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Ian CobleMark Abma and Eric Hjorleifson putting in some computer time.

We know you'd rather be skiing than wasting time on the internet. Which is why here at ESPN Freeskiing, we try to give you a one-stop shop for all the things freeskiing, so you don't have to surf the web for hours to find out the news from your favorite athletes, resorts and gear companies. But enough about us. Here are the websites that the contributors to ESPN Freeskiing visit when they're looking for information online about gear, weather, news, athletes and more. Introducing the best freeskiing sites on the web (not including our own).

Best Athlete Blogs

Jon-olsson.com: How can you not love Jon Olsson's blog? It's filled with jet-setting, beautiful women, Lamborghinis, and yes, skiing. It's got original video, professional photos, and Olsson's window into many different facets of skiing and adventure (like driving across Europe with Bode Miller).

Jenhudak.com/blog: Jen Hudak's blog features everything from poetry to photos to her take on the world. "Time came to a complete stand still," Hudak writes about the passing of her friend, Sarah Burke. "It felt as if the whole world stopped turning, yet everything continued on around me."

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The gnarliest crash of Winter X Games Aspen 2012 may have been Justin Dorey's gut-wrenching slam into the deck of the halfpipe during the men's final. Dorey, a medal contender from Squamish, B.C., was trying a switch double cork 1080 on his fifth and final hit after sticking a double flat-spin 720 on his prior hit. He had never landed the highly technical combo in competition, and had he done so at Buttermilk, Colo., many felt he would have medaled.

When Dorey crashed spectacularly into the icy pipe lip, he absorbed the impact like a rag doll then plummeted eight feet onto hard snow and slid to the flat bottom. Remarkably, after a few minutes on the ground, Dorey limped away from the crash nursing just his shoulder.

Reached by phone Tuesday afternoon in Whistler, Dorey said he expects to return to skiing by March 1 and hopes to compete at Winter X Games Tignes two weeks after that. He earned a silver medal last year at the same contest.

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When I got home from Winter X Games Aspen, the first question I heard came from a snowboarder friend of mine who wanted to know why skiers didn't try triples in Big Air the day after both Mark McMorris and Torstein Horgmo had landed them on snowboards. Here's a guess: because Dane Tudor wasn't there.

A week before Winter X, the 22-year-old skier out of Rossland, BC, released a video edit that featured him landing a switch triple rodeo 12, not on a park shoot-caliber, 110-foot tabletop, but on the last jump in the Breckenridge public terrain park. Listed as the third alternate for the competition, Tudor campaigned to no avail for an upgrade to the competitor list for the Winter X Ski Big Air. If he had brought his public park-sized triple to the slightly larger than public park-sized Big Air jump, we may have watched a totally different contest with other competitors forced to try their own triples. One thing is for certain: Tudor's recent triple proves that those tricks are attainable on much smaller jumps than previously accepted, and that the age of the triple is rapidly approaching. I recently caught up with Tudor, a standout athlete in recent releases from Poor Boyz Productions, to learn more.

What was going through your head when you tried that triple in Breck? Did you want it for contests or was it just a new goal for yourself?
It was both. I wanted to go to the X Games and I'd been really wanting to do one for a while. I was just feeling it that day, so I decided it was time. I also wanted it for the backcountry this winter on a big booter.

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Imagine if you will this scenario. In 2004, freeskier Josh Dueck crashed doing something he'd been comfortable doing a thousand times before. He woke from the slam only to find he'd lost half of his bodily control, paralyzed from the waist down and mentally devastated to find himself no longer able to do what he once did.

Now imagine this. Imagine that same skier believes he can return to flight. Imagine returning with half the body to the exact same flight that had changed his life forever. Imagine the fear that comes along with the thought, "The last time I did something like this, I ended up in this wheelchair." And then imagine saying, "But this time, I've got it."

That's what Josh Dueck just did. In 2004 he was left paralyzed after an overshot frontflip over a jump in Vernon, BC. On February 3, Dueck became the first person to perform a backflip on snow in a sit ski.

Dueck, the 2011 gold medalist at Winter X Games Mono Skier X, recently earned a bronze medal in Mono Skier X at the 2012 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo. He was also the star of a recent film, "Freedom Chair," which earned Best Documentary at the 2012 Powder Video Awards.

You're in for an awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping sight. Enjoy.

When Park City, Utah, native Todd Ligare isn't sending it off ridgelines in British Columbia or pointing it down spines in Alaska while filming with Teton Gravity Research, you can find him in his garage tuning his bass. Alongside good friends and fellow skiers, the Atomic athlete has managed to find a nitch off the hill playing in a band. We caught up with Ligare at Snowbird recently to see how last season faired for the athlete/musician.

Henry Georgi Huge peaks surround Zermatt, Switzerland, but the Matterhorn steals the show.

With the western U.S. still lacking in snow and the Alps being buried beneath a 10-day storm, I decided the place to be was Switzerland. Canadian photographer Henry Georgi and I planned a short-notice trip to Murren, Grindelwald and Zermatt, armed with a 15-day Swiss rail pass and our ski gear.

A few train changes landed us in Lauterbrunnen, where the station was packed with World Cup racers and fans fresh off the Wengen downhill and heading for Kitzbühel and the Hahnenkamm. Not us though. We hopped a cable car that gained us a couple thousand vertical and boarded our final train for the village of Murren, a car-free village surrounded by the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau piercing the skyline. For the next 10 days, we reveled in huge vertical, deep powder, and hot mugs of gluhwein as we ticked off three of the Swiss Alps' most epic mountain resorts.

Courtesy of MammutThe Mammut Alyeska jacket is built to handle rain, freezing temps, and more.

As much fun as it is to have a quiver of ski jackets, sometimes your cohabitant doesn't appreciate your monopolization of the hallway coat rack. "What the hell," Cohabitant says. "Can't you leave me one hook?" To which you reply: "It's not my fault. Different conditions warrant different jackets." Enter the Mammut Alyeska, which instantly reduces the quiver by two or three jackets, making life better for everyone.

WHAT IT IS:
As the price suggests, this is not a jacket you buy to hit the bunny hill a few times a year. This is the tricked-out Lamborghini you buy to drive across Siberia. Mammut, a hardcore Swiss manufacturer of premier gear, markets the Alyeska as its best all-around jacket, with good reason. Using three-layer Gore-Tex softshell fabric that protects you from every kind of precipitation, the Alyeska also allows your body to breathe and thus regulate its temperature while moving. It's burly for a softshell -- just picking it up will tell you that -- but that's the point. While a hardshell won't breathe and a traditional softshell won't shield Mother Nature's fury, the Alyeska does both. "It's the only thing I wear for skiing," says Mammut-sponsored ski mountaineer Dave Watson, who skied the infamous Bottleneck Couloir (8,350 meters) on K2 in 2009. "In everything from sloppy, wet conditions where snow sticks to everything, to hiking in the rain, to full-on powder skiing -- this jacket has always kept me dry."

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Mark FisherInside the tiny house with Molly Baker, Zack Giffin and Neil Provo.

Last May, Zack Giffin and I started coming up with ideas for ways to travel the 2012 winter chasing snow around the country. Giffin, a seasoned ski bum veteran, suggested we do it in his van equipped with a wood stove and sleeping space. That idea got a major upgrade once we were introduced to the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

"It seemed like kind of a far-fetched option, but an obvious attention grabber and a classy way to conduct the tour that would appeal to outdoor enthusiasts," says Giffin, who works as a carpenter during the summer. "Plus, I really wanted to build one and be a part of the tiny house movement."

We suggested the idea to Outdoor Research, as a way of sharing their new sidecountry line and with the inspiration from Tumbleweed, the house turned from concept to a tangible project in the last week of October. Seven weeks later, we had a tiny, powder-hunting gypsy mobile.

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Joshua Duplechian/ESPN Sammy Carlson competing in Slopestyle elims at Winter X 2012.

Sammy Carlson crashed during the Winter X 2012 Big Air finals on Saturday night, causing a torn MCL in his right knee. He was escorted out of the venue by X Games medical staff. This is Carlson's first major ski injury.

"Lucky, it's just partially torn, so I won't need surgery," Carlson said on Wednesday. "I think by the spring I will be back on my skis."

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Tim FitzgeraldTJ Schiller at his home mountain of Silver Star, BC.

TJ Schiller, Justin Dorey, Chad Sayers, Josh Bibby, Riley Leboe, Joe Schuster: That's an all-star list of freeskiers, who, believe it or not, all grew up in Vernon, British Columbia, population 30,000. That's an impressive per capita production, but none give credit to the Okanagan water supply. They all point the praise on the Silver Star Freestyle Club.

"I think there are two reasons we were successful," says Dorey, who joined his local hill's ski club when he was 13. "The first being that it put all of us kids together, which created an amazing atmosphere for skiing. Secondly and, most importantly, was our air site. We could session a big jump every weekend and not get the wear and tear on the body that you would hitting park jumps. I think the air site played a huge part in where we all are today."

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