Marc's Public Blog - Skiing / Snowboarding / Snow

My coworker Arturo was going to Whistler and offered for me to join him, so since I had never gone there, and had wanted to go there for a while, I took him up on his offer. It was definitely nice to be able to join a trip that I didn't have to plan for a change :)

In a nutshell, we didn't get that lucky with the weather: Whistler is a very low mountain (800 metres for the base, 2200 metres for the peak), and unfortunately, weather was too warm at those altitudes, even in Canada, with the result of snow conditions being much worse than they were at Tahoe in California.
At least, the first day was nice and sunny as the other two were very cloudy, with the second one being so cloudy that part of the day we could not see where we were going due to almost 0 visibility. As a result, we stayed on the lower portions of the mountain, but that also meant riding in half melted snow and avoiding rocks and grass. The only redeeming thing was that it was fun to board on paths covered with snow when everything around you was totally melted, it felt a bit artificial but fun to do at the same time.
All in all, even if the conditions were far from ideal, it was fun to see those two mountains, as they were indeed huge. I can only imagine how much fun they must be when you get fresh powder. Lucky canadians...

It was clear that day 2 was going to suck when we the clouds were almost at ground level, at the base parking lot lift.

When you're in the clouds, you can't see anything


I had to learn to ride T-bars, which on a snowboard is interesting. Basically you put a bar behind your front leg, and let the cable pull you. Too bad the lift police had a strong policy on not letting people ride with both feet bound in the snowboard


By taking the right lifts at the right times, we could be above the low cloud layer, and the top one




The snow at the bottom was all gone except for the path to ride back to the parking lot


It was nice, for kids they had a castle with rides in the middle of the mountain




We got a brief reprieve in the weather, we were able to see the huge glacier on Blackcomb, it's a 9km+ ride from the top back to the list


That was kind of fun, I ended up on the top of this rocks, and I was too lazy to hike back up, so I got down, somehow. Long story short, it was hard and technical due to the sheer lack of snow

You can look at the rest of the pictures from Whistler by following the link.
You can also look at the file with GPS coordinates from those 3 days of snowboarding in whistler (garmin format)