SURF ITALIAN : Follow one of the best young surfers in this new webseries of 6 episodes: Leonardo Fioravanti – 2013 ASP European Junior Champion!
It was the first or second day of a massive 5-day storm that dumped over 60 inches of snow on Vail, the very same storm that later that week took the life of my good friend Joe Timlin and 4 others in the deadly Loveland Pass avalanche. The storm that re-opened Vail and other ski areas a week after their “closing” day. My good friend Andy and I had a righteous day of shredding in-bounds with friends and decided to end the day by hiking for some good East Vail gnar and skiing home. Being a white-out day and somewhat variable snowpack, we decided to ski my preferred “safe” line, Tele-Park. The snow felt good and the slope was loaded with a few feet of BLOWER pow. Me being the more experienced backcountry traveler I sent Andy down first, agreeing to meet just above the next shelf about 150yards down the line. Andy sends it down a pillow line and loses it, tumbling a few times over to a tree and then down into a tree-well, upside-down. By the time this happened he was already disappearing into the white-out of the storm from my perspective, but fortunately I saw a tree shake off all its snow. And then, silence. I quickly knew something was wrong and skied over to that tree. “Rescue mode” kicked in faster than ever as I approached the tree and BARELY saw a portion of the base of Andy’s board. He was completely upside-down and in a tree-well with his head about 6 feet under the surface which I was skiing on. For about 3 seconds I thought he was unconscious as there was no movement and I heard nothing and thought “this is really really bad, but this is what I am constantly prepared for.” Andy quickly responded to my shouts and fortunately was alright but very very stuck as he was upside-down against the tree with his board strapped into his feet, thus locking him into a very cold and helpless grave. I quickly got my shovel out, started digging and got him out about 6 or 7 minutes later. We realized the camera was still rolling and were pleased to know that we have footage of the whole event.
A surfer on the Hawaiian island of Kauai claims to have used boxing skills to fend off an attacking shark that bit into his board, narrowly missing his leg.
Jeff Horton (pictured at right) was surfing earlier this week at Pila’a Beach near Kilauea. He told the Garden Island that he saw the shark, presumably a tiger shark, swimming toward him … More