from the twisted minds of snm
Arrived Saturday to an overcast Vancouver, picked up rental RAV4 (winter tires an additional $25 a day? Ouch!) Road trip to Revelstoke did become challenging after sundown with rain and fog. Did eventually make it safely.
Tired after a day of pretty fun riding thie Tuesday, will try to update more details later. Tonight is forecast for a decent amount of snow up on the mountain, so tomorrow may be the best day. Also being a weekeday and non holiday, it hopefully will not be crowded.
Saturday at Powder Mountain turned out to be good. Flurries broken by periods of sun throughout the day. Not deep powder as exclaimed by some skier who rode past, not even close, but it was welcome and good.
woke up this Sunday morning to see our flight has been delayed. Hey we could go ninja in a few hours at Brighton which reports 8″ over last day in addition to the previous 12. I’m sure it’s all tracked out though. Looks like we’re going to be hanging out at SLC airport.
Friday at Brighton was actually not bad. Not powder pounding by any stretch, but enough to have some freshies. The snow showers continued through the night, then web reports brighton had 8″ over the day, 12″ total. So the debate this morning was to hit Brighton again, or pound PowMow which reports only 3″. In the end, anti-crowd has won out. We figure all of Utah is going to be at Brighton as it reports the highest snowfall, it’s been over a week since last snow, and it’s the weekend. We had a good day at Brighton so figure give PowMow another chance.
forecast is for it to get cooler today. We’re not in any rush, it’s not like conditions are stellar or get better. Just finishing the typical freebie continental hotel breakfast at 9:00 this morning. Prob going to see how things are at Solitude.
Can you say, "tracked out!"
The Fab & I arrived in SlC uneventfully today to be greeted with sunny 60 degree weather and dishearteningly Sno bare mountains.
we visited a couple stores. Highlight so far I thnk was lunch at siegfried’s. Flight to seatac was so fast only got a couple hours of fitfull sleep. Having trouble staying up, time for power disco nap.
I’m lying head downslope in knee-deep powder looking up the underside of a leafless tree canopy, the sharp pain in my front leg beginning to dull with the onset of the adrenaline rush. I manage to get my board untangled from the ice-ball rock garden that I have wandered into and try to rub out the Charley Horse in my right quad. I know from the dullness this isn’t going to be a minor injury, so I focus on getting the board under me and traversing out of the sidecountry and onto a groomed course before I go shocky and black out in the worst-case-scenario. I am a little wobbly, but the leg doesn’t fold under the weight. I complete the drop into the little bowl I was S-turning down onto when I found the icy Linga of Death, crossing a little gulley and toe-siding out to the Echo course. After a little breather, I ride out to the base. Continue reading ‘Oh, Snap!’
Back from dealing with buffet sensou with yelling Chinese tourists in Noboribetsu. Figured going to a less-known property would be a safer bet against the throngs of foreign tourists, but apparently where we went was specifically marketing themselves toward the package foreign market. Onsen itself was not bad, though the scenery was lame, and the baths themselves set in the concrete industrial underside of the hotel. Had some good gyutan for lunch in a new place in the basement of JR Sapporo-eki, North of the Mexican restaurant. Dinner was at an unremarkable ramen-ya. Organic, but not all that good. If you like niboshi-based broth, you’ll like it, but if you lean more toward chicken bone or pork bone bases, you’ll find it painfully fishy. I guess I’m not too upset I forgot both my camera and phone in the rush to get dinner. It’s in Maruyama, around the corner from the second location that Bozu was in before he went under. The place screams, “former salaryman with a dream to open a ramen restaurant”. There was a centimeter or two of new snow in town, so that might be enough to get me motivated to catch the bus out to Kokusai tomorrow.
Yesterday’s high was between +5C and +7C. The wind was pretty minimal. Patagonia Capilene 2 long bottoms under Marmot Hatteras nylon canvas pants were fine. On top I had a Capilene 1 silkweight tee, a Capilene 3 quarter-zip long-sleeve, and R1 hoody. That ranged from about right to too warm. The zippers on both the long-sleeve and hoodie helped regulate the temperature. It would be nice if there was a R1-weight piece with the lighter-weight micro-grid fabric on the entire back for use with a pack. In the evening on the walk to dinner, I deleted the Capilene 3 long-sleeve since I’d be indoors for a long period and didn’t want to overheat. It was a bit cold, as the temperatures dropped toward the evening low of +2C after the sun went down, and the wind came up to 5-10 m/s. It was fine for the short walk, but anything more would have been uncomfortable. As a side note, the Capilene 3 long-sleeve doesn’t play well with the R1 fleece – their surfaces bind against each other, making it hard to put the R1 on without the baselayer sleeves getting all bunched up, or the fleece’s back getting hung up across the shoulders. Continue reading ‘Layering Test 5’
The warm weather has made all the unremoved snow in the streets melt and the vehicular traffic has churned it into a brown slurry. The snowpack on the sidewalks are corny slush in the sun or slick ice-slides in the shade. I’ll never understand the half-measures in this city. It’s not like it has never snowed before. It’s not like they don’t have front-end loaders and dump trucks. They’ll clear the center turn lane and the inner traffic lanes of a four-lane highway, but leave mountainous piles of snow in the outer lanes. I can understand just getting some lanes open immediately after a blizzard, but that’s where the work stops. They don’t clear the remaining mess in subsequent days and it just keeps piling up. When the temperatures drop next week, all that slush in the streets will harden up into an ankle-twisting egg-crate of ice. Continue reading ‘Wet and Messy’
Board is all put together and boardbag is packed and ready to go! Now all I need is snow. I’m sure there are some unridden stashes like the stuff we found when Root and Fabio came up last season, but with the recent warmth, I’m thinking it will be like SLC where it’s powder-shaped concrete. I guess I’ll go look for lunch and wander about town a bit. The outdoor store is closed today, so that’ll have to wait.