Miller's Car in a Blogspot Post http://bit.ly/74WlNk

I saw our Guest Services Manager's (Miller's) car in the Monarch parking lot in a blog posted by Arron Dodds' Life on the Road. The article's not bad either: http://bit.ly/5JmmFw.

Posted via email from RickyB's Posterous Site

Looking west & looking at Susan

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Rick

Posted via email from RickyB's Posterous Site

Looking toward the east

Rick

Posted via email from RickyB's Posterous Site

My Skis on top of Continental Divide

Left ski is in the eastern slope right is on the western slope. Beautiful day at Monarch. Not many people but lots of great snow n open runs! What a great office space for work.

Rick

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Skiing with Gunnar again!

Gunnar and I are focusing on leg rotation today. He's got roller blading background too Awesome! I'm the lucky one.

Rick

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McKenna the roller blader

McKenna has lots of roller blade experience that translated very well to skiing. Awesome!

Rick

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Carol on Pano

Happy Thanksgiving! Second day teaching at Monarch Mountain. Looking forward to another great day.

Rick

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Gunnar gettin on pioneer lift

Who who! Here we go!!

Rick

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First run Monarch view

Rick

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Decided to go to Amy's birthday party

Good times !!!

Rick

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Post once to many

I think this is so cool! I can post to most of my blogs and social media just by sending an email to my Posterous account. It seems really quite simple, but it's taken me a while to set up some of the places I want to post to. Some were simpler than others to set up.

Here's a list of places I'm sending this particular post to:

• www.rickboucher.com 
• www.twitter.com/ricky__b
• my Facebook profile
• htttp://rickboucher.blogspot.com
• http://rickboucher.wordpress.com
• www.mysnowpro.com/rickyb
• my Picassa account
• my YouTube account
• http://rickyb.posterous.com/

Couple of concerns I have though, it sounds like Posterous stores pictures, videos, etc. for you and Posterous tends to want to insert a line or two of text at the bottom of posts to show you're using it. Some of the settings seem to allow you to remove that "feature." About the pictures and video storage, I suppose that could be considered a good thing.

Something else I'm wondering about is how it's going to handle photos. I'm using Gmail, and I'm not seeing how I can insert a photo inline rather than attach it. Perhaps it'll be different on my iPhone.

Posted via email from RickyB's Posterous Site

Send Once Post to Many

With the growth of social networking and the many new blogs/networks one can join to talk about skiing and snowsports instructing, I've been trying to find a way to simply enter blog and social network once and have the entry posted to all the different locations. Here's a list of all the places I'd like a single post to show up:

1. Self-Hosted Wordpress blog (www.rickboucher.com)
2. Wordpress blog (rickboucher.wordpress.com)
3. Blogger (rickboucher.blogspot.com)
4. My Facebook personal profile
5. Twitter (@ricky__b)
6. My Snow Pro (mysnowpro.com)
7. Ski Pro Connect (skiproconnect.com)
8. My Monarch Space (Monarch's community space)
9. My personal My Monarch Space (www.mymonarchspace.com)
10. YouTube (www.youtube.com/rickboucher)
11. Ski Sensei (www.skisensei.com)
12. Posterous (rickyb.posterous.com)
13. Flickr
14. Picassa

I numbered them on purpose, and I think there might be others that I'm forgetting. (I'll come back and add them if I remember them later.)

So far I've found one way to post to at least half of the above list. Posterous allows you to post to many locations just by sending email to your Posterous account. It even allows you to send to just one, some, or all depending the email address you use.

There are a couple of reasons I'm cautious about Posterous:

1. It stores images and video on their system
2. for many of the services above Posterous inserts a promotional footer
3. any more?

Test post from my mobile device. Send away!

Image of Photo and Caption

Cool picture of me appeared in The Mountain Mail yesterday. The powder has been awesome at Monarch. Eric Ramsey has been taking pictures and I'm very happy to go along. This one ended up on 9 News and in the local paper. I think he likes how I can ski right at him without hitting him and the plastic things on my fingers that define my gloves. Actually this wasn't better powder than yesterday. This picture was taken about four days ago. The powder has been getting better and better everyday!

It's hard to teach lessons on the beginner hill when there is so much great powder on the mountain. But it's all good. Those of us who have been around awhile know where the great powder stashes are even after the 9 am crowd mashes up the hill.

The tree skiiing is gettin' really good these days at Monarch. I'll tell you about the Mirage trees and the Zipper cliffs, but if you really want to know where the great stashes are you'll just have to try and keep up. Then there's the Cat Skiing and Mirkwood. Mirkwood is really great if you can get a ride up. I'm getting lazy these days where I don't like to hike so much when the powder is so awesome inbounds.

Look me up. I'll show you where to go.

I'm In An Article!

Last week I was asked to teach a lesson for marketing purposes. Our marketing director had arranged the lesson for a writer that writes for the Rocky Mountain News. Here is a link to the article as it appeard in an online journal called Real Vail. Click here.

I really enjoyed meeting Luis and Patrina. I know I had fun.

New Terminology

I had a returning student (Steven Owen) a few days ago that asked me to help him find an "imperceptible trigger." I thought that was so cool. I hope to use these words in future lessons. I think what he was seeing was the smoothness of good skiers and wants to emulate how good they look going from one turn to the next, the "imperceptible trigger." 

When he told me that he was looking for the imperceptible trigger it made me think of using the feet and legs to start a turn. Steve was using old school hopping, rotary push-off kinds of moves with the initial turning force coming from his upper body. Can you see it?

I told him that I was once in a clinic with Bob Barnes (Encylopidia of Skiing Barnes) where he told me that the worst movement you can do with your feet in skiing is better than the best movement you can do in skiing with your upper body. I suggested that even though movements in your feet are small (imperceptible) they have a huge affect on the rest of the movements that happen throughout the turn. Boot technology helps to make it so. They are designed to respond to movements we do with our feet and legs.

During the lesson we worked on ankle flexion/extension, rolling the feet to the edges and the flat place between the turns, and steering the feet/legs/thighs in the direction of the turns. These were the "imperceptible triggers" that we worked on. 

I thanked him for the cool words and hope to ski with him again someday.

Big Clinic Today

I led a clinic today with about a dozen other instructors. The focus was on the PSIA milestone called basic parallel turn. Just in case you don't know the milestones, they are wedge, wedge cristi, basic parallel turn, and dynamic paralell turn. It was very obvious to me that we can focus on a specific manuver and do movement analysis for that particular manuver to determine specific needs of individual skiers. This would be true for any of the four basic milestone manuvers. Reinforced to me was the fact that how someone is able to perform any of these manuvers will show movement patterns that help or hinder their overall skiing. These four manuvers display the appropriate combination of skills necessary to perform the maunver which display and show a mastery of the necessary skills for great skiing at any level.

At first is was a little intimidating to have a dozen other instructors, and my supervisor, as well as a couple of other upper level instructors watching my performance. I think I was able to keep the clinic on task and I hope everyone got at least one thing that could understand to improve their skiiing over all. 

I think the single most important movement, as a group, was to improve/enhance ankle flexion, both flexed and extended (some were levered on the front of their boots, others didn't flex at all). The other most important element was to get them to slow down. The Basic Parallel turn needs to be demonstrated to students like you want them to do it. Once we slowed everyone down we were more able to see the movement patterns and turning mechanisms they were using and thus give them constructive feedback on how to improve their overall skiing.

Lots of Lessons

Mostly I've been getting private lessons this year. I'm almost up to 25 hours worth of request privates. After 25 hours I'll get a significant pay increase. Most of my request privates are coming from relationships that I've developed in past years. People from Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and lots of locals are requesting me. They're actually remembering me and asking for me. I'm like the second most requested instructor at Monarch. The person with the most requests is trolling the lobby and pretensiously helping people decide what kind of lesson to take. He also works in the Children's Center which helps a lot in getting requests. So I feel like I'm not doing too bad considering I don't teach CC nor do I troll the lobbys.

The people who are taking request lessons from me are people that I'vd developed a relationship with, in lessons, in the past. I think they feel like they know me and want me back. I work hard at developing relationships with people. The best lessons are when I really understand their motivations and then work hard to help them reach their goals.

Tiger Sharks

Sorry I've been so busy teaching and skiing that it is hard to find time to sit and blog. Monarch has been great this year. The snow is awesome, from powder to beautiful packed powder bumps. It's all good.

 

I got some new skis that I really couldn't afford. But hey, the ski shop, Mountain Sports Haus, let me have a payment plan. At first I didn't like these Volkl Tiger Shark Power Swtich skis. But after skiing on them for a little while, I am so turned on by them. They do what ever I want them to do when ever I want them to do it. If I want to hold an edge, they are like so totally holding, if I want to skid around they're okay with that too. The reviews say that are not so great in the powder, but I've been having a great time with 'em there. That's probably because there are skis out there now (like the Volkl Mantras that I want bad) that are specifically for powder. I'm still gonna try to get a pair of Mantras to use on the Snow Cat, but these Tiger Sharks are like so awesome. As an all mountain ski for an instructor, I don't think you can do any better.