Live to ski

After spending most of August hiking in the Alps I barely made it back to Vancouver for my August turns. But I got them in. After getting settled in town on a beautiful weekend I went skiing in a cloudy Tuesday. Great timing. But it was great being outside anyways.

When I drove to Mt. Baker in the morning I had some heavy rain but it died down as soon as I reached the parking lot. At 20 to ten I started hiking up with my skies on the back. I love this trail. It winds through such a nice forest.

Hauling skies

It was the first time that I have been at Baker this season and I didn’t know that the bridge was gone. The avalanche that took it out is still filling the creek bed. Pretty impressive. You can see the bridge at the left side of the picture.

The Bridge is gone

As soon as I left the trees I hiked through nice alpine flower beds. Pretty nice.

And it even got somewhat clear….

Clearing up....

At the camp site I swapped my sneakers for skiing boots and boot packed up to the ridge where I had lunch with some hot tea! Pretty nice in these conditions.

A healty lunch!

And then it was time to take the skies off the pack and ski down.

Waiting to ski down...

I was considering skiing down the ski route to the parking lot but due to the poor visibility I could not see how bad the bush wacking would be. So I just skied out the way I came.

The descent route

I could even ski beyond the camp site. So much snow. But at one point I reached the end of the last snowfield and from there on it was ski hauling again.

After 5 hours I was back at the car; just in time because it already started raining again. While driving West the sky cleared up and in Vancouver I had blue sky. Just in time to enjoy a Blue Moon on the porch.

So this was ski season 2010/2011. It was a nice last trip. Heliotrope ridge always makes up for a good time. Thanks to all the people that skied with me the last year. There were so many nice trips with you. And of course I am looking forward to a great season 2011/2012.

It’s been a while that I have been posting any pictures on this blog. So I will start in reverse order starting with the latest events. Last week, I got a kite for ski-kiting. The guy at the store recommended that I should practice flying the kit on the beach. So Thomas (the other one) and I went down to the beam twice last week. It was nice out and we had quite some fun. And of course I got dragged by the kite across the beach and ripped my jeans. Well, I guess I wanted to get some new jeans anyways….

The new baby in town.

Flying the kite.

Flying into the sunset.

After sunset.

Nightfall

Hey Shawn, still on RSS. This entry is for you. How is Australia? Did you already get bit by a poisonous animal?

I have been surfing the web looking for several things last week.

While looking for pictures or ski-able couloirs in Northern Italy, I found the page powderski.at that lists reports of all different kind of interesting skiing projects. They pretty much skied all the faces I want to ski and more. A really nice site.

Another nice site is powderguide.com. There, I also found some nice reports and great ideas for trips. Maybe, I should ski the Alps for a while…

And then I was also looking for some tips regarding my planned trip to Mt. Logan (fingers crossed that the trip will happen). There was an expedition in 2009 that has some information on the stuff they brought and the route. Both is listed on their page: packing list and a short report on the route.

Hopefully, I manage to update this blog a little bit more frequently to share unimportant information with pretty much no one. I blog, therefore, I am. WTF!

And there is a page I totally forgot: John Baldwin’s page. I guess he doesn’t need any introduction. He published some nice pictures and this trip planning page is nice.

About three years ago I started working on a project to built a pulley. It is supposed to be used for the cable crossing over the Squamish river. Anyway, two days ago I finally got it finished. I started from scratch and look what it came to…

Look, what's that. A plate with random holes in it.

Bearing and distance tube fed onto the screw.

The roll on the screw with the bearing.

And there is the second roll.

The complete pulley.

The pulley.

Sweet. Two pulleys!

Aren't they pretty?

After a very interesting conference in Saariselkä about trapped charged particles, we were confronted with some severe issues. Namely the ‘Escape from Finland 2010’. Due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland, all flight traffic in northern Europe came to a halt. Since Finland is part of this region, we were also affected.
After a four hour bus ride, we made it to Rovaniemi from where we took the night train to Helsinki. And that’s where we are stuck right now.
But it is not too shabby here. Helsinki is a nice city and we already did some tourist things. Currently, we are sitting on the balcony at the 8th floor with beautiful views over Helsinki. Max has been on the phone for 45 mins by now, trying to contact British Airline. But apparently, there are more people out there desperate to get their flight re-booked. But re-booked to when?

Whatever. Sumarizing, we are stuck here. The ferry to Germany is booked out for the next coup[le of days. So are the trains from Stockholm to Copenhagen. So we stay at the hotel, do some sight seeing and get some work done. And relax and be happy that we are not among the stranded crowed at the airport that got little more than water, a shower and a blanket.

We will see what will happen.

Some interesting links:
Flight radar – what’s flying where
NATS
Heathrow airport
Helsinki Times
MET Office