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

Welcome to 2012, I can’t believe it’s been a week already and I still haven’t been skiing. I am feeling a lot better however and intend to ski tomorrow – Yay!

Laura sent in a report for today, and I would like to thank her for doing so – Thanks Laura!

I skied at Whistler today. As has been the experience lately, the visibility was poor in certain areas, and especially in the high alpine. The snow is nice in the alpine but it seems that mid-mountain there’s a layer of hard stuff underneath. It’s not awful or solid ice or anything but just not as soft as it was before. The lift lines were long especially at Harmony and the Green, where they both extended to the end of the ropes. Halfway through the afternoon our goggles got iced over with sleet and the crowds disappeared. Imagine that! It’s snowing now so hopefully tomorrow will be a nice day. Tip: If you are a beginner, I still wouldn’t ski to Creekside base via Dave Murray or Franz’s at the end of the day. There’s perfect coverage but the crowds are insane, some people think it’s downhill race time and it’s pretty darn icy.

The only good news from me is that I have spent the last few days working on the 3D Map of Whistler, and while it will never be finished, I have it at a stage I am happy to release. I have a couple more items to polish up, but it will be online before the end of this week – I promise!

Riding Crystal

What a fantastic day! The only downside was having to share it with so many people It also reminded me of a Crowded House song – ‘Four Seasons in One Day’. It was cloudy and windy then the sun came out, then it got cloudy again and started snowing, followed by more sun finishing the ski day with an absolutely insane storm in the Crystal zone.

We unloaded the top of GE at 2:15 and proceeded to Crystal. The storm came out of nowhere and was blowing like crazy with blinding snow while we crossed the Moonscape (which was excellent skiing all day long). Escaping the wind and snow with ski (yet again) more fresh turns in Fraggle Rock and ended up on Lower Rock n Roll. There we were met with what seemed like 5cm or so of blower Pow – on the groomed run! It was crazy, the end of the day (a busy day) and we were getting excellent freshies on a trail we had skied a few times already.

Overall an excellent day, I wish the snow was like this all the time (I really could go on and on about it). My legs are done!

I am sure some people didn’t like the strong winds and overall weather, it would have been nasty for a beginner to get stuck in that. Also, the lift lines grew pretty big at one stage, and we had to put up with a complaining single on one chair. We had one really long wait for Crystal chair; it was turning extremely slow during one of the high winds periods. Two more waits of around 13-15 minutes for Excelerator chair around noon but otherwise the lines were small enough (5 minutes or not much more).

Lastly, here are a few short clips of Mike in the Crystal trees.