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Hard-Wired Mountain Zoomies On the Colliding Edge of Technology
By J.D. O'Connor
March 20, 2006
Olympic boarder Gretchen Bleiler was listening to Green Day during her silver medal run at Torino. Shaun White preferred AC/DC, with a little old-school Led Zep thrown in.
We can't print what Marc Nguyen heard just before he was knocked senseless by an iPod-impaired snowboarder at Mammoth Mountain last season but it sounded a little like: "Oh, we're going to hit!"
"He didn't have a clue I was there," Nguyen said. "I was rolling around, trying to get my breath and he was leaning over me with those stupid buds still in his ears saying: 'Dude, I'm so sorry... dude."
Personal sound systems - be it the ubiquitous iPod, the multi-taskable Treo or any of a dozen brands of MP3 players - are everywhere on the slopes, it seems, as skiers carry their own background music and phone systems along for the ride. Lightweight and compact, they may seem the perfect slopeside companion, but many people feel they don't have a place on the mountain.
"We don't recommend the use of sound systems of any kind," said National Ski Areas Association president Michael Berry. "To do so removes an important personal asset. You need to be able to hear what's coming up behind you."
Berry said some mountains banned personal sound equipment back when the Walkman first lumbered onto the scene two decades ago. But the issue "dropped off the radar screen" as snowboarding flourished and the number of iPods and other units began to increase.
Cynics have pointed out that part of the reason that the mountains looked the other way is because they found they could market their wares - everything from clothing to lift tickets - through the devices. Although this technology is still emerging, many see it as the future.
Marc Nguyen doesn't care. He and others who have found themselves on the wrong side of an auditorily-impaired skier or boarder view the on-mountain use of the devices as a hazard. A recent issue of Aspen Magazine featured an on-mountain point counterpoint discussion of the subject by a local skier and a boarder which illustrates the core issue.
Skier Jeff Busby said: "It's frustrating to have to repeat myself or to not even get a response from someone who has no idea I just spoke to them. The other, and more important reason is safety. I want to be able to hear a skier coming towards me, and more important, I want them to be able to hear me."
Busby and others have pointed out that when a boarder "plugs in" they become blind to others approaching them from the rear. He said he was involved in a collision of this nature just one week into the season - a collision Busby felt could have been averted if the other rider had heard him call out he was on his left.
Sam Kachmar, described as a ripping snowboarder, sees things differently.
"Snowboarding with my music is awesome because jamming out to my favorite playlist while cruising down the mountain is like having my own theme song follow me around all day - Rocky Balboa style," Kachmar told Aspen.
Kachmar said he regarded the issue as a matter of personal freedom - tinged with responsibility. "The skier responsibility code is that the downhill skier has the right of way, so the uphill skier must adjust their course to safely pass. All this can be done while listening to music."
Jason Reece, an American living and skiing in Japan, says he builds his musical playlist to suit his style and environment - music and reality blending with sometimes amusing effect.
"I was listening to Sublime's 'What Happened?' when this skier yard-saled right in front of me," Reece said. "It was almost as if it had been choreographed just for me at that moment. I couldn't help but think, 'gee, this is great.'"
Folks on the cultural right who regard such statements as another example of the young rider sealing themselves into a cocoon of self-involvement shook their heads at sight of White, Bleiler, Teter and company dialing in before medal runs in Torino.
"It enables you to focus on what you're doing without actually focusing, if that makes any sense," snowboarder Dustin Majewski said. "You're not over-thinking, and that's the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers."
While the upstart Olympic boarders were hard-wired with specially designed suits built to carry the biscuit-sized wafers of Lucite and silicon, there were no such gizmos for their alpine colleagues.
According to Laura Wisner, spokeswoman for Spyder ski wear: "It would not be a good time to be listening to your iPod," while flying down a mountainside at imminent crash speed.
Although statistics on ski accidents caused - either directly or indirectly - by personal sound systems have yet to be tabulated, there is some disturbing data on use of hi-tech gadgets in another high-speed discipline - driving.
Researchers at the United States' National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that 80 percent of the crashes and 65 percent of the near crashes studied were a result of driver distraction due to the use of hand-held mobile phones, personal digital assistants and digital music players.
"I know they're popular," said Jesse Alvarado, a big-air specialist based in San Jose, Calif. "But when you're up there doing aerials you're thinking about one thing - where you are at that moment. If you lose that focus and get lost in your music, you're going to land a backcracker and come up short."
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