Learning to Ski Steeps with “Extremely Canadian”
This year myself and Spring at Pebbleshoo have set ourselves the goal of training and educating ourselves a lot more in regards to the activities we’re interested in. Being honest it has felt like our ski game has been stuck in 2nd gear for a while now. We both took an intro to skiing a few years ago, learning how to do a downhill wedge and ski bunny hills but apart from that we’ve been simply trying to teach ourselves the proper technique. It hasn’t worked. So recently we had the opportunity to take a 2 day Steep Skiing Clinic with Extremely Canadian out of Whistler. Our expectations with this clinic were to go from being cautious skiers capable of linking a few turns down black diamond runs to feeling confident on double black diamonds and skiing more fluidly and aggressively. Day 1: Our Mettle was really tested on the first day. It was awesome! It was a slow progression through the day of skiing steeper and steeper snow. First, after meeting our guides at the Whistler Base, we did a warmup ski run so our instructors could determine our competency and expectations. After watching our ski form we were split into groups and myself, Spring and two others were assigned to Extremely Canadian guide Peter. First up we did some laps on a groomed blue run so Peter could watch us and give us advice on how to improve our form. For balance we practiced picking our uphill ski off the snow while we completed a turn. I found this incredibly helpful right away and realized my balance was all wrong. Peter was great with giving individual advice to each of us to help us iron out our own specific issues. Next we practiced pole planting form. Something we’ve been sorely neglecting and it was definitely needed. From there, after warming up and some guidance, we cranked it up a notch and hit our first black diamond run, Whistler Bowl. We’d never skied it before but Peter was great with getting us into it safely. Skiing Moguls, but not as we knew it We did a few laps of Whistler Bowl, working on a few different techniques while getting used to the steeper angle. One of the techniques that stood out for me was skiing on top of moguls rather than between them. I was so focused before on trying to stay in the runnels between the moguls that I’d never thought to just ski the bumps on top of the moguls. The rest of the day was a mix of exploring the various bowls on Whistler Mountain and skiing steep...
4 Years, 4 Summits
Four years ago today, April 14th, 2014, myself and Spring finished our journey from Ireland to Canada and set foot in our new home in Squamish. Spring was returning to her home country after living away in Ireland for 6 years and I was moving somewhere completely new and foreign. The trip to Canada was not enjoyable. We ended up on a 9 hour flight in the middle seats of the middle isle of coach on the plane, wedged between an individual on our left who drank himself into a stupor within the first 45 minutes of the flight and an older, spindly lady on our right who packed the area around her seat with bags and clothes and then fell asleep in a ball on top of them. To add to this, in the seats in front of us were two mothers with newborns. They fully reclined their seats into our laps in the first minutes of the flight and they stayed that way for the duration. The crying and teething stopped us from being able to sleep through any of this. When we finally, wearily arrived at Vancouver airport, made our way through immigration services and went to pick up our rental car they told us that we could not have it. Spring had a driving license and I did not. But the credit cards we had were all in my name. The rental car company insisted that they’d only allow us to take the car if we provided a credit card in the drivers name. Without options, we got a taxi to the nearest Hotel and decided to figure this all out in the morning after sleeping off the day. The next morning, my first morning at my new home, I opened the curtains and the day was glorious. Blue skies and sunshine. We turned on the TV and switched to the news. Our jaws instantly dropped. Breaking news was coming in of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, an Icelandic volcano, and European airspace was shut down. Had our flight been a day later we’d likely have been stuck in Ireland now. This delay may have also impacted my chances of getting my permanent residency in Canada. The permanent residency application insists that I be in Canada within 12 months of taking the medical exam that it requires. That 12 month deadline was on April 15th, my first day in Canada. The qualms we’d had with the previous days flight and being refused our rental car washed away. We were at least here, our 3 meager suitcases of clothes had arrived with us and we were fine....
13 Adventures from 2013
We’ve been on way more adventures and micro-adventures in 2013 than we can count. Some we’ve written about here, some we still plan to write about and others we haven’t decided about yet. We decided to pick our top 13 Adventures from 2013, so here they are in chronological order. Let us know in the comments about your own favorite adventure from 2013. 1. Winter Camping on the summit of Iago Peak: Quite a few of our most memorable adventures have been the result of some serendipity. We ended up on Iago Peak after our original plan had backfired due to another area we wished to visit being used by a cacophony of sledders. Iago Peak overlooks the Coquihalla Highway. On this night it was shrouded in fog and the lights from the various rest stops along it illuminated the fog from below creating the scene above. 2. Ice Climbing near Canmore, Alberta: In February we went Ice Climbing in Canmore for a week. In this picture Spring is pictured climbing one of the daunting ice pitches in Guinness Gully. By far our most memorable moment from this trip was ice climbing in the bottom of Kings Creek Canyon. On that day snow was dumping from the skies and as we climbed the ice walls at the bottom of the canyon we would intermittently get hit with avalanches of loose snow that had built up on the bluffs above before reaching critical mass and releasing down on us. It was like being shaken up inside a snow globe and made the ice climbing that much more adventurous. 3. Our first experience with AT Skiing, a Baptism of Fire: We chose a rather large objective as our first time out on our new Alpine Touring ski setup. We planned to ski up to the base of Atwell Peak and then climb to its summit before skiing out. Poor conditions stopped us from reaching the summit of Atwell though. The return trip covered over 34km’s with ~2000m’s of elevation gain. We’d definitely broken in our brand new ski boots by the end of that adventure. 4. Sport Climbing at Skaha: Over the Easter long weekend we joined some friends on a road trip to visit Skaha, a sport climbing area near Penticton. The weather was perfect and it was our first experience with sport climbing and clipping bolts rather than placing traditional climbing protection like nuts and cams. The area is amazing and we only scratched the surface of the climbing there over our 3 days. We plan to visit Skaha now at least once a year. 5. Camping on the...
Mount Baker: Ice Climbing
“Did you see the BCMC call out for a trip to the Mt Baker seracs to do some ice climbing? Do you want to sign up?” This was the question I received in a text from Leigh one morning in October. I texted back within seconds saying “Anniversary at Baker!” It just so happened that the Thursday before the trip we would see our 8th year wedding anniversary come and go. This seemed like the perfect way to see in another year of adventure together. We signed up for the trip and started dreaming about climbing ice again. The only type of ice that Leigh and I have climbed before has been waterfall ice, some in the Rockies and some in the Coastal Range, so climbing glacier ice was going to be a new experience for us and it was going to take some time to knock the rust off of our recently acquired ice climbing skills. We set up top-ropes at the first wall of ice we could walk up to on the glacier. These first climbs proved to be more difficult than anticipated, and everyone, albeit 1 or 2, had to shout “take” more than once on their way up. There were several bulges and overhangs to contend with and the density of this ice was proving to be very hard and made for some very ginger tool placements, as no crampon or ice pick was really sinking in. All part of the learning process and also part of the beauty of ice climbing, no two walls of ice are ever the same. Once we had our fill of these climbs we decided to make our way over to an area where 2 from our group set up a few more ropes. We had to weave around gaping crevasses, jump over cracks in the ice and down-climb some sections just to get to the climbing area. It was unnerving but so much fun at the same time. It was really starting to feel like we were on another planet with such an other-worldly almost eery feeling. The only sounds apart from the odd shout of “on belay” or “climb on” was the groaning and cracking of the glacier. I walked the final narrow ice bridge towards the crevasse where the top-ropes were set up to see that you had to rappel into the hole if you wanted to climb. I felt a reluctance at first, as my first instinct is to always avoid being inside a crevasse, but I had to find a way to push through it and I joined Leigh and our friend Scott down below. Did someone say...
Tantalust, Part IV: Risking Adventure
< Tantalust, Part III: Finding Jim I stirred awake. I could hear Spring outside, in the kitchen area of the Cabin, preparing breakfast. I hadn’t really slept, the sleep I did get was restless and fitful at best. I woke up periodically and looked around to remind myself that I wasn’t out sleeping somewhere on those glaciers. My shoulders felt stiff and knotted, from bearing the weight of a heavy pack and a stressful day. I joined Spring outside. The clouds still hung low beyond the large windows, dulling the morning light. There was an unease inside me that wouldn’t abate. The previous day had been hard, really hard. The mental fatigue from it still lingered. An Alpinist I met while ice climbing in Canmore last Winter, and subsequently added on Facebook, did some serious climbs in Alaska this past Spring. When he returned he posted online about how amazing his trip had been, and mentioned the obstacles he had overcome in a very matter of fact way. Weeks later though he posted a picture of the journal he had written on that trip which told a very different story. A story of fear, of exhaustion, of doubt. In retrospect he could only remember how much fun the trip had been, but his journals kept him honest when reflecting. I took inspiration from him and kept my own journal on this trip. Reading over it now is like looking at the scrawlings from the mind of someone else. It would be easy for me to gloss over the trials in hindsight and make light of them. In retrospect, they weren’t that difficult. In retrospect I know that we left the Tantalus Hut and arrived at the Jim Haberl Hut 12 hours later and successfully navigated some heavily glaciated terrain. The experience of that day was very different though and merely stating the facts would be disingenuous. I didn’t know if the fringes of snow that I’d step onto would hold, I didn’t know if the choices we made would work, I didn’t know if we’d have to sleep out there, if we’d find the Hut, if we’d get trapped by a dead end and an irreversible route, if we’d get injured by any one of the objective hazards we had to contend with, or worse, die. That constant uncertainty and worry whittled away at my core all day until nothing was left but a shell. I sat in the Hut for most of the morning, looking at old, tattered magazines but seeing nothing but the events of the preceding day. Sometime in the afternoon on our first day in the...
