Are all Americans like this?

[Last year, Kent went to Snowshoe to do a bit of riding, and although he told us how he got on, it went in the mystical Issue 6, and so nobody ever saw it. Somehow I feel it deserves a bit more circulation, so here's his story:]

We never once saw that dwarf Bourdon the whole weekend. I'm betting he was holed-up in one of the high end slopeside condos with one or more of the three Vietnamese hookers that slithered out of a yellow HUMVEE about 1:30 am Friday. If I had the choice of riding with me or beaucoup dinky-dao with three Vietnamese contortionists with bee-sting tits, I know my bike would still be clean. We chased Carlin Dunne for a while instead. That fucker is fast. Not very goddamned funny. Not a fucking laugh a minute, but very fast. Really just a quiet blur somewhere down in the rocks. At least he wasn't smoking fucking cigarettes like everyone else on the shuttle bus.

This is Kent. Is he more or less scary to look at than the "General Lee" with his gun and his bust up shoulder?

The "freeride" side of the mountain was the usual amalgamation of nasty roots, holes and rocks, punctuated by narrow wood bridges and wooden berms fifteen feet high over nasty roots, holes and rocks, all of it wetter than a Sophomore pussy on Prom Night. They put up "Feature Ahead" warning signs just in front of any man-made obstacles, which, of course, is a fucking joke, as the natural terrain in the trail was way harder to ride than any of the "dangerous" man-made stuff.
The "downhill" side was surprisingly dry. The Pro DH course was mostly wide open and very fast, with lots of opportunities for large air. I don't know what the cross country course looked like, because I did not give give a shit, and was disinclined to follow the trail of brightly colored spandex in that direction.
Saturday morning we ran into Missy Giove, who is not really out of retirement, but who is going to ride the NORBA races this weekend anyway. She was practicing the Pro DH course, but we convinced her to come fart around with us on the freeride side, and wound up hanging around with her, dodging and bouncing off trees for the rest of the weekend. Missy got April Lawler to come ride with us, so we spent Saturday afternoon chasing girls through the woods. Missy brought two Intense bikes and a 222 with some very trick shit on it, but April's Intense has some kind of Fox air fork that looked like it came from NASA. Fuck, it was better than NASA. Must be nice.....

Bet Missy's jealous of this 222 though - forget the trick shit, how about a few Stopa stickers and 'forgetting' to wash the bloody thing for six months?

Sunday morning, heading for the cycle cross course, my trail bitch, Rob somehow managed to rip the rear derailleur off his Mind Bomb while going about 50mph down a gravel road. The derailleur went up into the spokes and locked up the wheel. The resulting skid was nearly 300 feet long. What did not get broken in the initial explosion of parts got broken by Rob jumping up and down on the carcass cursing like a demon. We spent the middle of the day in the shop, drinking Red Bull and trying to cobble the Mind Bomb back together with a improbable combination of SRAM and Shimano drivetrain parts.
The high point of the weekend was a tie between Missy showing us her "special" tattoo¹, and Rob crashing so hard on the Sport Course that he knocked one of his top front teeth out. How one loses a tooth inside a full face helmet is still a bit of a mystery to me, but Rob has the fucking thing in a ziploc bag in his camelback, if you want to see it. I wanted to get pictures of both of these events for you, but Missy was a bit sketchy about the legality of it all, and Rob refused to open his mouth for the rest of the day. (Jesus, what a blessing that turned out to be.)
We rode everything at least twice, and the Sport Course/Powerline combination turned out to be the gang favorite, although some of the berms on Powerline were a bit dilapidated, or seemed so to us, being spoiled brats who had ridden the course in pristine condition the day before it opened back at the end of May.
We pulled all of the stickers off the "da bomb" so everyone had to ask what it was. This became tedious very quickly. The 888 gave it a very sinister stance, and we mostly just cursed in French at anyone we did not already know. I, of course was riding the Bubble Gum Gemini, and was immediately recognized by staff and returning guests alike as the smart ass with the vulgar stickers (Thank you very much!) on his fag pink bike. When Carlin Dunne first saw me gearing up to ride, he stared at the incredible pinkness of the Gemini and said: "You must be pretty good if you ride that."

Enjoy that? More Kentish fun next week, including the immortal line 'I said: “I called you from fucking Florida two fucking days ago and you told me the fucking place was open for downhill until the 9th. She said: “We are open for downhill until the 9th.”  I said: “How the fuck can you be open for downhill when there are no lifts and no fucking shuttle?” She explained that we could ride our bikes six and a half miles up the paved road to the top.'

¹ Well, there are now two reasons that I know I'm better than the Missile herself. This is the second one.