Dave Dubuque: For Mt. Spokane employee Gabe Blackwood, terrain park skiing is all about flow and progression

I am in awe of park skiers.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a terrain park, it’s a section of the ski hill that’s covered with a variety of features: jumps of various sizes; long, flat-topped boxes and metal rails; sections of pipe; large, vertical wooden walls and other objects that skiers and snowboarders can fly off, spin and flip over and slide down in feats of grace and coordination.

The terrain park fascinates me, largely because I find so much of what happens there unfathomable.

As a fairly traditional skier, I find the notion of skiing on anything but snow terrifying and unpredictable. If I hit a jump and happen to end up any higher than 8 inches off the ground, I’ll surely feel like an airborne sack of flour.

Yet I have an incessant appetite for videos of daredevils flipping and spinning in the air. I daydream of one day being able to do a backflip, but in reality, I can’t even manage a cartwheel on dry ground.

Every few days, though, I’ll muster up the courage to do a “straight” air – a plain, forward-facing leap – off one of the park’s smaller jumps. I’ll then stop to watch the hill’s more accomplished park skiers as they make it look easy. During one of my timid forays to that daunting part of the mountain, I met Gabe Blackwood, a Mt. Spokane Ski & Snowboard Park employee who helps create the park’s features.

Blackwood, a talented skier who I’ve seen fly 15 feet off the ground while traveling backward, has no doubt come to know me as the guy who, for the last four years, has asked about the finer points of doing a 360 (one full spin while remaining upright) while never actually attempting one. He’s an incredibly tolerant fellow.

He’s only been skiing for six years, but he said when he was a kid, there was always a trampoline in the yard. He learned to do flips at a young age.

This fact soothed my ego. My lack of childhood access to a trampoline is surely the reason for my failure to thrive in the terrain park. Certainly not my ungainly frame or lack of courage.

Blackwood said he started snowboarding when he was 18, but his friends skied, and he liked the sport’s style. Soon, he was watching pros like Phil Casabon and Henrik Harlaut and began to emulate their style.

“I love skiing because it’s a flow sport, like surfing,” he said. “You can do your own thing, and there’s unlimited opportunity for progression.”

Blackwood spent a season working as a chairlift attendant, but has spent the past three years as a member of Mt. Spokane’s terrain park crew. Not only does he get to play a role in the planning of location of the park’s jumps, boxes and rails – it’s also part of his job to ride the features to ensure that they’re safe for the resort’s patrons.

The time spent riding the park he’s helped create has translated into a bigger bag of tricks. This season, he’s learned to do a Switch 720 – a backward jump with two full spins – and a Cork 900 – a combination of off-axis spins that I’m incapable of fully comprehending, even after watching demonstrations on YouTube and hitting pause every quarter of a second.

While I’m convinced that an attempt to perform even one spin would put me in the hospital, Blackwood said two broken thumbs are the worst that he’s suffered.

“Of course, I fall frequently,” he said, “but avoiding injury is all about anticipating what could happen. And, of course, if you’re not falling, it means that you’re not pushing yourself.”

At least there’s one aspect of Blackwood’s skiing that I have hope of emulating.