Monarch Pass – After watching the top four finishers in the second annual Snow BoaterCross at Monarch ski area limp away as broken winners, Ron Parks started to relish his early ejection from the violent race.
“I got bumped out in the first round, and I’m thinking that was a good thing,” said the Salida local, whose call to polish his old-school kayak with snowboard wax left him screaming off course early and often. “I’m pretty stoked I only got one race. My back is thanking me.”
Carnage was the overlying theme Saturday as a dozen brazen boys battled on the slopes of Monarch. They raced their kayaks down a specially designed, winding course of berms and jumps, reaching speeds kayaks are simply not supposed to attain while occupied. The previous time those boats went that fast was when they were strapped atop a car.
And as is the case with most racing contests, it wasn’t the speed that hurt. It was the stopping. And the dropping.
“This is stupid, straight up,” said Kyle Scarbrough, a ski patroller at Monarch who apparently left his job’s required good judgment in his locker Saturday. “I broke my nose doing this last year. You’d think I would learn.”
Last year, the course was mostly straight. That made the stopping part of the race particularly challenging. Spectator hearts seized when racers last year barreled off course and screamed through the base area, narrowly missing wedging skiers and lift towers before skidding into the parking lot a hundred yards past the finish.
This year, designers added turns. Lots of turns with big berms. A big pond at the bottom of the course would slow the racers before they reached the finish corral. But then the pond lining was punctured by a paddle, and the supposed-to-slow-you-down pond became an icy pit that actually helped the paddlers reach top speed before catapulting into the corral.
“You know that moment in the middle of the air when you look down and wonder if you are going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life? I know that moment now,” Mark Arnold said after narrowly winning a second-heat finish that saw three racers simultaneously soar 10 feet above the ice and crash in a dramatic heap of plastic and flesh.
After the slow, limping removal of those three racers from the finish, course designers spent a few minutes shaving down the backside of the non-existent pond, which, sans water, served as a scary ramp. They threw down a couple of carpets on the ramps to slow boats careening through the finish.
Still, after the next race, Arnold caught a ride down the mountain in an ambulance after his third-heat finish launched him straight up into a flat, very loud landing that broke a rib or two on his left side.
“I’ll tell you, it’s really hard to make a kayak course on snow,” said Mike Tavares, the sole designer of Monarch’s modest terrain park and a kayaker who designed this year’s BoaterCross course and guinea-pigged every feature himself, a process he admits was “pretty sketchy.”
“The interaction between kayak and snow is crazy and sporadic. You can’t really control yourself,” he said.
The key, said Lake City’s Mike Camp, is to accept that you don’t have control. For his first time ever “paddling” on snow, expert kayaker Camp learned a few things beyond the fact that he should have worn shoes for his Snow BoaterCross debut. And that he should have worn his PFD, which might have protected his ribs from an ugly spearing by a fellow racer after the pair raced through the finish in the third heat.
“Don’t try to steer. Hit the berms high. Prejump everything,” said the 38-year-old, who lost the final race to Cañon City high school teacher Lucas Johnson. “And first, don’t try to slow yourself down because that doesn’t work.”
John Tillema of Fort Collins was expecting carnage when he arrived Saturday morning with a PFD, a helmet with a face mask and elbow pads. He never had raced a kayak down snow, but he had more than an inkling of what to expect.
“I’m not sure about this. But I know one thing: Snow is definitely harder than water,” he said.
After watching a couple fellow racers’ practice run down the course, Tillema realized another thing.
“I’m not crazy enough to win this,” he said.
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-954-1274 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
