Yesterday was a great day. Overnight, the resort had 7cm of snow. Not a huge amount, but very welcome after quite a few days without any. A shame I had to work, but since the resort is not very busy at the moment, we get more opportunity for ride breaks. There are normally 3 people assigned to a lift when you can run it with just two, this allows us to swap around, cover lunches, and when it’s less busy, we can go on a ride break.
Working on the Summit lift, I dropped into Tight Spots for my ride break, which involves a fairly steep slope with trees. Not many people had gotten to the run at that time, so there was still plenty of fresh snow on the run (Black Single Diamond), and it was fantastic! I’m going to have to get a decent helmet-mounted video camera soon, so that I can show you these runs. It was a fairly quiet day, so we got to recognize the folks that kept going up, which makes our 5 second conversations easier and less repetitive.
For my lunch break, I decided that I wanted to try one of the Black Double Diamond runs in the Extreme Dream Zone, if I could find where exactly they were. They have vague sign posts, and aren’t really marked, it’s a sort of ‘jump off here and fight gravity’ kind of thing. I got my app running which tracks where I go, speed and altitude via the GPS on my iPhone (Ski Tracks, best 59p ever spent), and decided to try the music side of things. I hadn’t used this part of the app before, and didn’t realise that you need to create a playlist within the app, rather than just selecting one already on the ipod app. I ended up only selecting one song. I tried out Trigger, which starts off being about / <- that steep! Crazy stuff. Trees everywhere. I think either people didn’t realise the run was there, or were scared of it, and so there was still plenty of untouched powder for me to taste. Fantastic run! After my one song ran out, I pressed play on the remote to carry on, and ended up with two Hillsong United songs. Kinda strange, snowboarding down a tree-studded cliff face (slight exaggeration, but only slight), singing along to Christian worship songs. It worked though.
I still had time left in my lunch break for one more run, so I decided to try Tree Time (I could see untouched powder between the trees from the lift). What a great run! It ends where it ‘meets’ Canadian way (the Cat Track to the bottom of the Summit lift), and I say ‘meets’, but where I came out of the trees, it was a 12 foot drop to the run, which is kind of flat. I stood up there for a good couple of minutes trying to decide if I could land it, and waiting for people to go past. I made it. I actually still had time for one more quick run, so I went for Tight Spots again. It was all going well, until I got to the trees that are much closer together (would be a great POV video), where it’s tricky to find areas to bleed off speed, and some gaps are only marginally wider than my board. It was fun up until the point where I attacked a tree and found a tree root. With my knee. Who woulda thunk it? A tree root next to a tree. Crafty little blighter.
Apart from a fair bruising (and subsequent swelling), I didn’t do any significant damage to my board, or myself (I actually bruised both knees, but I didn’t notice the other until later, what with the tree root and all), so I carried on.
Sweep was interesting. No reduction in range of movement with my knee, it just hurts in certain situations (like when approaching trees, or kneeling on hard surfaces). We found a group of 7, coming down Canadian Way, and had to escort them down the rest of the mountain. They were so slow, we had to keep stopping, and we are supposed to be traversing, calling out, and listening for a response anyway, which doesn’t exactly make it a speed run. We learnt that one of them had only started snowboarding that day! He was doing really well for a beginner, but his friends (one of whom was supposedly teaching him) really shouldn’t have taken him to this part of the mountain, and certainly not at the end of the day. But we got them down safely.
Thank God I didn’t break anything. Also for sandwich bags and an abundance of snow with which to make a snow/ice-pack. Definitely injury day. Bailed a jump on the Showoff run on the way home, and bruised my lower back, then tried to catch a falling cheese grater at home, where I only succeeded in grating my little finger. I can’t recommend that course of action really.
Today was pretty fun for runs as well. Working on the Sunbird chairlift, it was pretty warm (-2C or so) and it snowed all day, which kept us busy and thus (overly) warm. I tried out Heaven Can Wait, which is a mogul-ly blue, with plenty of soft snow on top. Really nice run today. Not so much a couple of days ago. At the end of the day, I was swapping station, heading down Outrider (our designated run for when wearing uniform), finding some lovely powder on the side of the run. Towards the end of the run, there is a wide, somewhat flat corner with a lot of powder to the left (it tends to stay that way as you loose a lit of speed in powder, and if you stop, it’s really hard work getting back to the run), and I strayed into it staying only a few feet away from the run. It was going beautifully until the nose of my board dug in, and flipped me head first, on my back, where I quickly buried my head in the snow. I think only my legs were sticking out, and straight up. If only someone had been filming it! I considered dribbling to find which way was up, but I just pushed the snow off of my face, and then flopped back to the run like a flying fish that had landed on someone’s deck while taking a flying leap into the ill-recommended.
New Year’s Eve was good. I did have to work both it and New Year’s Day. But the fireworks at the resort were great, and I really didn’t understand the glowing torch procession coming down the slope. My feet were so darn cold by the time the fireworks had finished, I could have done with hopping back into the hot tubs. Went to the CopperCity Saloon once we got back into town, which was fun. Didn’t have much to drink and left not long after midnight (due to not having any money, and having to work the next day), but still had a good time.
I’ll need to get some more photos up here, but not tonight. I need sleep, and possibly another snow-pack.
Life at a Resort 