Sunday, February 23, 2014

Olympic Gold Medal Pow....


Twenty minutes from our front door in Squamish, B.C. there's a magical forest where pow dreams come true. It's a place where one can find 500m hallways that extend at 40 plus degrees through 300 year old Douglas fir trees. For us, these types of places are not entirely typical. The coastal forest above Howe Sound is generally thick and un-passable at these lower elevations. This place however is "Kootenay like". It's a place that after spending the last 25 years in these forests, is unparalleled to any other one like it in my humble opinion..... Read G3's blog here.... and some more Flickr shots....


We set off early Saturday am and put in a very steep but manageable skin-track.


Enroute we decided to have a detailed look at the snowpack. The massive amount of snow that fell over the past 2 weeks has really ensured that all back-country travellers are on maximum alert and choose their terrain wisely. The CAA put out a special bulletin this week-end that highlighted our complex and unusual snowpack and to tread lightly and intelligently. Two weeks ago this place had no snow. This week-end we found a base of 305cms.... winter actually came!




                      
After a test run of the zone we headed up for round 2....






After multiple laps we agreed this was by far the best day of the past 5 seasons. We headed back to the machine to rest our legs and hopefully be back for day 2.....


Sunday morning turned out to be a very "Canadian" day. We woke up like much of the country at 4:00am and turned on CBC to watch the Canadian men's hockey team capture their well deserved Gold medal. When the game ended we were quickly aboard the Ski Doo plowing new overnight pow towards our favourite spot. The up-track needed very little work and was back in action for another big day.                  







Day 2 turned out to be even better! Oh Canada!                                            

2 comments:

Ina said...

Gold medals and deep snow: a great Canadian day!
Welcome back :-)

PAT MULROONEY said...

Tough to beat a day like that Ina! Cheers!