BOOTERS BALL II: RAGE Films private superpark
Last month at Booters Ball II on the flanks of Mount Shasta Resort, skiers faced some of the biggest jumps ever built. With a massive 100-foot channel gap holding center stage, RAGE Films rolled their cameras in hopes of capturing footage for their upcoming movie, Corduroy. Though the event started well, everyone’s worst fears were realized when the youngest skier in the bunch, Derek Spong, 16, was seriously injured guinea-pigging the gap.
“I can’t tell you what he was thinking, but I know there was probably a lot of pressure on him,” says park veteran Mike Wilson, who would hit and clear the same jump a day later. “Anytime someone pulls out a camera there is that Kodak courage and they think, ‘Hey, this could make me famous.’”
Turns out, it put Spong in the spotlight for the wrong reason. After getting towed in by a snowmobile, he launched into the air only to come down five feet short. At impact, he suffered five broken ribs, a partially torn spleen, and he ripped two layers of his aorta.
“I was holding my breath when he took the gap and I was standing five feet from where he came down,” says RAGE Films’ Pete Alport. “It was horrible. This was definitely freestyle’s worst crash this year.”
After the crash, some stood alone in shock, unable to grasp exactly what had happened. Others huddled in groups off to the side. Yet others wept. Spong was rushed by life flight to nearby Mercy Medical Center, where he stayed for six days.
As of Friday, Spong was still recovering at his home in Woodinville, Washington. He is bummed out about his prospects for next season, saying he’ll probably only be able to ski groomers, which is obviously not where he’d prefer to be. He declined to talk specifics about the crash.
Though Spong’s tragic accident put a damper on the event, skiers still threw down for the camera. And not all was lost.
Impressive features like these don’t appear out of nowhere. RAGE Films and the crew at Mt. Shasta Resort spent 10 days building the channel gaps, tree jibs and table-tops in the southeastern flanks of the resort. But when psyched skiers arrived for the weeklong jib fest, the cameras were focused primarily on the 100-foot channel gap. “People were definitely nervous about attempting the biggest feature in the park so early in the week,” says Wilson.
From April 28 to May 6, Kyler Cooley, Wiley Miller, Taylor Felton, AJ Burton, Tommy Ellingson, Spong and Wilson hitched rides to the top via snowmobile and tore up the park. Earlier in the week skiers caught big air on one side of the gap while the infamous opposing jump loomed.
The day after Spong’s wreck, Wilson prepped to attempt the same gap. But he added pop to the jump by building up a bigger lip. With a devastating wreck in Wilson’s past, he knew full well the consequences of coming up short. So he hit the thing going 85 mph, and traveled more than 190 feet in the air. “I hit jumps like that all the time,” he says. “I should have been there to go first. But, when I took the gap, I went way faster than I needed to and cleared it by a lot. The whole time, flashing back, playing in my mind, I was thinking about the accident so I wasn’t about to slow down.”
The remaining days of Booters Ball II were spent hitting less massive set ups and more technical features. During down time, jibbers relished in the relaxed atmosphere and barbecued under the sun. They also entertained themselves by pelting each other with snowballs on the 35-foot up-rail.
But thoughts remained on Spong, a Fischer team skier.
“I have total confidence that he will work hard to recover 110 percent,” says Matt Berkowitz, Fischer’s freeride manager. “He is the single hardest working 16-year-old I’ve run into in the ski industry and he is a great asset to our team. No matter if it is getting up crazy early to hit a feature, digging, shaping, or staying until sunset to get a certain shot, Derek is there and always charging.”