First Day at School

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Soundtrack for today is School Days by AC/DC - enjoy...

I arrived here late on Tuesday night - it's now Saturday early evening and I'm already being told off for lack of blog entries (mentioning no names Ian)! So a recap of the last couple of days:

Wednesday

Pretty much an admin day. Welcome meeting and briefing in the morning where we had talks from the guy who will run our backcountry course in week 6, Robert from Snow Patrol (not the band) who seemed to be a frustrated comedian and a lady from the medical centre, as well as from Lyndsay and Paul from Alltracks. Key lessons learned:

• avalanche risk in Whistler this year is extremely high due to freakish low temperatures in early season - basically the ground froze and the snow that accumulated was "dry" so hasn't bonded with the ground and constitutes a weak layer. The tons of snow on top then gives a high risk of avalanche. So some chunks of the resort are closed and we do not cross the ski area boundary for any reason (2 people that did at New Year were killed in avalanches - both experienced back country skiers). It was hoped that the rain we had on arrival would help bond the layers, but we don't know yet if that's happened
  
• keep your room tidy, don't take glass into the hot tub or use it past 10pm or the fun police will get you
  
• medical treatment is very expensive so don't go to the doctor if you have a cold
  
• Robert has a dog who gave him a black eye last week
  

Then off to queue for ages to collect my season pass - a very dodgy photo was taken which I now have to wear proudly round my neck for the next 3 months. Jet lag eye bags plus hat hair - lovely.

Quick trip to the local supermarket and home to unpack and relax for a bit before the welcome drinks/food at the Brewhouse in the Village. Managed to meet quite a few more of my course-mates, plus a couple of the instructors but will struggle to remember any names! Think I met 3 James', none of whom wanted to be known as James... Jimbo, Sheps and Valori!

Thursday

Despite waking ridiculously early (again), pottered around and finally headed up Whistler Village Gondola about 10am. Having still not purchased any skis, Kerry and I went up in civvies to visit the demo tent. Spent the morning on the green runs on a pair of K2 One Luv's (not great - felt rather unstable on them), had a spot of lunch at Chic Pea halfway down the mountain, then an afternoon on the same runs on a pair of Rossignol Phantoms (much better). Met a nutty old Hungarian man on the lift who didn't believe in wearing a ski jacket, even though it was chucking it down (snow) and he was probably getting rather wet!

Bonus discovery of the day - our house is the closest to our group dinner venue (Monday to Thursday each week) although we'll have to take a shovel to clear the shortcut of snow next week!

Friday

Another early start and the prospect of the first day at school... We all met at the base of Blackcomb mountain (all 70 of us - 40 skiers and 30 boarders) and divided ourselves into rough groups - skiers versus boarders and aggressive versus non-aggressive! Guess which I chose... and we're talking skiing here, not general attitude. So we headed up the mountain to the Rendezvous from where we had to ski down individually to be videoed and assessed... no pressure then... Funnily enough I've ended up in the non-aggressive slow group. But I have a really nice instructor - a Swedish lady called Petra - and a good friendly group. There's 7 of us in total - 4 girls and 3 boys. We spent the rest of the day getting some mileage under our skis (in my case a pair of rented Salomon X-Wing Tornados) and doing some skills training, including pirouettes! I can't say I actually managed a whole pirouette... maximum 270 degrees which might prove awkward... but I have had a bit of practice skiing backwards. Now to sort out the forwards bits.

The snow up the mountain was pretty good, but the lower slopes got rather icy unfortunately - coupled with my tiredness (jet lag plus miles) it didn't make for a happy return to base, but I got there in the end.

We finished our day with a trip to Merlins Bar at Blackcomb Base - really good fun and they have a live band there every Friday. No idea what they're actually called but it looked like Jesus on acoustic guitar and his fatter brother on bongos! I wanted to take a picture to post here but my phone had run out of battery. Ah well, there's always next week.

An interesting trip home (about a 20 minute walk home in ski boots in heavy snow, complete with close encounter with a snow plough), followed by falling asleep in front of the TV by 9pm!

Saturday

Surprisingly, I didn't ache as much this morning as I had expected - I think perhaps that the long walk home last night actually helped! Not that I plan to do that too often as my toes were feeling a little battered from the inappropriate footwear.

We all had a very lazy morning (having been woken at 5am by the phone ringing - Callum's girlfriend... lucky for her Greg answered rather than me! Not sure I'd have been as polite) and then headed into the village to abuse our credit cards. I am now the proud owner of some "Eagle skis" as my classmate Chris calls them! Having read the review on this site, I'm now quite scared at what I've done, but I'm sure it's like motorbikes - you can ride them at a more leisurely pace than full throttle. One bonus of buying them (apart from the heavy discounting from showing my dodgy photo season pass and my instructor's referral card) is that I get a free 2-day steep and deep course thrown in. Think I may wait a few weeks to cash that in.

Sadly I didn't actually get out to ski today, but looking forward to picking up the skis in the morning and going for a few runs on my very own equipment. Very exciting. That said, I'm going to take it a bit easy as I have 4 full days of ski school next week and I know I'm not particularly fit right now. Fitter perhaps than classmate Mark who is doing the course in response to his recovery from cancer of the appendix and in spite of being on blood thinners! Good for him.

Despite it still chucking it down with snow (bodes well for some good conditions tomorrow), I think Greg is planning to barbecue tonight... Typical Aussie! I think I'll go supervise from inside the patio doors.

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Comments

[Nat]

Animal black eyes
Clare, loving the blog. Can I just say that your mention of Robert receiving a black eye from his dog has made my cat-induced shiner a couple of weeks ago seem marginally less embarrassing...! Hope the snow's good x