American's Peter Thorndike and Olympic veteran Lisa Kosglow held on today to score $10,000 for a day of racing. Thorndike was on his game all day with consistency that could not be matched. Lisa however had to fight each race tooth and nail leaving only hundredths of a second between her and her rivals as the day wore on.

It was Sondra Von Ert that gave Lisa a run for her money right out of the start with one of the tightest races out of the early heats. Sondra lost to Lisa but maintained her speed keeping her in a respectable fifth for the day. In the end it was friend and fellow competitor Rosie Fletcher who managed to beat out Stacia Hookom for second place. She bumped Stacia to third and forced Erika Mueller to settle for fourth for the day.

Pete Thorndike pushed himself with amazing results today. He managed to keep his cool and hold his line against the rest of the speed freaks and even more importantly survived a crash with Chris Klug during the semi-finals that could have easily shaken his confidence. Klug acknowledged with a smile "I wasn't here to win, I just wanted to have fun and do my best". Ryan McDonald also had a fast day and stepped up to his first Grand Prix podium today in a proud second place. Eric Warren managed to skip by Klug and steal third for the day, pushing Klug down to fourth.

Hooray for head to head racing. Any spectator will tell you that they would rather watch two racers against each other, than one lone racer against the clock. It sucks that many racers have trained endlessly for single racer format, but today's Parallel Giant Slalom provided plenty of head to head action for the few lucky spectators that came out to watch. Since there had already been a few races around the country, many of today's competitors were ready for the fight and it showed.

The field was mostly Americans with a small but strong Canadian contingent. This included the Canadian veteran Mark Fawcett. Fawcett couldn't keep his line today against fellow Canadian Ian Hadgkiss who stepped it up landing in seventh after Mark slid out.

The best part of today's action was easily the fine blue bird weather that blessed us. Unfortunately it won't hold out for the rest of the weekend and it looks like we might be witnessing the halfpipe under a white out. We'll pray to the mountain gods in hopes of enough clearing to see what's happening but, even the experts here at MountainZone realize that we can't do much considering that we've been praying for snow, snow, snow for months now. Whoops!

— Hans Prosl, MountainZone.com correspondent