Symphony lift opened today after avalanche control made Flute Bowl safe. An arriving weather system brought continuous snowfall all day, but it also came with whipping winds and lower temperatures. The 1000-meter freezing level made for snowfall for most of the mountains from around halfway up to the midstation. When we reached the top of the Whistler gondola, winds were pretty high and visibility quite poor. The lights were green, so we began traversing over to the Harmony lift and rode it up through the blizzard conditions to the top, where the winds were biting, and the visibility down to below 50-meters. We’ve dropped into Harmony bowl on many an occasion in marginal weather, but this pretty much beat all previous “poor judgement” descents. Turning from the first pitch onto the second, the visibility dropped to the point that it was riding by inertial guidance only, tracking from one course marker dot to the next.
The sensory deprivation was giving Fabio vertigo. The mental understanding of moving left while actually moving right sent him toward the brink of nausea. I was just using my inner ears and strain/loading sensations on my legs to judge velocity, terrain, and direction. I managed to negotiate the terrain by feel without stacking. Halfway into the bowl, the conditions changed from just wind-whipped blizzard snow to clouded in with driven snow, reducing visibility to a couple of board lengths. This, of course, coincided with the flat section, where we generally drop off the cat track into the bowl and traverse around various hills and terrain features. Doing this in untracked powder is one thing: Doing it when you can’t see much past three meters is another. I made it to under the cloudline and into visual range of the trees at the bottom of the bowl. Now that we could see, riding the trails and unridden margins to the Symphony lift base was easy.
Unfortunately, when we got to the bottom of hte Symphony chair, the liftie had the load point roped off, and said the area was closed. We anticipated something like this would happen so we converted to hike mode and got ready to walk the cat track up to Burnt Stew and traverse back to Harmony. Just as we were getting ready to go, the patrol guys who were turning the area boundary signs from “open” to “closed” and sweeping the area for stragglers came down the cat track and told us we could ride up the lift with them instead of making the hike. We took them up on the offer and rode up in the 100 km/h winds to the top. Having the gravitational potential energy to ride out, but not the ability to see where we were going sucked. Strong winds made riding challenging, and the inability to see the next marker made it worse. If I had never ridden this trail in the past, there would have been a high probability of getting lost in the blizzard and possibly suffering some kind of exposure-related issues, including death. We slowly descended through the solid white, grouped together with a pair of German skiiers. I knew the way, so I was pulling point. Again, dropping below the cloud level, we could finally see the trail out and the closed are signs.
Riding out to Harmony base on Burnt Stew, we found Harmony closed also. We continued past down the green run and caught it up to Roundhouse for a lunch break out of the wind. I bought a $5.78 CAD broccoli and cheese soup at Pika’s to fortify my normal dirtbag sandwich and Cytomax. After lunch, we had time for one last run down green. It was tracked out and un-fun, so we rode back up and downloaded to the village. We ended up not getting much riding distance today, but there was an overabundance of adventure factor.
Time for crepe dinner at Crepe Montaigne…
Pictures on the gallery. Sorry, my camera froze up in the -6C weather, and I was having so much fun in the whiteout, so there aren’t any pics from that part of the day yet (check back when Fabio or Root post their pictures).
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