. This season I was only able to go a few times when the temperature eased up. So with 1 week of incredible pow and 4 weeks of sub-arctic temperatures, I bid AK farewell and left for Montana.

Heres a link to a short video of one cold-ass day in the Turnagain BC:

Cork 7 First hit

All of these pictures were taken in one day by Travis Durtschi:

I'd like to think that I got full extension on this one..

Alyeska..Glorious, Magnificent, Beautiful

I love this little double.

Perfect example, by February this zone is all but a roller

Stoked.. good vibes all around

Gear Jammer....classic

South Face non-dairy creamer

Whipped Cream

North Face uber-creamy

My favorite line at alyeska, eagle rock

Josh pushed me over in the air....end result=pain

180 sir...

Hawaii

Leaving New Zealand I met up with mom and Landis in Hawaii. We stayed in Honolulu for a couple of nights and then made our way up to the north shore of Oahu. After a long long winter it was nice to have a little taste of summer. I learned how to surf and skimboard, hooray!

Landis took some dope pictures: