Taming the Jane

Mary Jane, CO, is home to some of North America's most fearsome bumps. But instructor Bob Barnes shepherds his flock through the treacherous valleys and sets them on the path to mogul enlightenment.

by Peter Heller

Jane Bumps

Ski Season Yoga Keep your body in shape and centered throughout the ski season with these simple yoga exercises.

Power Your Steering Don't leave turning entirely up to sidecut. Use your legs' full range of rotary movement to guide your skis on the perfect path.

Better Skiing Through...Skiing Nothing prepares you for ski season like skiing. Use this workout and get ready to rip.

Stable Edge Control Here's a drill for experts to improve stance, turns, and edge-control.

Winter Park, CO
Resort Profile

Slideshow: Taming the Jane
Mary Jane, CO - home to North America's most fearsome bumps.

Standing at the top of Outhouse, a cascading, double-fall-line triple-pitched bump bash, I felt like Patrick Swayze about to paddle my surfboard into hurricane waves in Point Break. It was a self-sacrifice of sorts to the bump gods - or demons, as it turned out - of Winter Park, Colo. In my defense, this particular moment in my life was B.G. - Before Guru - when my decisions about skiing had more to do with reckless hope than actual strategy. By "Guru, I mean Bob Barnes, the resort's mythic mogul master, who would soon take me under his wing. But for now, with more amp than technique, I ignored the stickers bearing Mary Jane's unofficial logo - a Band-Aid - on the helmets around me and scraped, bounced and yard-saled my way down Outhouse. Because this run was the gateway. The gateway to The Jane.

Mary Jane, the brooding mountain just to the south of Winter Park, is arguably the top bump area in the country. She's part of the resort, but so distinct as to seem like another world. The thickly wooded mountain is draped with mogul runs of every stripe: spilling fall-line trails like the favorite, Derailer; tipped double-fall-line slopes like Hole-in-the-Wall; mean, boulder-choked chutes like Awe and Baldy. Half the time, The Jane is shrouded in clouds. She is forbidding, enigmatic, and as you approach on the winding highway, her mogul fields ripple with muscular shadows of menace. Your quads burn just looking at them.

On the ride up the Zephyr chairlift to Outhouse, I met one of The Jane's fierce cadre of devotees, a tall, gangly, 30-something who wished to be referred to only as Nihilist. He summed it up: "Best bump hill on the planet. You wanna hang with us, you better rip. As I threw myself into Outhouse's Mounds of Death, which meshed perfectly into one another like the flesh-grinding molars of a tyrannosaurus rex, I realized quickly that the only part of me that might rip were the muscles in my groin. That's when I decided to seek professional help.

Bob Barnes, The Guru, runs Winter Park's famous Bump Jamboree clinic, and he just might be the most respected bump instructor in the country. A former racer, the director of Winter Park's Ski and Ride School and an eight-year veteran of the prestigious Professional Ski Instructors of America national demonstration team, he is constantly pushing the edge, discovering new and better ways to teach bump skiing. He's also six-foot-one and built like a tree trunk, so his students do as they're told.