Harvest Huckfest 2008

September 20th - 21st, 2008


Harvest Huckfest 2008 Report by Seb Fremont


Well Mother Nature has her own way once more this weekend with a very wet Saturday which wasn't part of the forecast, the rain throughout the day made the conditions quite hard for all the Slopestyle Athletes that were registered, nearly 40 of them and after doing a riders meeting @ 10:30am a general consensus was done. Wait until later and see what Mother Nature has in store. At this point, many riders decided based on the conditions that it would be unsafe to ride the course and by the time 1:30pm came along and seeing rain throughout the day it was judged that the conditions were unsafe for the riders to compete this year for the Slopestyle. Many options were looked into but once more, the rain has simple made the course unrideable creating slippery conditions on all wooden surfaces and water accumulation in front of most jumps and in the landings simply was too much. So we'll have to wait until Spring 2009 to see the next Slopestyle competition.

Now as far as the Dual Slalom came, only a few brave souls came out to challenge themselves and the weather on this Gunner Vision course. The format was quite simple, 2 runs down the course, combined your time and get seeded for the next day. With that in mind 16 competitors took to the track hoping to get the best time for the ladders on the next day. Being that only 16 competitors showed up, a decision was made by the riders to put everyone in the same group so we had junior racing against the Open Male category. On Sunday, the weather was a little bit better, cold but it's not raining so the course was in excellent shape. After a good 90 minutes of training, it was time to do the head to head competition. This time, the racers were paired off based on their results. The format was quite simple, you get 2 runs, one of each course and at the end of that the winner and moving on to the next round was the person that won based on differential timing. As the heats went off, no surprises surfaced on the exception of Brennan Walstrom that won his first run against Dylan Wolsky. Unfortunately, a crash in the second run saw Dylan move on to the next round. Our last 4 competitors in the Semi where our top 4 qualifiers (Tim Pearson, Dylan Wolsky, Harry Armstrong and Mitch Chubey). This is where Mitch Chubey took the win to advance to the finals as well as Harry Armstrong leaving Tim Pearson and Dylan Wolsky to battle if off for 3rd and 4th.

In the small finals, Tim Pearson got the best of Dylan after a tight first race where the racers were only 0.13 sec apart. As for the finals, you couldn't ask for a tighter race as after the first run Harry Armstrong was behind Mitch by 0.34 sec. On their second run, Harry beat Mitch by 0.31 sec but not enough giving Mitch Chubey the win by 0.03 sec.

To the GLC we went for the Après where we gave any prizes to all the competitors that came out thanks to our Bike Park sponsors. We had a Sram Drive Train, Camelbacks, Troy Lee jersey, gloves, WTB Saddles, Garbanzo Bike and Bean gift certificate, Race Face armor. Fox tees and many more.

So with this in mind, our last bike park event is now done and I simply wanted to thank everyone for coming out to all the Phat Wednesday DH Series, to the Air Affair, to the Harvest Huckfest. Thank you very much for coming out to all these events and please fell free to contact me @ sfremont@intrawest.com for any comments, suggestions etc for upcoming events.

Cheers,
- SF

Dual Slalom Results (PDF)