Marc's Public Blog - Skiing / Snowboarding / Snow

While this was initially supposed to be a snowboarding reunion for former VA coworkers at Whistler, it ended up being Dragan, Jen, and me, later joined by two coworker to help fill the place we had gotten.
The snow conditions were quite good: fresh powder every day, although at the samme time, visibility was quite poor at times, and it got somewhat cold on some days. But eh, I'll be happy with this any day :) Unfortunately, marginal whiteout visibility also made Jen nauseous and unable to board until she got out of it (it wasn't a full whiteout, I could see which way was down, but visibility was indeed poor)
Unfortunately, 3 days wasn't really enough to cover the whole mountain like Arturo and I had done the prior year (because we weren't equally matched in skills, were a bit late in the mornings, and made the good choice to loiter around some runs when the snow conditions warranted them instead of trying to cover more and more runs). At the same time, it showed me portions of Whistler that I was longing to board, but didn't have the time, or opportunity to. That kind of sucks because it'll just make me want to come back :) (I would have given a lot to spend an entire day shredding powder in the symphony bowl, some of those runs looked awesome).
I also found out that one is better off having a cabin in Whistler than one in Blackcomb as far as mountain accessibility is concerned, but sometimes you also have to go with what's still available. This also goes for flights where the suitable friday evening flight to Vancouver had had its price conveniently raised to over $400 per person, with a return flight that was 3H late due to the United plane we needed, coming from Chicago, and being very late (thank you United for still having your fscking hub in the worst airport in the US). This was also while wearing plastic shoes I had just bought in the airport because I forgot/lost my shoes that morning, and all I had left to wear were my snowboarding boots :)
Anyway, I digress. Here are a few picts:

flight from SFO to YVR

Thanks to Dragan for organizing the trip, and getting us from the airport to Whiistler and back, a link to the best of picts and all the pictures from Whistler