Whistler in winter

So it's well into spring here, but up until a few days ago Vancouver was still continuing it's freakishly cold streak, and was still snowing down by our place on the water.

The upside of this, has been the piles of snow for great snowboarding... we headed up to Whistler ski resort early March to check out the 8,100 skiable acres, over 200 trails, three glaciers, 38 lifts and twelve alpine bowls. ...unfortunately, Whistler has been a bit cold for much snow, so we didn't get to check out much powder... but it was a gorgeous day, the mountains were beyond awesome, and there were so many runs it was like being a kid in a candy store!!

We were so busy snowboarding, we didn't take that many photos, but Lance did capture our mate Bruce waxing eloquently on top of Blackcomb after he and Lance hiked to the top of an alpine bowl, where they got lots of fresh tracks...

The peak to peak gondola had just opened recently, which was a fun ride, 4.4 km long, 436 m high, if somewhat disconcerting, given Whistler's recent bout of chairlift related 'incidents', one where the Harmony chair just a few weeks before we went up, lost a chair completely...luckily during the descent, presumably, given that nobody actually noticed the chair missing until a groomer found it on one of the runs. I intelligently told our friend Suz this as we were heading up on the chair, forgetting she had a fear of heights.



Not so happily, the ELcalibur Gondola in December, actually toppled over... water having gotten into one of the towers and frozen, stranding about 50 people for most of the day, and injuring 12. luckily we didn't encounter any such issues, and figured it was the best time to go to Whistler, with their maintenance staff on full alert!


Video of Julia snowboarding her last run, very lazily...

So now we're waiting for the snow to thaw so Lance can get all his riding in!