Tandems Collide

Apologies for the extreme delay since my last posting. We've been running around quite a bit and I've been without Internet access for the past few days. Instead of giving one large brain dump of the last few days, I'll continue to parse it up a bit, for ease of ingestion...

Monday was spent riding Whistler/Blackcomb. What a mountain set! The other resorts we've visited have all been great for unique reasons, but for sheer size and variety of terrain, pitch, and snow there has been no comparison to Whistler. We were sad to have only afforded ourselves one day to ride, but we were happy to have at least enjoyed that one day. We continued to be spoiled by fresh powder and enjoyed quite a few runs of riding atop a pillowy highway of bliss. To get a sense of riding in fresh powder (for those of you who may be alien to this concept) imagine opening a new container of rich sour cream. You know the first spoonful that you carve out, where the spoon's trail is distinct and the cream doesn't provide any resistance, only gently guides the spoon across it's top, allowing you to plunge as deeply as you wish while still maintaining it's smooth lines? Now imagine riding on that spoon at 50 km/h and the tub of sour cream is the size of a backyard pool, your path shooting out behind you effortlessly until your exhausted little legs beg for mercy but your inner child screams for more. It's kinda like that.

For our first few warm-up runs we were forced to stick near the top of the mountain because there was heavy cloud cover limiting visibility throughout the mid-section of the mountains and we needed to wait until the sun could burn it off. The sheer size of the two mountains is very difficult to describe. Basically, I took one picture, here when we were already above the cloud level of the peak of Blackcomb, and just this area alone I would say would compare to Blue Mountain. And this is only the portion that is above the clouds, on one half of the mountains (as Whistler too has a peak terrain area).

I am proud to say that Robyn and I did manage to ski both the Easternmost run and the furthest West slope. We did our best to see and snowboard as much as we could. This entailed a lot of traversing throughout the morning which left us tired and unfulfilled by mid-day, so for the afternoon we focused on finding a handful of runs that we enjoyed and sticking to them. We got in a lot of snowboarding, and I continue to be impressed with Robyn (and my) progression of skills. Things we were reluctant to do only two weeks ago we now jump into without a second thought. This was going to be our last snowboarding adventure for quite some time, and I can happily say that we made the most of it. We will wait with vapoured breathe until we can 'shred' again.