Catching Air
or Building Jumps and Obstacles
How do you build the perfect jump? How steep should the angle of inclination be? And of course,could the above picture be done? These are relatively easy questions to answer.
Building the perfect jump depends
entirely on what you want to do with you're air time. If you want to go for
overall distance from the end of the jump its better to make a not-so-steep
angle. If you want to go for height while in the air then a very steep angle
of inclination is what you are after. The best angle of inclination you could
look for would be one of about 45 degrees. Not 45 degrees from a flat surface,
but 45 degrees in relation to the point on the hill in which the jump starts
on the hill. 
Anything steeper
and you start sacrificing distance for height. There is a limit though, to
how steep the angle can be. Obviously you couldn't make a jump that makes
a 90 degree angle with the hill, it would be like running into a wall of ice,
and will get you nowhere but the emergency room.
To the question about the loop-the-loop, the answer is yes. It is possible, although it is very hard to make a perfect loop of snow/ice. The only thing you need to really take into account while you are building it is how far up the hill your starting point is in relation to how large of a loop you make. In order for you to successfully make it through the loop you need to built up enough kinetic energy as you went down the hill to last through the whole loop. If the kinetic energy at the top of the loop doesn't at least equal the amount of potential energy built from going up the first half of the loop then you're not going to make it.