Remember about 8 or 9 years ago when they kicked mountain biking out of the Summer X Games because it wasn’t Xtreme! enough? It was about that time that I lost interest. Too much street luge, and the word ‘extreme’ had already jumped the shark at that point. Now a woman in Aspen is going for the Extreme Hugging Record at the Winter X Games. She needed to hug 5,001 people within 24 hours, and she set up her hugging booth at the base of the superpipe. I guess the X Games needs to work a little harder in an Olympic year.

Oh boy, now anyone who wants to meet with the West Virginia Governor knows that they only have to sit in a tree for a week. WV Gov Joe Manchin responded to national pressure and called an emergency meeting with tree sitters over a mountaintop mine in the state. This is the eighth day that Eric Blevins and Amber Nitchman have been subjected to air horns, floodlights, and threats of violence from the Massey Energy mining company. Their tree occupation has stalled the explosions that would level a mountain to get to the sweet, sweet coal buried at its center.

Here’s what I’d do if I was the mining company: Have some hippie-looking person run past mine security and knock one of the guards to the ground. Then have that person run to the tree and scale up to the tree sitter and tell them that they’re going to takeover so the other person can go shower and eat some food, play hacky sack, etc. Then when the original tree sitter came down, I would reveal that the hippy who burst through security was actually a Young Republican and employee of Massey Energy. Pretty smart, huh? It’s shocking I don’t work for energy companies charged with blowing up mountains to get their coal.

My advice to the tree sitters: Don’t fall for the above-mentioned trick. Also, don’t leave your tree for the meeting with the Gov (the ‘emergency meeting’ would have been my second idea to get them out of the tree’).

Ski resorts are sliding back from global real estate corporations to the smaller, mega rich investment groups who used to own them. I prefer to have my ski resorts as the play things of billionaire financiers, except maybe in the case of Dick Bass, whose coal mining investments have left lifelong Snowbird skiers in an ethical lurch. There’s a lot of financial wrangling that I don’t understand in this article about Intrawest selling Panorama Mountain Village resort in Canada. Essentially, they needed to free up some cash to try to stave off foreclosure on their Whistler/Blackcomb, which is slated for auction in the middle of the Olympics. Intrawest sold Copper Mountain to POWDR back in early December, and this sale is part of some baffling high stakes game where people move money around to try to make more money.

Authorities are hoping to evacuate the last of the tourists and inhabitants stranded near Machu Picchu by the end of today. Yesterday they flew about 1,402 out of town after heavy rains washed out roads stranding more than 3,000 people. The stranded town turned into a study group for Lord of the Flies, and prices for food, water, and lodging sky rocketed as anxious hikers realized they’d be stranded for days.

via Wend

English Russia included this photo in their post, “A Solution for Many Many Snow.” Those Russians, very crafty. You’d have to stack more than a few cases of vodka in the backseat of that station wagon to keep those back tires from spinning. I’d love to motor up to Vail in this machine.