Extreme Exposure: Green Race ends in a tie, ski resort bomb scare, more
Welcome to another edition of Extreme Exposure, a weekly column that brings you the best photography and news from the world of action and outdoor sports. This week Dane Jackson vies for his first Green Race title, a Colorado ski resort investigates a bomb scare and much more.
Seeing Green
Even though he tied for first with Frenchman Eric Deguil, Dane Jackson still doesn’t consider himself a Green Race Champion, one of the few titles in the sport of whitewater kayaking he’s yet to capture. “I still haven’t won it,” he told SI.com after the event. “I made a pretty big mistake in one of the main rapids and lost 3-4 seconds.”
The sport’s best paddlers navigated North Carolina’s Green River Narrows over the weekend in one of the most intense Class V races in the world, and few in the sport thought there could ever be a tie in such a contest, let alone two years in a row. But Jackson lost to Isaac Levinson last year (Levinson finished 3rd in 2015) on a tiebreaker before it happened again this year with Deguil.
Adriene Levknecht won the women’s competition as the water receded over the weekend after rainstorms brought the river up to dangerous levels during the week preceding the race. Hundreds of spectators made the trek into the gorge to watch one of the oldest whitewater races in existence—this year the Green Race celebrated 20 years. Most of the crowd gathers at Gorilla, the river’s crux rapid, cheering competitors on as they head into the race course’s largest drop. “That’s always a cool part of the race,” Jackson says. “You come around that corner with everyone cheering—there’s nothing like it.”
This Place is the Bomb
Steamboat Springs, Colo. is known for dry powder, long winters and cowboys. A terrorist hotbed it is not. But this week, the FBI and the Routt County Sheriff’s Office are investigating a “suspicious device” found near a ski lift at one of Colorado’s most iconic resorts.
According to the Steamboat Pilot and Today, local authorities, and even a bomb squad, were called to the resort after a “suspicious device” was found near the Pony Express lift and no one, including resort officials, are saying what it was as the investigation is still ongoing. Here’s what they do know: the device looked like a bomb, it wasn’t placed to destroy a lift and looked as though it’d been dropped haphazardly. The sheriff’s office then released this statement warning local citizens about the find, “We would like to encourage citizens to be attentive and use caution if a suspicious device is found. We believe it may have been thrown away there but not placed in that location to injure anyone." One of the more bizarre incidents of this young ski season.
A Dangerous Endeavor
In more news that solidifies climbing’s hold as one of the most dangerous sports in the world, this week the search for missing 27-year-old Austrian climber Gerhard “Gerry” Fiegl was called off. According to Outside magazine, Feigl fell some 2,600 feet while descending from Nilgiri Peak in north central Nepal. It was a disheartening demise, too, as Fiegl, along with fellow climbers Alexander Bluemel and Hansjorg Auer, had became the first mountaineers to successfully summit Nilgiri up an extremely challenging southern route prior to Feigl’s fall. A representative from Salewa, one of the project’s sponsors, released a statement confirming the fears of many of Fiegl’s friends and family: “According to information from Nepal, there is no longer any hope to find Gerry still alive.”
Style Becomes Him
And this one, just because it looks so good. This is Mike Rave, with a classically-styled method air at Brighton Utah’s early season terrain park, the BoneZone. Rave and other riders took advantage of this Big Cottonwood Canyon tradition—recently adopted by the resort—where local pros set up a mini-terrain park in the beginner area so riders can get out jibbing in the preseason. As soon as the mountain opens, all the terrain features are moved back up to Brighton’s main park area. But for now, as early season snowstorms roll in, it’s a fantastic way to get the local snow-riding community a head start.
