The SICK Children of Glacier, WA.

One of the greatest things about working at BCA is traveling to different regions and checking out the variances in North American ski culture. I can tell you that in Crested Butte it’s still popular to have a flavor savor (this was also true in 1988). In Nelson the “rage” is wearing your latest all-natural-wool toque made by your girlfriend or mom and it needs to sit on your head just right. In Jackson it’s all about keeping up with the locals on both the up and the down. At Alpental it’s about maintaining an urban feeding-frenzy mentality by snaking pow and the lift line whenever possible (this is a survival instinct learned from sitting in Seattle traffic). In Aspen it’s about being comfortable dropping $37 on lunch. And at Mt. Baker ski area it’s all about shredding pow. I rediscovered Baker about five years ago and my mind was blown: not only was everyone, including little kids, wearing avalanche safety gear (loads of Trackers), the terrain was off the charts and the access was unreal. I remembered it being a weird fall-line, snowboard-dominated area from when I was younger and I couldn’t have been more wrong after revisiting back in 2006. This rediscovery/realization has lead to a multi-year attempt at assimilation which is still in progress. Baker can’t quite be defined. It’s not near a large urban area and it’s not in the middle of the boondocks (like say, Telluride). The people that ride there are mainly from Bellingham and Canada and they are mellow, almost to a fault. In fact, even the pros are mellow. Early season two years ago as the owner of Mt. Baker was in the bar buying all the locals pitchers of beer, it was brought to my attention that I was surrounded by loads of professional snowboarders and photographers, who I had assumed were just local loggers enjoying free beer. But they’d all been flown in for some world class conditions and they were well behaved. So if you’re not from Bellingham, Canada, or some other place that has access to Baker, you might be from Glacier, WA. The population in 2007 was 103 (52% male, 48% female; a sick ratio for a ski town) and the best italian restaurant in North America is located there (Milano’s). It’s also the location of the Mt. Baker Guest House (http://mtbakerviewguesthouse.com/) which has become a very fitting remote headquarters for BCA when we travel to Baker to work with the patrol or teach at the annual Beacon Bowl. The guest house is run by Jim and Juli Evangelista, two lifelong powder hounds who met in Jackson Hole in the 1970′s and were married by a Grateful Dead lyricist (different story).  So let’s get to the point: what this blog is really about is 14 year-old Micah and 17 year-old Mattias Evangelista, the off spring of Jim and Juli. Glacier is pumping out some awesome young free riders and these guys are two of them. If you’ve got the corn skiing blues, the following videos of these SICK children of Glacier, WA, should help get you pumped for next winter: http://vimeo.com/user6926685/videos