The early season in Québec usually revolve around 2 things : overcrowded lift lines and early season rail jams. This year Orage, Piktur-This and Val St-Come teamed up to bring us the Orage Freeskittle.

    Val St-Come is the home/base mountain of some of my good friends at Static Motion Productions, I decided I would head over and check the event out early in the morning instead of hitting my backyard park all day, I jumped into the car equipped with the new Moment Plank prototypes, my newly molded Full Tilts and a big piece of frozen pizza. Once I arrived to the venue, I realized that the set up was pretty much perfect for a spin to win contest and wanted to see what everybody was doing before entering the contest. While the main features were perfect for spinning like a top, a few other looked like a lot of fun to me so I spent a bunch of time with my buddy Jonathan Couillard aka Jo Couille (Jo Balls) to get some pictures. After spending all of the morning practice session hiking like a mad man and not working on any comp tricks, I decided that poaching the course when nobody was around and building my own set ups was something I’d like to do more then competing. Not to mention that the level of riding was insane and that I didn’t really feel like spinning 450 then 360 switch up 270 out the first flat down box like most of the top contenders were doing.

all abort - Photo by: Jonathan Couillard

jumping over fences into gaper crowd - Photo by: Jonathan Couillard

those tails are made for tapping, and that's just what they do... - Photo by: Jonathan Couillard

    Spinning a lot is fun, but doing it for judges and ending up doing the same stuff everybody is doing isn’t exactly where I want my skiing to go. I didn’t enter the comp and went on filming and taking pictures with my buddies when the course was empty and when the tourist were not busy  standing up in the landing areas of my homebuilt set ups.

Once your bored with hitting a feature, you can always  do a screaming seamen off the jump onto it. - Photo by: Jonathan Couillard

tail bonk are played, screaming seamen bonk is the new hot shit - Photo by: Jonathan Couillard

    All in all I had a lot of fun shredding and watching the young guns from Quebec wrecking shit on the course and I gotta give props to my man Alex Bellemare for having the craziest smoothest big spin run I ever saw until he screwed up on the bottom table feature cause there wasn’t much you could do on it. The little monkey did 450 on-360 switch up-270 out into a 270 on-switch up-630 out without moving a muscle, damn kids theses days.  Props to everyone in the organization and all the riders involved for making such a good show and hopefully I’ll see you again next year at the next Freeskittle if I’m not too busy jumping over fences into gapers.

Photo by: Jonathan Couillard