Live to ski

So last weekend it was time again to haul our skies around the Coastal mountains. Despite the rain in Vancouver, Bram and I decided to head up Brandywine to get some turns in. So we left at an convenient hour (8.30am) and started carrying around 11.30 from the Brandywine trail parking lot. Apparently, there were no snowmobilers, but we saw one snowmobile.

Fortunately, we only had to haul our skies for the first 400 vertical meters. As soon as we reached the meadow it was possible to skin up. There was a creek to be crossed but it was no problem further up the meadow. At one point soft rain started to be our companion. With increasing altitude, the rain slowly transformed to snow.

When we reached Brandywine summit, we almost were soaked but in good mood.

So we just skied down the glacier on the North side to get some more turns in. Here, the snow was kind of slushy but we could ski some fresh ‘almost’ powder. From the glacier we climbed to a col and skied down south towards Brandywine glacier and skied up again to reach out up-hill tracks. Following these, we had some nice turns towards the meadow when we reached a little lake at a snow covered basin. In order to add some water skiing activity to our schedule, we started to water-ski the lake. This was awesome. The slope next to the lake was steep enough to speed up sufficiently to make it across the lake. So much fun. First, we tried it at the edge with little distance to cross, later we crossed the whole lake. So much fun. To prevent our clothes from getting wet we just got rid of them completely. It wasn’t that cold :-)….
But it got late and at 7.30 we decided to stop having extensive fun and skied out. At the meadow we somehow ran into a bear (it still was about 200m away), took our skies off and hikes out.

We reached the car at around 9pm and were back in town at 11. All in all this was an amazingly entertaining day with about 1200m vertical of skiing plus some retarded water skiing. What more can you ask for on a rainy Saturday?

Last weekend, Bram and me decided to drive up Duffy lake road to ski some trees. Since we went for a relaxed weekend we decided to built an igloo to sleep in. Neither of us ever slept in an igloo. So we skied up and found a nice spot to set up our home. First, we compressed some snow to make it easier for cutting blocks.

While the snow was settling, we went up a ridge towards Mount Chief Pascal to ski some powder. It was just awesome.

In the evening we skied to our chosen camp site and Bram could prove that he spent his time well watching How to built an igloo movies on the web. Apparently, he is the igloo yedi.

So we had a quiet night in a totally over sized igloo. But who cares.

Under a beautiful blue and clear sky we went powder skiing along Cerise Creek. What a snow and we were almost alone. There were only 8 other people skiing this valley that day. Warm and sunny, gorgeous.

When we returned from our skiing experience, we had to face a cruel reality. Our igloo didn’t enjoy the sun as much as we did an collapsed. So, we had to dig out our gear before we could head to the car.

Still, it was a fantastic experience to sleep in an igloo. Way more comfortable that a snow cave. Just next time we will pack our sleeping bags before leaving them in the igloo for the day.