Jackson Hole Underground

On arriving at Teton Village on Friday for the WyObama party, I ran into snowboard star Travis Rice and showed him my Obama T-shirt.

“I told a girl I liked Obama,” Rice recalled of a recent encounter, “and I totally got her digits.” [Translation for those over 40: She gave him her number.]

Then I walked into the Village Cafe and found a table of snowboarders relaxing over burritos and beers. “Are you guys here for the Obama party?” I asked, skeptical.

They reached into their pockets and produced dog-eared, folded, slightly soggy bits of paper: their voter registration receipts. They proudly held them aloft.

Barack Obama has made it cool to give a shit.

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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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Ay, chihuahua!

Looks like a snowboarder went for a tumble down Taco Bell Chute last night. A cold tumble. The temperature at Jackson Hole Airport this morning was -15 degrees.

The debris ran all the way across Flat Creek but did not appear to form a dam. There is a layer of ice over the water at the bottom of the gully.

This dude looks to have been carried for perhaps 50 to 100 feet, before he got himself out of trouble and resumed making turns on the ridge. He probably crossed the creek and ordered a half-pound cheesy bean and rice burrito.

Sick, hermano.

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I concluded Powder Week at JH Mountain Resort with one more out-of-bounds run, this time in Granite Canyon.

When the guys from Nordica skis, my assigned partners for the afternoon, approached me about skiing Granite, I was leery, to say the least. The north-facing, cliff-laden chutes already had seen one serious avalanche and one stranded snowboarder that week.

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It’s dumping out again, which means skiers and snowboarders have to eat well after a day of hard charging in the hills.

For the skids, there’s no better bargain right now than the ski bum special at the Million Dollar Cowboy Steakhouse, beneath the Cowboy Bar on the Square. $5 gets you a burger and PBR.

And this is no ordinary burger.

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