Thanks to David Frey and Aspen Daily News for extensive coverage, as well as Joelle Milholm and Glenwood Post. Interestingly the Aspen Times virtually ignored the event with a 1/3 page reprint of the post article buried in their sports section. I’m boycotting the Times for 4 weeks starting today.
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| Solo men’s class podium winners, left to right: Greg Hill, Jimmy Faust (Faust and Hill tied for first), Steve Romeo |
And speaking of news coverage, one reason the Aspen Times isn’t doing as good a job with extreme sport reporting is that reporter Tim Mutrie isn’t there any more. Tim did send me an interesting email speaking of co-winner Jimmy Faust, which I re-print below.
“Lou, I was really pumped to read on your blog updates how Jimmy Faust, a guy I’d come to know over years of covering the Grand Traverse (as I recall, he and partner Pat O’Neil (a Crested Butte teacher) finished on the Traverse podium every year, and won it thrice, except the one year Faust went for a thousand-foot slide-for-life on sun crust off Star Pass. He lost a ski in the wipeout and they lost hours searching for it… only to rally and finish in the top 10 or 15, or something like that.) was hanging in there with the likes of ironman Greg Hill. As a true amateur and regular kind of guy (he’s a carpenter or builder or something like that), Faust’s achievement, in my opinion, is all the more impressive — in a way, he’s like folks we all know in these kinds of towns, Aspen, CB or whatever, who put their day jobs aside for the weekend only to compete/perform/whatever at a world-class caliber level. Awesome.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
