Bears, Backflips & Snow

So it's thanksgiving weekend over here this weekend!!! Love 3 day weekends. We went up to Whistler for the Saturday and Sunday. Being the shoulder season hotels are quite cheap, so we got a 5 star one for $99. It's sooo good being able to ride all day, then ride the 1 block from the chairlift to your hotel and then get in the hot tub!

One of the highlights would have been coming across 3 bears on one of the trails! As it's getting colder over here and there are no berries around, the bears are coming lower down the mountain. We came out of some trees into a bit of a clearing and there were 3 smallish bears, the trail kinda went round them and at the closest point they would have been 5 or so metres away! Apparently one bear came right down into Whistler village last week and took a chunk out of some drunk tourist at 2am! However, these bears looked like they couldn't really care less about us though (a good thing!) pity we didn't have our camera handy though!! Doh! Jul also came across another quite large bear riding by herself, about 10 m away, and we saw a few from the chairlift! Very exciting!
On the Saturday night I went up to a place called the Air Dome, it's an indoor jump park with a foam pit where you can learn how to do tricks without munting yourself. I personally don't really have any tricks at all on a bike, so this was heaps of fun.

Me trying to backflip...

Me fighting for my life in a sea of foam...
I basically just tried (un-successfully ) to do backflips for about 2 hours... which sounds like quite a long time, but it's not really. The roll in and jump takes about 10 seconds, then getting yourself out of the foam pit take about 2 minutes, and then standing in line for your next go takes about 15 minutes, so I think I did about 8 jumps. After landing on my head 8 times in a row my neck was a bit sore so it was time to call it a day. I was the only person there on a big downhill bike which made it quite a lot harder too.

Jul also came along and took some pics...



Here's a video so you get more of an idea

So the next day we met up with a local girl Tanya (who has spent 3 months in NZ) who we were going to do some riding with. We took the gondola all the way to the top and went to ride in the snow! Great fun! And not something you do in NZ every day. We also had an impromptu snowball fight when another kiwi saw my silver fern on the side of my helmet and figured I was fair game for a snowball fight. Everybody quickly jumped off their bikes and for the next ten minutes it was all on!

Me and Jul in the Gondola

The snowball fight...(bad photo, but you get the idea..)
Me in the snow...Starting our descent...
Me sliding down the mountain..
Me and Jul at the peak

Here's another quick vid - this time me in the snow...

Heres a few more pics...

Our new riding buddy Tanya... (she can pull some sweet no-footers!!)
A good shot of my helmet...and the snow
snow... and slush...

Jul decided she was way too hardcore for just normal Whistler riding and wanted to go without front suspension for the whole weekend, so she rode with her fork locked out.... on purpose...honest... (j - I blame lance actually! he should have noticed...and in my defence I haven't ridden for about 6 months, had never ridden this bike before and the only thing I knew about riding in Whistler was that it was really, really rough.... which it was!)

So that was that. Whistler Bike Park is now closed until next summer! Luckily we have Monday to recover...