MOUNT BACHELOR —

Freestyle skier Dean Bercovitch has had the kind of tricks that win big air competitions.

Or, at least, he thought he did. It was hard to be sure, because the 25-year-old former slopestyle skier from Whistler, British Columbia, could not afford to travel to many contests over the past few years.

During a backcountry skiing trip in Montana last week, Bercovitch and his friend Ian Hamilton, 26, decided to take the suggestion of several of their skiing buddies and enter Hella Big Air, held Saturday at Mt. Bachelor ski area. Bercovitch won the ski division — which came with a prize of $10,000 — with a combined score of 179.2 for his two best jumps in the finals. The already successful trip was sweetened by Hamilton’s second-place finish with 177.3 points. Jonah Williams rounded out the podium with 176.6 points.

“I’ve been waiting for three or four years to do well in an event,” Bercovitch said. “I just won 10 grand American, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to use it to do more events. So this is going to be the start of something.”

Bercovitch said good weather conditions during the qualifying round encouraged skiers to try some of their bigger tricks, but the sky turned overcast and the wind picked up before the remaining 10 skiers could start the finals, in which each competitor would get three jumps.

“Between the rounds it was snowing, and (during the practice runs) everyone was coming in short,” Bercovitch said. “So after that, it was pretty obvious to me that it wasn’t going to be a ‘who can do the biggest trick’ contest anymore, it was more about who’s going to execute well. Because when the weather goes bad, it makes it harder to take a risk.”

Bercovitch opened the finals with a switch (backward) 1080 (three rotation) jump, and then attempted an “unnatural” spin on his second jump, spinning left instead of his usual right. He fell.

“So pressure is on for the next one,” Bercovitch recounted. “So I decided to play it safe. Instead of doing the unnatural, harder trick, I did it natural with an interesting axis, like I did in qualifiers. But I actually landed it this time, and the judges liked it.”

Hamilton, who lives in Missoula, Montana, had the top jump in the qualifiers, but he admitted he was even more unnerved than the other competitors by the shifting weather conditions due to a bad crash during a slopestyle competition several years ago.

“It was snowing between when we practiced and when we went, and I undershot a jump and got really hurt,” Hamilton said. “So I definitely had some stress when we were waiting for finals, and it was snowing. I was like, oh, I don’t want to do this.”

But despite crashing on the double misty 1080 — his most consistent trick — in the qualifiers, Hamilton tried it again on his first jump in the finals, this time landing it. He then landed his switch trick, a 1080 with “an unusual downhill flipping axis.”

“I was excited about it, and I had a third run to either improve the switch hit or have fun with it,” Hamilton said. “I decided to add a 180 (half a rotation) to my double misty, so it was a 1260 I did backwards. I hadn’t done one in a year or two, and I tried it and landed it. I was stoked.”

Unlike Hamilton, who has focused largely on backcountry skiing in recent years, or Bercovitch, who has struggled to find opportunities to compete, snowboard division winner Chris Corning, 18 and of Silverthorne, Colorado, added the Mt. Bachelor Hella Big Air title to a number of other impressive outings. Corning finished fourth at the inaugural big air event at the Olympics earlier this year and finished second in big air at the 2017 world championships in Sierra Nevada, Spain. He also won the Copper Mountain (Colorado) Hella Big Air in early March.

Corning showed off his skills with his first two jumps, starting with a back triple 1440 (that’s four rotations) and following up with a massive front 1040.

“I was definitely battling between doing the front 10’ first or not — I kind of knew I was going to do a back triple, and I was going to do a front 10,” Corning explained. “I was looking at my tricks, and if I need to I could do a front 14’. But it was just dependent on what everybody else was doing on that first one.”

Corning said he decided to go with the back triple when the sun peaked out just before his drop, giving him a clearer view of the slope.

“It was, well, might as well do a back triple, so I ended up doing that,” Corning said. “I tried one in practice in the morning, and then didn’t do it again until that one. So it was kind of a long time, but it was OK.”

Sean Neary, 20, finished second in the snowboard division and Austin Visintainer, 21, was third.

And while event organizers and podium finishers joked about what they could do with their cash prizes, Bercovitch agreed when Hamilton called prize money “a reinvestment in your career.”

“At 25 years old, I’m in this interesting situation of not being sure where I’m going to go in the industry and not being fully confident in the tricks I’ve been doing, even though I know they’re different,” Bercovitch said. “I can keep doing it now. I just put down one of the tricks that I thought could win, and it did. So aside from the money, it also means that there’s a lot of hope that I’m super excited about.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0305, vjacobsen@bendbulletin.com