200,000 - Nov 10, 2006

Yes, I save all my ski passes.

Yes, I get excited when big numbers turn over on my odometer.

My old faithful Saturn rolled over 200 000 km on the Sunshine Village access road. I took this geeky picture once I got home.

Skiing - Dec 27, 2008

After Christmas, the temperatures at Lake Louise FINALLY became reasonable so Erin and I braved the crowds, which actually weren't that bad, and headed out to Lake Louise for some fun and to work up our ski legs before the trip to Fernie on New Years.

Perhaps we Banff skiers are spoiled. We took the a lift up with a patroler and he said that would be the busiest day of the year. We had to wait for the lift once at Larch and once at Ptarmagin. Though I am no fan of busy slopes, I do hope the numbers pick up at Lake Louise so that they remain profitable.


Here's Erin with Whitehorn II in the background. Those chutes are still a long way from ready. They need more snow and the snow that in them needs to stabilize.

Looking the other way, you can see me. I'm about to fly down Brownshirt. Remember those moments of bliss I was talking about last post. That run was another one of them. The snow wasn't powder, but it was just perfect for some packed powder turns. Erin said she wished she had a camera to capture my turns. I got going really fast and was able to stay smooth.

Here's Erin coming down underneath the Paradise chair. There was actually pretty good snow there. The coverage was decent and large moguls hadn't yet developed.

All-in-all, this was a really great day of skiing. We managed to avoid the rocks and had some good time just being together in the mountains. Lake Louise will always be a special place for us.

Nose Hill Skiing - Dec 20, 2008

Partly because the ridiculously cold weather had kept me from Lake Louise, partly because of the wonderful dump of snow on the hill and mainly for the sheer audacity of it, I took my Alpine Touring equipment out to Nose Hill for some foothills touring.  It's  a wonderful experience to take literally 5 steps out of my garage and start skiing.  It's also extremely rare.  

Here's a shot of my shadow in the bright afternoon sun.  I stealthily took this picture so that it looked like I was holding my pole.  You'll note that there are NO other people out.  It was VERY cold.

The drifts were quite deep!  This was on the main paved path through the park!

Either this dog had wandered off away from his master, or these were prints from one of Nose Hill's coyotes.  Given that there were no human tracks in sight, I'm sure it was the later.

This was the highlight of the adventure.  After wandering about on the top of the hill for a while, I slid down to a gully.  Since the snow pack was only about 30cm, it was pretty shrubby, so the way down was pretty slow going.  However, once I was at the bottom, this glorious (untracked) sight awaited me.  On the the left are my boot-packing tracks and on the right are my 4 glorious Nose Hill powder turns.  We skiiers are always chasing after those fleeting moments of powder bliss.

  This was one of them.