Hot Dogs & Hand Rails

Now in its sixth year, Bear Mountain’s Hot Dogs and Handrails event has always been a hallmark of cutting-edge features and course design, progressive riding and technology, which you need to bring 110+ tons of snow (ahem, ice) to a mountain smack dab in the middle of the Southern California desert. In case you haven't noticed, we're still in the middle of September. As the crowd started to flow in, the temperatures climbed into the upper 70’s (Fahrenheit, thankfully it wasn’t a skin-melting 70 Celsius!). Immediately the estimated crowd of 5,000 filtered through the sponsor village and begged, and in some cases bartered, with the company representatives for their promotional goodies. A few of the sponsor tents had short-lived contests to win free product. By far the most entertaining was Dragon’s: they had boys and girls of all ages on their knees with penis-shaped beer bongs up to their lips while they sucked down milk in a race for a free pair of goggles and some giveaways from 686.

The hotdog and handrail hungry hordes Milk is good for you, kids!

Once the riding got underway the crowd migrated into the middle of the U-shaped course. The course this year was by far the most innovative ever seen at a “pre-season” event. Mountains across the world would be lucky to have hot dogs and a setup like the one featured in the event during their regular winter seasons. The riders were faced with a choice of bomb dropping into the run-in for a marble down ledge, which led into a gap to hip wallride, or into a down C-rail, both of which ended up at a pyramid box. They could also start on the other side and drop into an elbowed down-flat-down rail, which led into what can be best described as a bank with a flat box on top of it. To say the least, the level of riding was well beyond what anyone could have expected out of a pre-season event.

The course creativity level pissed on your usual rail jam They stole this ledge from City Hall and dragged it up the hillSteppin' up the difficulty level with the elbow kinker

It was clear early on in that there was going to be a battle royale for the top three spots, and of course the entire duration of the finals was a shoot-out for best trick. Ultimately Ted Borland won that battle with a clean 5-0 on the down-flat-down elbow rail. Other contenders on that beast included many front lip attempts and even some 270 variations, none of which were landed. The event ended up with Zak Hale taking 3rd, Jed Anderson taking 2nd and Big Bear home town hero Scott Vine taking the top spot and claiming his second Hot Dogs and Handrails victory. He consistently dropped bangers buttered in style all day and walked away with a well-deserved hefty check.

Borland, the elbow kink king!

Photos and text by Andres Quintana