An End to the Dry Spell

It’s been 16 days since our last snowfall here in the Kootenays. Not a record dry spell by any means, but enough to get people worrying – “will it ever snow again”. The days of sunshine were appreciated, but as it got colder and strong north winds scoured even the protected stashes, soft turns have [...]

Sunshine

The view from Mt Grey yesterday.
It’s been a couple of weeks now with continuous cloud/fog in the valleys and sunshine up high.  It makes me glad to be a skier, otherwise the lack of sun could get me down (like living in Vancouver). It’s been Spring-like conditions up on the mountains with warm temperatures (12 [...]

Dynastar Huge Trouble

I just took delivery of my brand new 185cm Dynastar Huge Trouble skis (140-115-130), and I’m currently in the process of trying to work out where to mount them. The very detailed review that sold me on the skis makes a convincing case to mount them at -3cm to hit the sweet spot in the turning radius.  I’m [...]

Seaman Peak

Sunrise – Wildhorse Creek.
I got to guide one of my favourite local tours yesterday. After a late night (life lesson #273 - don’t party with Quebecois when you’re breaking trail all the next day) and a very early start I snowmobiled for an hour – most of the way into the Qua yurt where I met the 8 [...]

Kootenay Pass – TR

We checked out Kootenay Pass yesterday, looking for protected powder in the trees. The sun was shining bright above the valley fog, not a breath of wind, and we found some creamy consolidated powder skiing – a beautiful day.  Here’s a short video of Steve.

Russ from Funhogz in Cranbrook met us at the Pass, joined [...]

Old Glory – Trip Report.

With the ski hill getting a little firmer and a little more skied out every day, it seemed a good time to go for a walk. Andrew and I headed up Old Glory to check out the conditions in the Alpine. It was easy trail breaking all the way, and mild sunny conditions until the [...]

Wildhorse Pics

Here’s a few pics that Sara took on a sunny morning at Wildhorse last Friday.

Snowpack 101 – that’s me in the pit, just to show that I do occasionally dig. It seemed solid to me, and nothing moved all day.

Perfect Glades – With so much recent snowfall we only had one road in, but there’s [...]

High Danger?

Kirsty on the Fench Fry (Mt Record) – 1996 – A classic old pic taken from White-wolf ridge by my brother. Mine’s the middle track, and the conditions were as perfect as they look.
The Canadian Avalanche Centre provides a valuable public service with their regularly updated bulletins. It must be challenging trying to summarize something [...]

Mashed Potato

It was dumping hard yesterday and into the evening,  so I had high hopes for powder skiing today, but woke to rain on my roof. Motherlode chair was closed due to reportedly high avalanche conditions (I’d have loved to check it out) so we skied mashed potato like snow with poor visibility on the Red [...]

Please don’t take away my right to access the backcountry.

John Van Dongen
BC Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General
Victoria BC
pssgwebfeedback@gov.bc.ca
Minister Van Dongen,
I recently listened with concern to your CBC Radio interview (Jan 6th) in which you stated that you were considering criminal penalties for those skiers who crossed closed ski resort boundaries, and for skiers who entered the backcountry under certain conditions. As a lifelong backcountry [...]