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Thursday, March 24, 2005

Sick, sick, sick powder day

Oh my god we just had the most amazing day's riding, and now I'm soooo exhausted. This morning I managed to get out at 9, which is an accomplishment, and we went hiking into the backcountry. In the morning we went up to blackcomb glacier, took the t-bar to the top, walked up onto the glacier and along the ridge, traversed straight right across to the far side and then walked straight uphill to the far side of blackcomb peak. From that hike you can either loop round to the left and end up coming back down onto blackcomb glacier or go the way that we did and end up on the far side of lakeside bowl and eventually come back out at the seventh heaven chair.
The hike was absolutely killer, like walking up a blue run except in deep snow, althought fortunately the previous hikers' footprints had made it somewhat easier than it would have been if we were the first people up there. We had to take a few breaks even though it was only a 30 minute or so walk. It was quite a feeling of satisfaction when we got to the top though! Plus the views from the top were amazing, it was wicked to see everything from a different angle to how you usually see it from the pistes! Check the photos again, I took a bunch and some are quite impressive.
Anyway, the first run down we traversed quite a long way along the far side of the bowl then dropped into the trees quite a way over. The powder in the trees was beautiful, although at the top it had gone slightly crusty. I watched Nicolas, our French tour guide for the day, stack it into a tree and get buried up to the shoulders too, which was funny. Fortunately we all managed to make it back to the piste ok, although we were a bit worried about Pete, who managed to go down past the "way out" signs, which to be fair were tiny and inconspicuous, then hiked maybe 100m across the mountain to get back to the bottom of the piste!! After that ordeal everyone was ready for some lunch but we had only 10 minutes to get from the top of 7th heaven to the glacier creek restaurant, so we hammered it straight down there, which froze our faces!
After a baked potato for lunch we headed back to the glacier and did the same hike again... We lost Nobuko though because she fell off the t-bar three times, much to my amusement - the third time I saw her and another guy going ass over tit down the bank to the right of the lift line. In the afternoon the sun had come out and it was incredibly hot walking up that hill carrying all our stuff. Again it was totally worth it though, the second run down through the bowl was absolutely incredible - we took a line further to the right and were carving out huge sweeping turns through untouched snow. On the way down through the trees I took a rather extreme line though which was pretty, er, difficult :) fortunately me & Tim managed to find our way back to civilization just in time.
After we'd done that run me & Tim were thinking of going over to Whistler and hiking flute bowl but our legs said, "absolutely not", so instead we went for one more run top to bottom via crystal chair and jersey cream and headed to the longhorn for a couple of pitchers and some mulled wine :) awwwwwwwwwwwwesome day!!! Hopefully it's going to snow again tonight but there's a chance the freezing level could be at 3000m, which could be slightly problematic!!

1 Comments:

At 4:14 pm, Blogger lexathon said...

At last you have some good times on the mountain!

It sucks to be me right now, as I am looking for jobs and have no money to do anything at all.

Really you should think about coming back sooner.

 

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