TAE Natural Selection at Baldface Recap.

Dustin Craven Photo: Dustin Lalik

The second stop of The Natural Selection has just been shown as live. Fourteen of the world’s best snowboarders including five women dropped into the infamous Scary Cherry run at Baldface in the hope of making it through to the finals in Alaska, but who came out on top.
If you were unable to catch the live stream, this article contains spoilers and you might want to watch the stream first here.
Article by Tom Kingsnorth

This is the stop two of the second year of Travis Rice’s all mountain freestyle tour. Stop one in Jackson was a huge success and many of us were eager to tune in to experience the same euphoria once more. Baldface featured the top ranked riders from Jackson and also included 2021 winners of the YETI Natural Selection at Jackson Hole, Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Mark McMorris, who were in Beijing for stop one.

Whilst you can never really compare live snowboarding to an as live event, it was easy to forget that the event had actually already happened and once you tuned that fact out, Baldface proved to be an enjoyable watch. The snow conditions in Baldface proved to be significantly better than Jackson and consequently we got to see a higher level of riding from the competitors.

Head Honcho, Travis Rice.

The contest was held in two-run head-to-head format, with no tie-breakers and riders were rewarded for creativity, risk, execution, difficulty and overall flow. The overall run was judged from top to bottom, with the highest score taking the heat. This was a little harsh for Sage Kotsenberg, who was chased down Scary Cherry by some huge boulders after knocking them off the roof gap at the top of the slope. Never the less rules are rules and Sage was unable to continue his winning streak from round one.

Scary Cherry reaches more than 2200’ vertical and is littered with 80 natural and wooden drops, kickers and other features spread throughout the famously powder-coated, 40°-plus slope. Whilst the drone footage looks like something out of a video game, it doesn’t do justice to how steep the course actually is, once you see the sluff speeding down the slope does this steepness become apparent.

The top four men coming out of the qualies all put down runs that scored in the 90s to advance through to the semifinals. Mikkel Bang and Ben Ferguson tied on their second round for the day’s highest score. Mikkel’s sublime switch bs 5 was enough to put him through over Ferguson.

Travis Rice matched up with Dustin Craven and it was Travis who took to a new section of the course with a run consisting of a 360’s, a huge fs 5 with signature style. Craven went all in with a cab 5 and a banging fs 7 to give him a shock win over one of the favourites and take his place in the semi finals.

The final saw Bang and Craven go head to head. Mikkel led after round one with a huge frontside 720 but Craven’s was bounced back with an estimated 70 foot straight air added to a clean a 540 in the final run of the day. On Mikkel’s run, he was unlucky to hit a tree and even rode off the slope holding it as if he was Chuck Norris. The judges decided that Dustin Craven had been more flawless and was crowned the TAE Natural Selection Baldface Winner.

Dustin Craven stoked on 1st place.

For the Women, it was very much a case of who can beat Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, who has been dominating everything for the past few seasons. Elena Hight was probably her fiercest competitor at Baldface, with her years of contest riding giving her an advantage over Zoi’s raw talent. Marion Haerty and Hana Beaman (USA) were in close distance of Hight, who was in second place going into the finals.

The conditions were less gnarly than Jackson and we got to see the women put down some solid runs. Hight was throwing clean 360’s and big straight airs for a second place finish. 21 year old Sadowski-Synnott has had an incredible season and this continued with her grabbing the highest scoring women’s run of the day to give her the win at Baldface and a ticket to Alaska.

Zoi Sadowski-Synnott is on fire right now.

You can watch the entire TAE Natural Selection stream from Baldface again on this link here.

To find out more information on The Natural Selection, their website is here.