nz open and down days.

NZ open was this past weekend. the slopestyle riders had a pretty crappy foggy day for jumping, but for saturday and the pipe it cleared up and was super nice. Pipe was riding pretty good. a few weird kinks in it, but in general it was riding sweet as.
They were trying out a new judging system for the contest where each trick is given a score (instead of the whole run). I think it's good in theory but really hard in practice. For slope a little handrail suddenly has the same value as an 80 foot jump, which it shouldn't. and in pipe there's no way to fairly compare someone doing 4 hits versus someone doing 6 hits. It needs some work still, but right now i'm still a fan of overall judging.
I'd planned on arriving in NZ so i'd have a week of riding before the contest day, but due to poor weather i'd only managed to get 3 days in. Which kinda sucked. Not feeling extremely on point to do really well in the comp, i tried to challenge myself and do runs with tricks i hadn't practiced yet. I tried 2 different runs. i fell on the first one on a switch backside 720. Then for my second run started with a mctwist 720, switch backside 540, cab 900, switch backside 720 and finished with a backside 900. The run went ok, but with it being pretty tech and me being out of practice it was a little lower than what i would have liked. So i ended up in 15th place. All good. Was a good way to kickstart my trip.

The following day i headed up to snowpark to take some jump laps. After a few warm ups I ended up hitting a step up to the bagjump airbag a few times before they shutit down. red bull had the setup for a few weeks for some of their team shreds. Pretty cool setup with a step up into the bag and a step up to snow right next to it. and now its open to everyone for their hucking delight.
We tried to go up there yesterday to hit it again but the weather was turning and it was way too windy for the bag. So we messed around all over the park. couple jump laps, hit some rails, over to the pipe. SNowpark is pretty fun as it's really small, everything is usually pretty good and chair rides are entertaining as you can watch people huck themselves all over the place.

new zealand has pretty unpredictable weather and we're on another crappy weather day. When it's thick cloud or snowing here it's really hard to ride as there's no trees or anything to give definition. So generally we go skating, play golf or everyone's favorite blogging!

I'm staying with Will jackways and abby lockheart in they're sick little house right on the lake and has a small mini on the side of the house. which gets hit up whenever it's dry out, which is not today! mini golf in queenstown.

We might head up to some clubfields this week to chase some pow and get a few shots.
we'll see what the weather brings!
jl

abby with a rock to fakie with will watching

me with a front rock