You Now Know at Least 25 Things About Pipe & Park
By Lane McLaughlin PSIA-NW Tech Team

So the Pipe & Park scene has probably stormed your local resort to some degree. You may have anywhere from one little rail, to a cobbled together half-pipe, all the way to a mind-blowing X-Games style park. Regardless of how epic a park may be, it can be fun just to be involved in the park culture at your mountain and to hang, ride, and teach with others who love to get playful with all the crazy features. If you feel as though the whole park thing is just another world and you haven’t found a way to break in, let’s get you started with a simple lingo lesson that’ll pump you up with at least 25 things you can easily remember and take to the park.

ATML: PSIA/AASI’s model to recognize/remember the four phases of any jib feature (be it a jump, rail, or half-pipe): Approach, Take-Off, Maneuver, and Landing. Hopefully you can blend your movements and tactics in each of these phases to stomp your landings.

BAFL: Say it like ‘baffle’. Stands for Big Air, Flat Landing. It’s what gets people hurt in the park; most typically occurs when a jibber out-hucks the landing zone of a jump.

Coping: The corner part of the half-pipe that transitions from the deck (what you can walk up) to the vert (where you drop into and boost out of).

Drop Next: What you call out to other park riders to respectfully say you’re taking the next turn on a park feature. Followed up by “Dropping” as you actually take your drop.

Easy Style It: One of the points of Burton’s Smart Style initiative. It’s the motto to remind you to start small and work your way up with your jib skills and the level of challenge you assume in the park.

Flat Bottom: The section of the half-pipe that’s between each wall and transition. It’s where the pipe rider sets line, speed, and edge angle before taking the next hit.

Grom: The little (young) jibbers in the park. Ones that are especially skilled can be labeled super groms. Look out for them – they’re not always aware of the safest places to stop. Not cool to yell at them – take the time to ‘xplain to them the finer parts of safety and park etiquette.

Huck: To “go big” with little regard for personal safety; to catch mind-blowing air. Describes the quality of the airtime, not the quality of the moves or the landing. Those who huck are huckers. A group of huckers hucking form a huckfest.

Invert: While in the air, get ting your feet above your head. Jibbers go inverted by rotating in a variety of directions: forward/backward flips, sideways for Lincoln Loops, and diagonally (combination of axis) for Rodeo and Misty flips.

Jib: Any stylie type of move or trick can be considered a jib. The freestyle park is also known as a jib park; those who jib are jibbers; time spent jibbing is a jib session.

Knuckle: The feature of a jump where the flat deck rolls over and transitions to the steeper landing zone. The jibber wants to “clear the knuckle” rather than “knuckle it” to get to the “pillow” of the landing zone and stomp the landing.

Lip: The last bit of snow on a jump’s take-off ramp. The shape and angle of the lip has an affect on the amount of pop and/ or kick the jibber gets at take-off. The more vertical the lip raises up the more “woo” it has.

Mad: A description of the degree of skill and style a jibber has. If they own a wide variety of tricks and an admirable, defining, or unique style it could be said that they have “mad skills”, “mad tricks” and “mad style”.

Natural: Skiers spin to the left or the right whereas snowboarders spin frontside or backside. So, for a skier who routinely spins to the left, this would be considered their natural spin and to spin to the right would be unnatural. Skiers get more points in competitions when they spin unnatural, so of course they lie to the judges about which side it is.

Ollie: To lever off the tail of your board/skis followed by releasing that energy to pop yourself up into the air and potentially over an obstacle or up onto a feature. Levering off the tail(s) is an Ollie whereas levering off the nose (tips) is a Nollie.

Park Ranger: These are the dudes that keep your parks in shape and hopefully help all jibbers have a good time by promoting safety, fun, and respectful behavior. Respect them (and teach your groms to respect them) while they close a feature for maintenance – it’s usually a sign that the feature has become unsafe or they are going to tune it up so it rides better anyway. Provide them feedback if you feel that a particular feature has become unsafe or is not riding well or is interrupting the flow of the park – they use rider feedback to tune the park.

Quarter Pipe: A terrain park feature that transitions the jibber from the slope to a vertical wall of snow. At the top of the vert or in the air above the vert, the jibber is able to throw down their stylie trick before coming back down the vert and riding out the landing on the same slope they rode in on.

Rainbow: The name of a rail or funbox that uniformly arcs up from the snow surface and back down to the snow surface (follows the shape of a rainbow).

SmartStyle: A pipe & park safety initiative from Burton that’s been heartily adopted by National Skier Areas Association (NSAA). You should see signage all around your freestyle terrain and can help promote the initiative to your jib students. Look Before You Leap, Easy Style It, Respect Gets Respect are the three elements of Smart Style that embody just about every facet of common sense, safety, risk awareness, and etiquette you can think of. Check out http://www.nsaa.org/ nsaa/safety/smart-style/ for the details and images you can download and use.

Transfer: Utilizing the takeoff from one feature and landing on another. In golf, playing into the wrong fairway is bad, but luckily in the park transferring features is cool – as long as you don’t bogart someone else’s line in the process.

Urban Jibs: When you take your rail grinding skills beyond the resort, perhaps sliding the rail at the condo unit, jibbing the picnic table in the park, or gap jumping from one rooftop to another, you’ve gone urban.

Vert: So think of how a halfpipe is shaped like the letter ‘U’ – the vertical parts of the ‘U’ are referred to as the vert. Unlike the letter ‘U’, a good half-pipe has much more transition and a relatively short vert – more like a good soup bowl perhaps but I guess that’s all relative. Quarter-pipes also have a transition to vert and sometimes that vert is the side of something – like a water tower, a wall, a tree, the side of a cabin.

Wedge edge: Not your snowplow kind of wedge but instead the shape of some jumps’ take-off ramps. Sometimes a wedge shaped ramp will be built, set back from a knoll, allowing the jibber to air over the flat and land on the pillow (down the backside of the knoll). Also referred to as a cheese wedge.

X--Games: A premiere extreme sports competition hosted by ESPN. Annual summer and winter versions are held with Winter X hosting new-school events like slopestyle, skier/boarder cross, and half-pipe.

Y: whY hasn’t someone come up with something freestylie for Y; the loneliest letter in the new school alphabet.

Zaugg: The company that makes some of the top snow cutting equipment for pipe,