aemka.ch

what a week! after driving for 6 hours straight our crew consisting of howzee the photodawg a.ka. “hauschka”, nik huber a.k.a. “fizzle” and me arrived at the beautiful villa excelsior, in the heart of a at first sight very idyllic town called bad gastein. it was saturday afternoon and the weather forecast for sunday wasn’t positive at all, so we had the brilliant idea to go out and get our drink on…the next day i had 2 hours of sleep and a missing tooth. on sunday we were pretty much chilling and sleeping all day long, and snowfall kicked in. in the evening we had dinner in a nice chalet with alot of ribs and fries followed by a super slow motion sled ride in the deep but heavy fresh.

on monday it was finally time to make it happen. me and howzee drove around town and searched for spots while fizzle and simon abt started shaping a small quarterpipe in front of a waterfall. as we arrived at the spot and started hitting the quarter we noticed that the snow that was really geat to sculpt obstacles kept crumbling apart and that the shots werent really the bomb. so we switched to riding a wooden rail right next to our quarter, also without the success of gaining a good photo.

thats when it was time to get serious… we stopped by a nice doublekink ledge on the rooftop of an abandoned indoor swimming pool, after we set up the spot we shaped a gap bomp drop and simon and howzee were shooting inside the complex, riding down a small set of stairs and jumping over the last three steps onto a tiled floor sprinkled with broken beer bottles. that definatley wasn’t worth ruining the board

howzee took a hike to the other side of the canyon and shot me and fizzle on the doublekink, sniper style…i had to hit switch 50-50 and fizzle threw down some fs 50-50 gap outs, finally, our first bangers! the complex was located on top of a huge cliff and was three stories high and howzee caught it from the other side of the valley. as spectacular as the pics looked it was also a challenge for me being afraid of hights to strap into my board. my knees were shaking and after i cleared it i was totally relieved. it was time for simon to jump the gap drop. he got his shot after three tries. that was a rap, and we went home and i hit the sauna, drank a beer and went to sleep.

on tuesday we hit the mountain and i started off by jumping a cliff right next to the liftstation, but the pic was no good. we got one powderspray of simu and split up and started building two massive booters. simu and howzee were the first to finish while me and fizzle were busy with our “mission impossible”. we stopped shoveling and headed up to the other kicker and simu and me hit it one time and decided that the shape wasnt smooth to suit our speed and we could build another row of blocks onto the take off.

day 5, we created a monster… i hit kicker nr.1 only one time and landed a perfectly tweaked out bs7 mute and devoted myself to filming my fellas and shaping kicker nr.2. by now i had 2 shots clocked. fizzle hit the kicker numerous times and had alot of fun.

on thursday there was partly rain and clouds so we wanted to get some more urban action. we scouted around in my subaru and descovered a big fence that was made to protect the train station from tumbling down boulders and avalanches. we shaped a mini tranny to do some blunts and handplants. after shaping we headed back to the hotel to dry our boots that were soaking wet and get some rest. sauna time!

7:00 pm , it was slowly getting dark so we bought some salt and headed to the fence spot. we set up the generator with the spotlight and started riding right away, although it started to rain. we were lightly frustrated at the moment it turned out to be a good session with great shots and also a really funny crew shot featuring simu’s stack footy miniramp wich he built in protest to our scetchy quarter. after we got what we wanted we stopped by a little restaurant to eat pizza. we were totally over…

friday was our last day and also moment of truth for kicker nr.2. the weather was nice and we took the gondola to the top. temperature was well above 0° C and we had to discover that the kicker was melting away. it took us another 2 hours to shape. after that i hit the beast although i was really sceptical cause there were rocks hidden in the landing. i charged it full speed and landed on the nuckle ontop of mossy rocks covered with 10 cm of snow. thats when we thought: f*ck it!

so we met our dawg from pontresina, duck and drank some jägermeisters on the peak and hit the park and had alot of fun hitting a mini kicker line the rest of the day .

after a fun last party on friday evening we headed back on saturday morning back to switzerland… we arrived at 8pm at the nbc house. it was a long week and a real fight to get our stuff done. i was mashed…

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