JH Underground – Jackson Hole, Wyoming news, sports and music blog from Jackson Hole, Wyoming

I awoke to –15 degrees this morning. Saw a reading of –22 at Jackson Hole Airport the other night (via the Mountain Weather Web site).

Spring will be here soon, no?

Already anticipation is running high for the free Michael Franti and Spearhead concert at Teton Village on March 29. Only two months to go.

The excitement level ratcheted up another notch here this week with the discovery that The Radiators will open the show.

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Posted under festivals, funk, music, new orleans, rock, teton village

It recently has come to my attention that PC users stuck in the stone age of computing accessing this site via Internet Explorer are greeted by a confusingly jumbled page.

I work on a Mac and use Firefox as my browser, and most of my friends do likewise, so that’s why it’s taken me so long to realize something is awry on Explorer.

Alarmingly, 42 percent of my readers use Internet Explorer, I discovered this week.

I’m working to fix the problem. But in the meantime, you might consider buying a Mac trying this free download of Mozilla Firefox for Windows.

Not only will you be able to view this page in its proper layout, but you’ll have a browser you can customize with hundreds of options to suit your personal tastes. The makers of Firefox also say it’s faster and more secure, but I can’t vouch for that (although I suspect it’s true).

What I can say for sure: It almost never crashes, unlike Explorer.

Posted under from the publisher

Nothing like a risqué costume party to heat up the January doldrums.

Saturday night’s Players’ Ball, thrown by Jackson Hole Snowboarder magazine at Snow King Resort, may have been the biggest bash of the winter. The caliber of the festivities, and the size of the crowd (800-plus?), were on par with Halloween.

Revelers came decked out in style, as seen in this gallery of images by photographer Morris Weintraub, who worked overtime to document the ball.

Skids, ski-lebrities and would-be rock stars turned out to boogie to a slate of DJs headed by the New York hip-hop duo El Gant and Portland’s DJ Wicked. The dance floors were packed in the hotel’s Grand Room and downstairs in The Lounge (née Shady Lady). The crowd was funked up.

Once the resort emptied out, the merrymaking lasted in some quarters until dawn.

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Posted under entertainment, skids, snow king, snowboarding

This is what hiking Mount Glory has come to: one boot-packed trail for the hardcore, and another for the slow afoot.

It used to be that the daily race over Teton Pass was the “Idaho 500″ – commuters in Subarus and monster pickups vrooming between the bedroom communities of Victor and Driggs and work in Jackson Hole.

This winter the traffic on Glory’s “Stairway to Heaven” has been astounding, particularly on powder weekends. It’s not unusual to find 25 skiers atop the summit. Last Saturday, at 2:30 p.m., people were still waiting in cars atop the pass for a parking spot.

Congestion on the bootpack recently led to at least one incident in which a hardcore type “turtled” a slow hiker apparently unwilling to move out of the way, tossing him off the trail into the deep snow. Afterward, skier Jason Tattersall, with help from Teton Pass ambassador Jay Pistono, broke the new route, which is staked with bamboo and ribbons to the west of the main trail.

I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t the rest of life enough of a rat race that people ought to take their time hiking a mountain and soak up the experience?

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Posted under backcountry, skiing

Wow, a cool band from England — and they actually play instruments!

After visiting the Mangy Moose on Tuesday, the New Mastersounds had the Knotty Pine grooving Wednesday with the funkiest organic rhythms from across the pond. There were no DJs or laptops on stage, just tight playing of quaint throwbacks like drums and guitar.

Young guys doing old-school funk, this band is the British counterpart to Galactic, heirs to the New Orleans musical legacy. Both groups pay the most devout homage to The Meters and bring intense energy to retro grooves.

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Posted under funk, knotty pine, mangy moose, music, new orleans