While the rest of the SASS crew made their way to Hunter Mountain for the Reclaim the Fame rail jam, I went back to my alma mater, Williams College, to help run the now-infamous Weeny Jam.  The 3rd Annual Weeny Jam, put on by the Williams Ski & Snowboard Club and sponsored by South America Snow Sessions, is a yearly exercise in the rediculous and a way for the nerds at Williams to finally get out of the library and enjoy themselves.  Think of it as the Trans Am with hot dogs, free roller coaster rides, a bangin’ DJ, and a palm tree-lined mini-jib course.

The 2010 Weeny Jam course.  Get pumped!

        SASS brought a bag of goodies to hand out to the winners of contests like Best Run Eating a Dog, Best Pairs Performance, and Best Run with an Inflatable.  A new contest, Best Grom, was instituted this year for the plethora of shred-goblins that showed up to Alex’s Park at Jiminy Peak and heckled me every five minutes for prizes.  Luckily, when I announced that the prize for Best Grom would be a case of Capri-Sun, they left me alone for a few minutes.

Kids getting strapped up in the SASS VIP area, and Lucas gets down with some Williams folk in the DJ booth

         Williams’ own Chuck Kolmer, aka DJ Dirty Deeds, bumped the instrumentals for the duration, and the SASS DJ booth quickly turned into the VIP section, and also the scene of my on-mic heckling of nearly everyone present as part of my emcee duties.  No tele skier could get in a run without a mention of either Phish or granola, although I have to give Crosby Fish ’10 credit for crushing himself on his tele-heli attempts until he started skiing away from them towards the end of the Jam.  The Weeny Jam is also great for the non-park types, as Will Bobsein and pal Paul Rollo rented skis just so that they could perform the world’s first in-competition Weeny Exchange, which involved a couple fake-out figure 8 turns before the two turned into each other and taking a perfectly-timed chomp out of each other’s dogs before turning away to the raucous applause of the crowd.  It might have been the highlight of my week.  Unfortunately, the technical difficultly of the Weeny Exchange was just not high enough to beat a pair of groms who coordinate their own take on the weeny exchange while one of them slid the rainbow box.  

         In another highlight, former Williams alpine racer Tavis Moonan sent a HUGE backflip right to his feet off the ripple of a jump Jiminy had set up, after which point inverted aerials were promptly outlawed.  Tavis, finally freed from the rigors of college racing, has taken to the park and is apparently now landing 10′s.  Hell yeah, Tavis!  After a round-robbin tournament of Rock, Paper, Scissors for a pair of next year’s Seth Morrison Oakley Crowbars, one lucky grom walked away with the sweet new goggles, but no grom could complain, as nearly every one of them walked away with a shirt, a Bern helmet, Dakine gloves, or a Herd hat.

DJ Deeds on the beats, and the groms breaking out in hives at the site of sick schwag… next year’s Seth Morrison Crowbars!

RPS for the goggles; this homeboy was stoked with his prize!

         After a night of sending it back at Williams, Lucas, myself and two of my Williams home boys, Eric Mayer and Nate Brevard, got a late (ready: 1:15) start at Mt. Snow to check out the much-hyped new park scene at Carinthia.  It was sick!  The Nitro park was especially suited to my little-to-no park talent, with a seemingly endless line of boxes, rails, stalls, jumps, and an artificial cliff drop, all right under the lift and running the length of the quad.  Mt. Snow may have built a park whose hot-lapability outguns even Waterville Valley’s Exhibition park with its poma lift.

The tip of the jib iceberg that is Carinthia.

          Thanks Vinnie for the Mt. Snow tickets, and big ups to Jason, Douggie, and the rest of the Jiminy park crew for helping the Williams Ski & Snowboard Club put on another killer Weeny Jam!