Symphony lift opened today after avalanche control made\u00c2\u00a0Flute Bowl safe.\u00c2\u00a0 An\u00c2\u00a0arriving weather system brought continuous snowfall all day, but it also came with whipping winds and lower temperatures.\u00c2\u00a0 The 1000-meter freezing level made for snowfall for most of the mountains from around halfway up to the midstation.\u00c2\u00a0 When we reached the top of the Whistler gondola, winds were pretty high and visibility quite poor.\u00c2\u00a0 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\u00c2\u00a0below 50-meters.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve dropped\u00c2\u00a0into Harmony bowl on many an occasion in marginal weather, but this pretty much beat all\u00c2\u00a0previous “poor judgement” descents.\u00c2\u00a0 Turning from the first pitch onto the second, the visibility dropped to the point that it was riding by inertial guidance only, tracking\u00c2\u00a0from one course marker dot to the next.<\/p>\n
The sensory\u00c2\u00a0deprivation was giving Fabio vertigo.\u00c2\u00a0 The mental understanding of moving left while actually moving right sent him toward the brink of nausea.\u00c2\u00a0 I was just using my inner ears and strain\/loading sensations on my legs to judge velocity, terrain, and direction.\u00c2\u00a0 I managed to negotiate the terrain by feel without stacking.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Doing this in untracked powder is one thing:\u00c2\u00a0Doing it when you can’t see much past three meters is another.\u00c2\u00a0 I made it to under the cloudline and into visual range of the trees at the bottom of the bowl.\u00c2\u00a0 Now that we could see, riding the trails and unridden margins to the Symphony lift base was easy.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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 \u00c2\u00a0told us we could ride up the lift with them instead of making the hike.\u00c2\u00a0 We took them up on the offer and rode up in the 100 km\/h winds to the top.\u00c2\u00a0 Having the gravitational potential energy to ride out, but not the ability to see where we were going sucked.\u00c2\u00a0 Strong winds made riding challenging, and the inability to see the next marker made it worse.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 We slowly descended through the solid white, grouped together with a pair of German skiiers.\u00c2\u00a0 I knew the way, so I was pulling point.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, dropping below the cloud level, we could finally see the trail out and the closed are signs.<\/p>\n
Riding out to Harmony base on Burnt Stew, we found Harmony closed also.\u00c2\u00a0 We continued past down the green run and caught it up to Roundhouse for a lunch break out of the wind.\u00c2\u00a0 I bought a $5.78\u00c2\u00a0CAD broccoli and cheese soup at Pika’s to fortify my normal dirtbag sandwich and\u00c2\u00a0Cytomax. \u00c2\u00a0After lunch, we had time for one last run down green.\u00c2\u00a0 It was tracked out and un-fun, so we rode back up and downloaded to the village.\u00c2\u00a0 We ended up not getting much riding distance today, but there was an overabundance of adventure factor<\/em>.<\/p>\n Time for crepe dinner at Crepe Montaigne<\/em>…<\/p>\n Pictures on the gallery.\u00c2\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Symphony lift opened today after avalanche control made\u00c2\u00a0Flute Bowl safe.\u00c2\u00a0 An\u00c2\u00a0arriving weather system brought continuous snowfall all day, but it also came with whipping winds and lower temperatures.\u00c2\u00a0 The 1000-meter freezing level made for snowfall for most of the mountains from around halfway up to the midstation.\u00c2\u00a0 When we reached the top of the Whistler […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[16,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paJYlx-TC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3448"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}