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Year in and year out, Hot Dawgs and Handrails takes over Bear Mountain and a cluster of snowboarding, Inland Empire folk, product tosses, partying, and dance parties commence. 2011 was no exception thanks to Clayton Shoemaker and crew because the typical rowdiness and riding went down just as we expected. The only aspects to seriously change up were the course setup and the location of the shit show that is the HDHR after-party.

With 130-tons of snow covering the course, twenty-four invited riders began to drop into the largest; most progressive and creative set up HDHR has seen yet around two o'clock on Saturday. Loads of snowboard fanatics, drunken locals, industry names, scantily clad teeny boppers, and little kids with spray paint and stickers covering their entire body swarmed the lower mountain and sun deck ready to witness some ballsy snowboarding. As expected, the Red Bull feature garnered the most attention and nutty tricks with a wall-ride creeper ledge as one option, stair gap as another, and flat-box as the last thing to hit. This thing saw more back flips to bails than your littler sister's gymnastics coach. However, when these attempts were pulled off you knew it because the crowd went out of their minds.

The rest of the contest set up included a drop in with two identical banks that would send you to opposite sides of the course, a down rail with street-style entry, "The Sender" down the middle to a 20-foot grass gap to flat, a close-out rail, more grass gaps, and a burly down- flat-down rail. The options were endless and the variations of tricks the competitors were throwing together were plain ridiculous. This year's champ, Ryan Paul pulled out a switch front flip to 50-50 on the Red Bull ledge feature while Scotty Vine continued to lay down one-footers all day long. Nick Visconti and Jake OE were getting super technical on the down rails and the down-flat-down.

It was a flurry of insanely impressive jibbers going off and making it obvious they were having a damn good time as well. With warm temps, booze and Red Bull flowing, and free product flying all over the place, the 8th Annual Hot Dawgs and Handrails was without a doubt a major success. After an obvious difficult deliberation, the judges made up of JP Walker, Joe Sexton, Seth Huot, and Lauri Heiskari delivered the winners.

Ryan Paul scored the $10,000 coveted first place prize with Brandon Hobush nailing second and $3,000 while Jesse Paul rounded out the top three with $1,000. Melissa Evans represented the ladies and showed no fear towards any of the features which earned her a quick $1,000 to take to the after-party.

Speaking of not-so-sober pros, industry peeps, and snow addicts; the notorious HDHR after-party switched locations after a long run at Mandarin Garden. Guess the employees were a little over broken furniture and glass strewn about the airport runway below. ThirtyTwo hosted the party at Avalanche Bar and well, that's all we remember. We think there was music, a laser show, a dance floor, and a fan that was super entertaining to dance in front of.

Congrats to the winners and everyone in attendance that made it out alive. Bring on the snow.

Rider: Ryan Paul Photo: Mike Yoshida