POWDER WEEKEND STARTED TODAY

WEATHER BROUGHT THE GOOD AND THE BAD

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

One of the last snow weekends of the season is unfolding at Whistler Blackcomb with enough powder in the bowls to make a person disappear.

Whistler received 13 cm of new snow overnight and another 12 cm during the day on Friday.

I arrived a bit disappointed at a line-up for uploading on the Creekside Gondola at 8:30 am, but 15 minutes later I was at the front of the line.

The snow was falling so heavy that I was covered in a thin layer of snow before off-loading up top from the Big Red.

I dislike that stretch of trail from the Big Red to the staging point near the Roundhouse when a combination of wind, new snow and the wrong wax for the temperature requires a lot of work to get going.

I had been there a few times over the last few years when the weather is so cold that the board sticks to the snow.

Today, the snow was fresh, heavy and warm, making for a bit of slog away from the Bid Red toward the Roundhouse, because I had the wrong wax on the board.

The normal warm up runs did not quite work out since I was put to the test right away working through so much powder on ungroomed runs that I normally carve.

Creekside had started uploading early, and so first tracks had been taken, but there was still so much powder all over the place that those first two hours up until about 11 am were just awesome.

Of course, with snow fall during the day comes a lot of wind and a cloud bank that rolls in and rolls out. So you have to be prepared to move to different trails to get away from the changing bad weather conditions.

I was going to head to the Harmony Express and then Symphony Bowl, but the lift status board had them both closed due to high winds. On some days you can feel the strength of the wind as you are looking at the lift status board, making no doubt that the lifts were at least temporarily closed.

I played around for a bit more waiting for those lifts to open. I briefly thought of taking the Peak to Peak and then routing to 7^th Heaven and the Blackcomb Glacier, but the line up at 10:30 am was a bit too long and not getting any shorter any time soon.

And then the line-ups everywhere were getting a bit long. So I took a chance and rode back down to Creekside. I got lucky with the Creekside upload being only 10 minutes, about half the time of the Big Red and the Emerald Express.

I did eventually ride over to Harmony Ridge. The wind was so strong on the Ridge that the new snow was swept up into the old snow and the skiers and boarders became pretty irrelevant to the fits and starts of natural history with everyone, I’m sure, just keeping their fingers crossed hoping to get out without falling off the edge of the trail.

I, for some reason, went back up and tried to ride out via the Saddle. But with zero visibility and a lot of memory about how steep the terrain was here, I pretty much just took my time, as if it was my first time.

I gave some hand signals to two skiers that had veered ‘off piste’ and seemed literally a bit lost in the clouds. So I motioned with one arm the direction down, like just one part of a ground crew motioning those light beacons on an airport runway for the planes to follow.

The weather is supposed to improve over the next few days with better visibility and sunny periods – and more powder.