MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Fall 2017

96 ML BLUE FALL 2017 Pulling a neglected skateboard from your backseat or truck bed when there's snow on the ground has its own way of making you smile. Thing is, if you pair that skateboard with a shovel, and enough grit and elbow grease to liberate the earth hidden beneath the icy blanket of snow and road salt, there's rideable surface everywhere. As legendary skate pioneer and artist C.R. Stecyk III says, “skaters by their very nature are urban guerrillas." An unlimited rideable playground lies just beneath the snow if you can allow yourself to see the potential of urban infrastructure and landscape. We ride the sheltered cover of car ports, the barren tire patches of the snow covered streets, and sweep clean the salt and sand from retail storefronts and big box compounds, liberating the rideable blacktop or cement. 12:00 P.M. We’ve done it—we’ve ridden the occupied territory of the earth, sky, and sea. This fabled Boardsport Trifecta is often reserved for more, should we say, aristocratic winter locales—not the shores of the most menacing body of fresh water in North America that bumps uglies with the chapped Niagara Escarpment. But like our myth- ridden mortal ancestors, we too have grown tired of the gods’ selectiveness. We are the new Titans of this place. –Dedicated to the memory of William George Childs Like Icarus, we ascend upward into the beaming gaze of the sun: Zeus territory.