So it was a great time to take a day trip to Whistler to check out some of this fresh powder. Ryan (my cousin) picked my up at 6:30 and we headed off hoping to get up there nice and early. Unfortunately several thousand other people appeared to have the same idea so there were significant queues at the ticket office where I needed to pick up my Edge Card (a discount card for Whistler). Eventually we made our way up the mountain squished in to a gondola with another 10 or so people, arriving at the top just before 10.
It was opening day for a new chair lift, the Symphony Express Chair so I guess there were a lot of extra people on the mountain for the opening. The new chair was not opening until 11 and a number of other chairs were still closed when we arrived due to staff still letting off bombs to make controlled avalanches, so the queues at the bottom of the chairs that were open were rather long. It took longer to wait in the queue than it did to make the run down again.
After our first few runs on the green (easy) runs we headed to the harmony bowl, an area with a lot more blue (intermediate) runs. And to make things a little more interesting Ryan likes to go off the beaten track and do a few jumps and stuff like that. Well after gaining more and more confidence I decided that I could probably follow him now so followed him off the main path in to some snow that not many people had been riding over. I soon found that I am not quite good enough for that kind of snow yet and found myself face first in a whole lot of snow. And with snow that deep it is not very easy to get back up again.
After that I decided to stick to easier runs so I headed for a long trail called the Burnt Stew Trail. Finding this trail proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated as the signposts were all covered in snow. So I took an educated guess and went down what I thought would be the right one. It would appear that I need further education in navigation as my educated guess ended up sending me on a rather tricky blue run that had an awful lot of snow on it. That short run (probably only about 500 metres) took me around 30 - 40 minutes as every couple of metres I would fall over and then try and spend the next minute or so trying to get back up again. Very exhausting.
All in all it was a fantastic day and by far the best snow I have ever had the privilege of snowboarding in. I am now very sore though, with sore thighs and triceps (from pushing myself back up again)
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