7th Heaven View

R.I.P Sarah Burke – a true pioneer

As usual I am running late – so just a quick report. Today was excellent and I had a really good time up there. The alpine is a perfect -6C —> -10C and there is quite a lot of ‘fresh’ to be found. The light snow is blown around so easy it is resulting in a lot of deep pockets. We did a run down Dog Leg and besides from some cornice debris to be wary of, it was completely fresh. Actually, we didn’t need to venture too far to find fresh snow, the Blackcomb glacier was 1/2 fresh making for some choppy fun. I guess the cold temps has kept a lot of people of the hill (including myself).

The snow quality was awesome, and today is one of my best ‘non-powder’ days ever, although (as mentioned) it kinda was a ‘powder’ day at times. The lower mountain, while still having great snow is still really cold due to an inversion right now. Stay up high! I am looking forward to tomorrow

Blackcomb Glacier

What fantastic conditions for our American friends to enjoy their Martin Luther King long weekend. Clear skies and cold temperatures after some fresh snow falling Thursday/Friday. There wasn’t a lot of fresh, around 10cm (~4 inches), but it was light and fluffy. I have to admit that -15C (5F) is a bit too cold for me, but I also have to admit it makes great snow for skiing. Visibility was perfect and I saw and heard a lot of happy people around the mountain today.

Normally American long weekends can be a bit of a gong show, and I heard yesterday was kind of busy but today was really quiet. I uploaded around 10:30 which is normally the worst time to do that, yet I skied onto Wizard chair (and base 2 Blackcomb gondola didn’t have a line either). I didn’t see any lift lines (2-3 minutes at most) during my few hours up there.

The video below shows the Blackcomb glacier, and while it was a bit choppy, the skiing was excellent. The current forecast is also looking excellent

Black Tusk

I just finished another fun day on Whistler mountain, the snow wasn’t ideal (~week of cold sunshine), but fun nonetheless. The upper alpine provided decent turns as did the very bottom of the mountain (due to snow making producing some good quality snow). This week, I skied 3 out of 4 of the ski-outs (missed the upper base of Blackcomb), and they all had great coverage so all you ‘die before download’ people have nothing to worry about.

There was a lot of flat light today, but it was never too bad in my opinion. Late in the day we actually had some amazing lighting, which is when the photos in this post were taken. Black Tusk was looking pretty darn nice!

View from Whistler Mountain

Cheakamus Lake

I’m pretty happy right now, a couple of things in my life are falling into place and I can now look forward to a ~week of skiing powder Check out the forecast – snow to the valley!

Kyle

What a difference one day can make, yesterday was kind of warm and you could barely see your next turn, while today was cold with bright sunshine. I decided to ski Whistler mountain, since I haven’t been up there for quite a while and Symphony chair was the only chair not to open yesterday.

Inukshuk

The snow from mid-mountain down was pretty icy, which was to be expected with the sudden temperature drop. Above mid (well maybe you had to be a bit higher than mid) the snow was good. Symphony and Flute had a nice dusting of fresh, light powder so the skiing there was super fun.

Piccolo and Sun Bowl

I met Kyle on the chair, and he decided to join me on the hike up Flute. Unsure of how the snow would be, since it looked a bit scraped on Flute Shoulder we headed a bit further and found the gully north of Flute North to be almost fresh. The skiing was excellent so we decided to do it again, the video below is from the first lap.

The coverage on Flute North, and my favourite line Pig’s Fancy looks excellent.

Flute North

If you happened to be on Whistler today and wondered what all the dogs were about, this week there is an CARDA (Canadian Avalanche Rescue Dog Association) training and evaluation session going on. First of all, a big thumbs up to ALL ski patrollers, then another thumb up for those who spend the time and energy to train a dog to help with the search and rescue effort.

I’ll finish this post with two more (scenic only) videos. The first is skiing along Matthews Traverse, while the second is a 360 from the top of Flute. The first one shows how I need to get one of those helmet cams that makes you look like a ……..

Disease Ridge

I finally skied in 2012

The theme of the day was flat light, although the sun did try to break through once in a while. I had a few moments of decent visibility but overall I was skiing at 50%, both in speed and aggressiveness. I stuck to the alpine, spending most of my time on 7th Heaven where I found the snow a bit dense, but still a lot of fun.

The coverage up high is really good now (200cm is the unofficial benchmark for a good base), with a lot of the smaller rocks close to and on the main runs now being buried. The traverse to Lakeside Bowl is another story, it might have just been the flat light making it hard for me to pick a good line, but I spent a lot of time stepping around rocks.

There was a crazy dense fog/cloud layer around mid-mountain, the worst I have seen for at least a few years. It was definitely slow going through that.

Anyway, got to go, the Canucks are on. I just had a quick read of this post, and it sounds about right – the snow was decent, the visibility wasn’t but I had a good day anyway. As they say, I bad day on the mountain is better than any other day…..

Lakeside Bowl