Boys ski, girls shop, everybody's happy...

23rd Feb, 2008

It was our biggest day on the slopes so far for Clive and I. Diane and Lorraine took the bus down to Kelowna for a day's shopping, not just for clothes and shoes, but they managed to bring back some supplies as well.

Clive and I headed out just after 9am. We headed for the Black Forest area where we saw another type of Snow Ghost whilst riding the lift up....




We did a few runs at the Black Forest, exploring the blues which we found to be pretty tame in comparison to other areas of the mountain. Tried a quick venture off piste as there is a particularly spacious gladed area with lots of room to manoeuvre, but with no snow now for over a week, we soon got sick of sliding around on ice so moved back to the main runs.

We then headed off to Gem Lake via the T-Bar, taking a quick trip up the Falcon Chair as we hadn't been on it before. It is an old fixed grip double chair and has a very steep pitch at the end. There is some marvelous scenery near the top of the chair, I'll take a video before we leave.

Gem Lake was brilliant as usual, although being a Saturday there was a lot more traffic on the run, yet still minimal lift lines or waits, if any. Blue Ribbon was ungroomed according to the grooming report but still looked OK from the top. As so often happens, you ski just far enough over the lip to make it impossible to turn back when you realise it is indeed ungroomed, lol. In truth, we made it down comfortably, it was a very 'interesting' run ungroomed, but if they groom it tomorrow we'll be there with bells on, heaps of small dropoffs and rollovers, looks like a ripper.

Kalina's was a bit of a highway so we headed off to a few different spots, finally stopping for lunch around 1:30. Pies from The Bakery and coffee from Beano's is the current lunch of choice, yummy. The World Cup is on at Whistler over this weekend and as you'd expect it is live on TV here. We watched the final stages of the men's downhill at Beano's whilst having lunch. The large crowd gave an almighty cheer when the Canadian skier posted the fastest time with around 6 or 7 skiers still to run. Predictably, his time was beaten and I think he finished 5th.

We took off again, heading up the 6-seater, down to the Powder Chair and finally heading back to Gem Lake via Blue Sapphire. I got a video of Clive coming down Blue Sapphire....



I have sorted out the zoom aspect so that we don't look like ants on the slope, but I'm still a bit shakey. I'm sure I'll improve by the end of the fortnight, just bear with me.

We did a few runs down Blue Sapphire until they called last lift at Gem Lake at around 3:15. As we went up the Gem Lake chair for the last time, it is 2450m long, it started to snow, but not the champagne powder I have heard so much about, it was Aussie like sago. For the uninitiated, sago snow is like tiny hail stones the size of small grains of rice.

Getting off the chair we needed to head down to the Powder Chair to return to the village. Normally this is a real fun run down a cat track, steep in parts with fun kickers and bumps. This time however with sago snow smashing into our unprotected faces it was.....mmmmmmmm.

By the time we got to the Powder Chair, a drop of around 300m vertical, the snow was light and fluffy, woohoo....



We decided to head back, we'd had a pretty full on day, it was snowing and the jacuzzi was calling. We skied back to the unit on snow that appeared to have already been ever so slightly freshened by the brief snowfall. As we came down the mountain the snow stopped and by the time we got back to the door of the ski lockers in the condo block, the sun was out. We looked back towards the area we had been and it would not have surprised if it was still snowing there.

With the sun out we decided to do an extra run off the Bullet Express which is the lift that remains open for night skiing. We enjoyed it so much we had 3 final runs, lol.

Finally made our way back to the unit. I forgot to mention on Friday when we came home the lift was out of order. After a full days skiing, it is no fun having to walk from the ski lockers in the basement to the 4th floor, grrhhhhh. Fortunately the lifts have worked since.

We had only been back in the unit 2 minutes when we spied the shopaholics returning with heavy bags, struggling across the snow from the gondola....



I said to Clive that we should go down and help them, but he thought it would be more fun to jump out and surprise them with the camera as they struggled down the hallway, lol....



We had our daily jacuzzi and 2 beers, the girls joined us for a while before jumping out to prepare a nice dinner.

That's about it for today, but keep those comments coming. I believe lots of people are waiting for the daily reports but the 4 of us are equally eager to log on and see who has left a comment, so if you are reading of our adventures and haven't replied, leave a comment and say hi.