I spent the 2010 winter season shredding the cottonwood canyons and local terrain parks in the area. When I wasn?t at Park City lapping the parks, I was out hiking around Grizzly Gulch getting some slack country turns and learning the ways of the backcountry. I?ll definitely be more prepared for next season, allowing for greater adventures into the unknown.Getting Artsy in Grizzly Gulch

Fun!
During the evenings, I coached for Axis Freeride at the Olympic Park. With a medium sized jump and lots of low impact rails/boxes, the UOP is the perfect training ground for kids looking to improve their skills. It was very cool to see younger kids learning new tricks and progressing astonishingly fast, I even learned some new stuff with them. It?s definitely the best job to have for the winter season!
My favorite day this season was in the beginning of April. Utah was hit with a sizable storm and I got to ski with my olderbrother Tim Durtschi for a day. We were going to ski Alta but due to the amount of snow that in fell Little CottonwoodCanyon, a huge avalanche from Mt. Superior closed the road. Instead of waiting in a long line of cars, we decided to head over to Brighton for an amazing day of trickery into powder and lots of laps on Milly lift. I dropped off a few rocks and small cliffs after Tim, which isn?t something I normally do so it was nice to try something different and push the envelope.Faceshots all day at Brighton!!
180 into pow
As for competitions this year, I competed in the 4th annual Queen?s Cup Open at Park City. It was very fun and I?m glad I participated in the event. This was my third year attending and I ended up winning it for the second time! Again they held it on Pick n? Shovel it was such a fun event complete with beautiful weather and great people. Because I won, I got the chance to film in the super sweet park shoot, a women's only photoshoot held after the event. But it didn?t go quite as smoothly as anybody would have liked. The weather was very windy and the jump we were supposed to be shooting on in Kings Crown was taken by another group . So we tried to make the best of what we had and filmed some of the features on the top of the run instead. I got a shot doing a sniper tap on a hip with a barrel, its one of my favorite shots I?ve ever gotten on skis. Then we just skied some PC powder the rest of the week, it was great.Sniper tap!
Fisheye 540 from Queens Cup
This past week I went up to Mt. Hood for a few fun days of skiing at the 4th Annual West Coast Sessions. The turn out was awesome, the features were an absolute blast, and everybody threw down despite the less than favorable weather. But I've learned that that is to be expected when dealing with Timberline. This was the my third West Coast Sessions of the four, I missed last year and am so glad I got to join in on the fun this year! I spent most of my time there hot lapping the park with Carrie Rossman and it was so much fun!4th Annual West Coast Session
With some downtime at my Mom's house, I decided to work on my season edit. I managed to gather enough shots from the season to make a decent one. I wish I could have gotten more shots of better tricks but those will have to wait for another time. I'm proud of it, mostly because I did all the editing with a little help from friends. I think it's my best yet, but there is still some room for improvement, which is what is so great about this sport, you can always improve on something! Enjoy!Erica Durtschi Skis in 2010 from Erica Durtschi on Vimeo.Now I?m currently in Oregon and I?m not sure what my plans are for the summer. Regardless of what I do, I?ll be making updates on the Surface blog, the Saga blog or my personal blog. So keep looking at those.I?d like to thank Brady Perron, Witt Foster, and Collin Collins, for letting me tag along on various excursions it was so much fun watching them and my new goal is to learn how to land/ski switch in powder, They make it look so easy.Thanks for reading! - Erica "MERICA" Durtschi

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