January 13, 1997 didn't start out being a dumb day. It began like any other freezing ass powder day with 14 inches of fresh snow and a contest that had blown out of town the night before. But by the time it finished, we were all deep in the caverna dumbo.

Sims rider Neal Drake, Generics B-boy Jeremy Baye, Liquid's Chris Swierz, and Big Bear loc Jimmy Messer got marginally roped into doing a photo shoot with Shawn Frederick. It was about one degree Fahrenheit when we all jumped on the Cornice chair and hiked over to the top of Sentinel Bowl. After one trip down the mountain the photo shoot was over, and we'd learned several things: one, that the powder was way too light to cover the ice below so landing anything big was out of the question; two, that a Salomon rider named Brandon was bitter, and finally that Neal Drake was ready and willing to be the first into the swimming hole of dumb.

While we waited for a shuttle to take us back to the lift, he walked down the access road, strapped in and began flagging down passing cars and asking them to pull him really fast into a dirty pile of snow chunks posing as a quarter pipe.

Why we were waiting for shuttle has more to do with Kirkwood than our net dumbness at the moment. Kirkwood is a box canyon surrounded on three sides by mountain. Some parts of the mountain are bigger than others. While it is big, it's a one stage mountain. You can go to the top and ride back down to the bottom, but there are no middle lifts. No across and over lifts. Just up lifts. Meaning, that any time you do some traversing at the top, you have serious traversing at the bottom. And if you want to get from one lift to another you have to ride a shuttle or walk. Viva la shuttle.

When the shuttle arrived Neil had gotten one ride. Though Jeremy had lovingly shaped the pile of rubble into a bit of a kicker Neal barely made it to the top of the berm. It was dumb. Stupid even.

The shuttle van dumped us off below the Cornice chair and photoman Frederick decided that he would stick with Brandon and the rest of his posse and that we would be on our own. That was okay, because Sweez said it was time to make some powder runs in the pipe.

The Kirkwood pipe was perfect on the day of the event. But now the pipe, like the rest of the icy mountain, was covered in 14 inches of fresh snow. The snow was so light that it hadn't stuck to the top of the pipe, but in the transitions and on the roll outs it was knee deep. Yee haw. Powder in the pipe.

Three runs later we decided to go ride the park. But on the way there we found some great little snow-filled finger chutes which Neal, Chris, and Jeremy straight shot. The fingers weren't long or steep, but they were fun. We dorked around down a rock filled drainage. Jeremy did a front flip off a cat track and Neal dropped a weekend warrior fat-to-flat rock and followed it up with by charging directly into Jimmy's shoulder with his face. Neal's neck gaiter began showing spots of blood, but we couldn't find any cuts on the boy. Stigmata maybe?

On the chairlift rides between runs Jeremy Baye would discuss one of his two favorite subjects--the horror that is dudeness, or how cold he was. The lectures went something like this: "I hate dudes. They're all dude this and dude that. Dudes only have two words in their vocabularies--dude and fuckin'."

Jeremy continued. "Once I was stuck in a dude car with a bunch of fuckin' dudes and two dude dogs and there's a bowl of dog food in the back and dog hairs all over the car. And the dudes are smoking pot and that makes them even more dude than they were in the first place. It's so cold."

We dropped some more stupid stuff and at about 3:00 PM we called it a dumb day done.

The End.

Editor's Note: If you're looking for a moral to this story, or the slightest raison d'etre, don't. It was a dumb day. The title should have been enough of a warning.