It seemed like every single person in the greater Big Bear area made it up to Bear Mountain Saturday, January 20th, 2006 for the second stop on the TransAM tour. Parking was a mess, the lift lines were chaos, and taking a run down a groomer was the equivalent of taking a run through a dense forest—only the trees were moving and had boards with dangerously sharp edges attached to their feet. However, this gave the perfect excuse to stop snowboarding for a little bit and watch the TransAM that was happening right above the lodge.
The setup was definitely not death defying, which was a refreshing break between the super-huge-extremeness of The Honda Session and the X Games. The course had a couple of poppy, little jumps off to the side of a rail garden complete with two down rails, a couch jib, a faucet jib, a corrugated metal tube, a log jam, a quarterpipe with a log-jib on top, a plastic quarterpipe, and probably some other stuff that I’m forgetting to mention. The finals were jam format, as were the qualifiers, and like the rest of the mountain—they were chaos.
Trickery in both the jump and jib zones was at an all-time high. Off the top of my head—some backside 180-on 180-offs the second down rail happened, various rodeos off the jumps also happened, there was a front board down the corrugated pipe and also some 360-ons on the same feature, and one-footers—there were definitely some one-footers. The weather was good, the vibe was good, and we can honestly say that we weren’t bummed at all today sitting down watching a contest instead of actually snowboarding. So yeah, hooray to HCSC and everyone else involved for putting on a sweet event. Special big Thanks to our sponsors: Allyance, Oakley, Dakine, Ride, Zumiez and Freebord. Here are the (many) results:
Men’s final
1. Mikey McMillon
2. Forest Pailey
3. Matty Mo
Women’s final
1. Iris lazzarechi
2. Nirvana Ortanez
3. Melissa Johnson
B.O.N.E.R. (Best Overall Nutty Extreme Rider) Award
Greg Bretz
Overall style
Zak Hale
Best one-footer trick:
Terrence Stillen-Rooney
Best slam
Nick Poohachoff
Feature favorites
Rail line: Christian Mares 270 on, 270 out
Log slide: Forest Palley front blunt 450 out
Jump line: Josh Shaheen backflip to frontside corked 540
Mini spine/log stall: Matty Mo frontside log ride 270 spine transfer
