Sage drinking a big glass of Icy wine.

Gimme: Some of that Icy Wine!

You wanna be cool this season? Well do ya punk?

Move along Monster, get the fuck out of the way Red Bull, Drink Water you’re boring, there’s a new beverage taking snowboarding by storm, and it’s called Icy Wine.

It seems like every few seasons there’s a new drink that takes snowboarding by storm. There was PBR’s a long time ago, then there were 4lokos, then fireball was all the rage, and for a few years the guys at Snowboarder Magazine have been trying to make slamming cosmos a thing. But all that shit is whack.

It’s uncivilized, and we like to think of ourselves as people of class and dignity. That’s why we are happy to announce that there’s a new drink for this winter. A delicious drink, a quenching drink, and it’s oh so easy to make.

All you need is some of the cheapest red wine you can find, a glass, and some ice. Then just pour, and enjoy…

ICY WINE!

A photo of Sage Kotsenburg texting me to "throw up the photo of him drinking icy wine"
A photo of Sage Kotsenburg texting me to “throw up the photo of him drinking icy wine”

 

Yours truly, a chick, and a pint glass full of the Icy-ness
Yours truly, a chick, and a pint glass full of the Icy-ness

 

A polish bro, Halldor Helgason and Stan enjoying a fine glass of Icy Wine
A polish bro, Halldor Helgason and Stan enjoying a fine glass of Icy Wine

 

Mark Wiittanen, Snowboard Videographer extraordinaire and "Pink Man" raging with the Icy Wine
Mark Wiittanen, Snowboard Videographer extraordinaire and “Pink Man” raging with the Icy Wine

 

Joe Sexton sucking down some Icy Wine
Joe Sexton sucking down some Icy Wine

 

Follow @icywine_official on your Insta to keep up with the hot trend!


Politics: The “nasty woman” loves you!

Nobody has more respect for snowboarders than her. Tremendous respect. Huge.

Since the day he announced his candidacy back in the spring of 2015, Trump has worked hard to establish the fact that he’s the most inept, uninformed, unprepared, ignorant, sexist, racist, and dangerous candidate in U.S. history. He’s a global embarrassment, proudly anti-intellectual, anti-free speech, and just ugly in every way. But none of this is news.

We’re getting close to election day. His chances of victory, ha! now very slim. And though nobody loves Clinton, she will take it. Nonetheless, all you registered voters who also self-identify as snowboarders, ought to consider the following if you plan to dismiss yourself from the vote or plan to cast your ballot for the Comb-Over Clown: He hates snowboarders & he hates snowboarding.

How do we know? He said so.

On November 6, 2012, he tweeted: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

January 1, 2014:
“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.”

January 25, 2014:
“NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”

January 26, 2014
“Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don’t believe it $$$$!”

For everyone with open eyes and no aversion to the facts & research of the global science community, we know Dumb Donald is wrong. Receding glaciers, Record high global temperatures, Record low snowpack. Later-starting & warmer winters. Longer, hotter summers. Record high CO2 levels in the atmosphere. He’s so wrong. But worse than being willfully ignorant & dead wrong on climate change, is his energy “plan.” Here’s a few chunks of shit we scraped off his campaign website:

Open onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands, eliminate moratorium on coal leasing, and open shale energy deposits.

This means Arctic drilling, destruction of natural habitats, more fracking, and new coal mines the world doesn’t need and the market won’t support.

Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.

Yeah. Fracking, natural gas, & clean coal. Welcome back to 1902. Not a single mention of clean energy investment. Nothing. No solar, no wind, no hydro. Just a backward looking non-plan with zero specifics on how he plans to somehow magically revive the dying & completely outdated fossil fuel industry. But it’s no surprise. This is how he’ll supposedly #MAGA.

Here’s the point: come November 8, vote for snowboarding. Vote Hillary. And no, not that dipshit Gary Johnson or Jill Stein—your precious little protest vote will only narrow the gap between Tic-Tac Trump and President-elect Clinton.

“I won’t let anyone take us backward, deny our economy the benefits of harnessing a clean energy future, or force our children to endure the catastrophe that would result from unchecked climate change.”

-Hillary, November 29, 2015


Gimme: A Master Debater! And Liberace!

Start your season in style!

Right when I was writing about shitty collaborations…like, literally right (with the Grateful Dead + John Mayer feat. Greg Dacyshyn), THIS popped into my heart!

THIS!

Liberace! Mr. Showmanship! Lee (to his friends and lovers (Matt Damon))!

Do it get any better? Let’s read the press release!

Lib Tech and Travis Rice (in cooperation with the Liberace Foundation for the Performing and Creative Arts) are proud to release the T.Rice Pro Yahnker Edition!
Tonight at the final presidential debate on the eve of November’s election we find out who the best master debater is.

To celebrate the coming of the master debater we are launching the limited edition T. Rice Pro Yahnker boards. What’s a T. Rice Pro Yahnker board you ask? Well it’s Lib Ripper Travis Rice’s (you know… “The Fourth Phase”!!) collaboration with visual artist Eric Yahnker (@ericyahnker) a seminal satirical pop culture artist. Yahnker juxtaposes powerful iconography breaking down barriers using humor and beauty to create a healthy discourse. Such is the power of art in all it’s forms whether it be the art of beautiful pop imagery on canvas or the art of flight when Travis gets the perfect pop off the lip or even the art of the political debate where polarizing titans of American communication butt heads on important issues until eventually spiraling down in to an endless feedback loop of middle school “your mamas fat” jokes.

You gotta just take it in, laugh a little and form your own opinion. The T. Rice Pro Yahnker Edition might be just what you need to stay engaged and stay fun. Featuring two of Yahnker’s most iconic pieces of satire the “Honorable Discharge” on the 157 with blunt shape and the “Soaked Statue” on the 161.5 pointy. Both with a base graphic featuring our master of ceremonies Liberace himself seemingly amused at the current brand of American circus.

You want? Buy here!

But if you bold you can win one! Here’s how!

The election is just around the corner and the choice is yours. Blunt or pointy? All terrain freestyle or big mountain freestyle? Pants suit or toupee? Your vote is part of your voice and we want to hear you! So much so that we’re giving away a set of these the limited edition T. Rice Pro Yahnker boards to one lucky voter!

All you have to do is:

1. Vote.

2. Get the “I Voted” sticker.

3. Take a RADICAL picture of you with your sticker.

4. Post it to Instagram with the hashtag #masterdebater16.

Travis will randomly choose the winner on election day! So get to voting and you too can be a master debater!

Do you feel lucky, punk? Well do ya?

The dream! She lives!
The dream! She lives!

Richards: On the joys of tubing!

Would you like to try a new adventure? One guaranteed to thrill?

As a rule, everything surrounding the tube ride is horrible. The bus is hot, crowded, and (since most of your bus-mates are inevitably high schoolers) ridiculously loud; your tube, while walking, is unwieldy and smelly and chafes your arms; and you have to wrestle the cooler, which has unfortunately taken on the ultra-gravity of enough supplies (chips, jerky, fruit, cookies, drinks) for a mid-sized Super Bowl party, into its own snug-fitting tube, then drag it across the frozen parking lot.

But soon the miracle happens: The tube lends you its magical buoyancy and the slide (if that’s the word for an ambiguous, two-miles-per-hour general trend) sweeps you away. It’s hard to overemphasize the passivity of tubing. It is sloth ingeniously disguised as adventure. Though you are outside, you may as well be in your living room watching television. The tube forces you into a nearly horizontal recline, a posture easily mistakable for someone taking a nap. Nature rolls effortlessly by, and in response you alternately breathe and eat.

You float downhill for about five hours, gauging the length of the trip only by the emptiness of the ice chest. This indolence is broken up by a minimum of functional walking: to the cooler (which quickly becomes the most important member of the expedition) or courteously down hill when nature calls.

You try to keep your distance from the convoys of high-school tubers, who tend to slide in circular formations, like threatened wagon trains, around stashes of illegal beer. Occasionally you wave, with veiled condescension, to a fleet of passing skiiers, trapped in their aluminum handcuffs and actively assaulting the mountain with sticks.

Tubing immediately exposes the hypocrisy of other winter sports: Traditional snowboarding, from a tube, looks like an artificial, intrusive, arrogant, faux-refreshing extension of the landlocked ego; snowboarders use the mountain as a fluid blacktop, another surface to conquer with the aid of a board. (I shouldn’t even have to mention the blasphemous walk-on-water hubris of skiers.) Tubing, on the other hand, is fluvial Buddhism: It asks you to submit humbly to the hill, to meet it on its own terms and have a long talk with it in its native language, rather than just flitting around on top of it.

There are no tricks or stunts. You don’t visit, you merge It is your motor. Aside from a tube, the only equipment you need is spiritual: respect for the mountain, an instinct for meditation, and a high regard for inaction.

A 1980s arcade game called Toobin once tried to enliven the water component of this sport with danger—your animated tuber threw aluminum cans at rivals while navigating the waterfalls, fishhooks, and crocodiles—but the game was unconvincing. Tubing on a hill is nothing like that. It is remarkably harmless except, of course, for the danger inherent in all winter sports, especially when mixed with alcohol); nevertheless, a friend of mine, who grew up on in Aspen and always acted as our local guide, often tried to spice our trips with danger. She once told us, for instance, that it was mating season for winter snakes, that cottonmouths were copulating in giant snowbanks as we slid by, and that if we touched them with a stray dangling foot they would spring out in all directions fangs-first.

More credibly, a local informant told me that the Aspen has recently taken on the atmosphere of an international border: He said local police set up a dragnet across the mountain, stopping tubers and arresting anyone carrying illegal substances, handcuffing them in their snowsuits.


Driving that train! High on Dacyshyn!

Some things go together like peanut butter and jelly. Some things don't.

Some things go together. Copy and paste. Peas and carrots. Bon and Jovi. Snowboarding and Slayer.

Some things don’t. The Grateful Dead and anything. John Mayer and anything. The Grateful Dead and John Mayer and anything.

It is a mystery to me, then, why Burton’s Creative Director Greg “Bad Santa” Dacyshyn loves them all so much and loves to roll them into bad collaborations.

You may know Mr. Dacyshyn from such hits as last year’s An Open Letter to Jake and Donna Burton:

You have two senior “leaders” working for you that have undermined you, your company, and the entire snowboarding industry for close to 15 years. The damage is deepening, and unless you take action soon, the situation will go from bad to dire.

They don’t snowboard, flaunt their wealth in the face of your modestly compensated organization, lead by intimidation and fear, and pursue countless failed projects under the guide of “being core” and “building a lifestyle business,” which benefits no one besides themselves.

And last year’s Jake and Donna Burton Respond to the Open Letter:

The internet can be a toxic place full of rumors and anonymous trolls. Don’t confuse their rants with facts. And don’t lose sight of this: It’s a good time to be at Burton. We are so excited about the future, about our direction, and about this great team. The rest is noise.

You want to know what that noise is? Do you?

THE FUCKING GRATEFUL DEAD!

Greg Dacyshyn says:

One of my favorite bands is the Grateful Dead, who have created a new version of the band called Dead & Co. They’re on tour in the US so I’ve been catching shows wherever I can including NYC, Boston and Boulder, Colorado.

burton-x-grateful-dead-event1

Do you know who leads Dead & Co.?

John Mayer!

And BARF CITY!

In case you are lucky and unaware of the the Grateful Dead you might look at their skull motif and you might read their lyrics like, “Driving that train, high on cocaine…” and you might think “Metal.”

But you are wrong. The Grateful Dead is not metal. It is hippie bullshit with a squeeze of rot. It is a Baby Boom of disaster. It is a beard worn long and craggly hiding bits of last night’s fondue dinner.

It ain’t good.

And now to cleanse your palate.