Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home.

Our time in Whistler is over. It was a great season - fun times with people we met out there, nice skiing and what may be their best snow year in 15 years! We packed up the car, and did the drive in one straight 31.5 hour shot. Taking turns sleeping makes it go a little faster, and we lucked out with pretty clean and ice-free roads.

We got to do some fun math thinking on the road. Here's one of them:
1. The 2004 Toyota Matrix has a goofy gas tank gage. From somewhere right around 20% full to below the "E" line is only about 15 miles of actual driving.
2. There are some areas, particularly one in North Dakota, where it is 43 miles between towns, plus an additional 10 miles if you miss the really-really-small-town exit before that.
3. 43 plus 10 is 53. This is quite a bit more than 15 miles. 53 minus 15 is 38 miles.
4. Once the Matrix gas gage is at the "E", you have about 37.8 miles until the car dies. 37.8 miles is less than 38 miles.

We ended up running out of gas. After a half hour of driving with it well below the "E" mark, it started sputtering on the freeway, which was very close to an exit ramp where a sign claimed there was a gas station. Unfortunately it was a mile or so off the freeway. Fortunately the exit ramp was downhill which seemed to have the right angle to slosh a little more gas in the lines, which gave us enough to sputter up the next hill. The car died just before the top of that hill- we put it in Neutral, coasted to the top and just barely had enough momentum to get over the top of the next little incline and start coasting downhill again into the gas station. All in all - we coasted about 1/8 mile, straight into the gas station. Whew- that was a little closer than we were aiming for! :-)

Jodi got some nice pics of me

Jodi stayed inbounds and got some cool pics of me coming back in one of the backcountry chutes to Blackcomb the other day. Here I am!

In the first pic I'm just to the right of center turning near some rocks. In the others I'm easy to find.

So Sore!

Maybe it was so many hours in planes and airports on Tuesday. Skiing so much yesterday certainly contributed, too. But we're sore!

Based on Ryan Steglich's recommendation from when he was here, we're going to spend the day at this place and have some sort of massagey hot-and-cold tubby experience today. Zoom!

http://www.scandinave.com/en/whistler/

Skiing knee-deep!

One person who's lived in Whistler for 8 years said yesterday ended up being "one of his best three days".  Whee!   We ended up having 14 inches of new snow, which was on top of 55 inches of snow over the last week. The first 55 inches covered up the old packed and icy snow and filled stuff in, and the 14 inches of new snow was fluffy, and depending on how the wind blew it, was thigh-high in a lot of places!

We hit the lift line a half hour before it opened and there was already a pretty good line of people waiting to get the "freshies".  On our ride up we could see those first-in-line people skiing down and getting "stuck" on the medium blue run under the lift - the snow was so deep that plowing through it slowed everything down so much that the slope wasn't steep enough. We headed straight to a steeper black run and it was awesome! And the best part - since it was mid-week, there weren't too many people so we got 5-6 nice runs before all of the new powder was skied out, and a few good ones after that too.

I (Jodi) don't have a lot of experience with deep powder and could definitely use a few more days to "practice".... can we have, say 12 more days like this before we have to leave? please?

Back from Cancun--- Snowing in Whistler!

Just got back to our place from our Cancun trip--- thanks Tom, Jodi, and John! What fun!

Looks like Whistler had 20" of fresh snow this morning, and as we were driving in it was pounding, with about 6" already sitting on the streets. I guess tomorrow we have to throw on the snow clothes and get right back into the groove!!

Camping!

We had a nice time camping. The winds were pretty low, the stars and moon were out for part of the night, and we were toasty warm in our awesome fluffy sleeping bags after getting the clammy sweaties dried off from the trip in. The next morning the sun came out, warmed up the tent, and gave us beautiful WARM sunshine to do a few skin-up-and-ski-down trips on a great powder run just outside of our tent.

Backpacks ready for the ski lift - on a four-person lift, we each get a seat and each backpack gets a seat along side of us!

Chris goes for a ski run before dinner

A sliver of moon and thin clouds early in the night

While climbing up for a ski run,  Chris took a picture looking out over the vista with Jodi climbing for a ski run on the left, and the tent in the middle plateau.

Fun shredding powder on our own private slope!

Beautiful day to go Camping!

Time for our yearly winter camping effort! Hehe. Today we have partly cloudy skies and not far to travel to get to camp. We'll ride the lifts to the top of Blackcomb and skin out the back, using the same route we typically do.

About a 500' ski descent will bring us to a very small glacier, next to which we will set up our tent! Lots of mellow powder slopes to ski from there, and it's supposed to be full sun tomorrow.

Can't wait to see the view in the morning when the sun comes up!