Whistler's opening week

I've been on vacation since last Friday.  This has been the first week long Vacation I've had in a long time where I haven't planned anything.  I looked into some last minute flights to a bunch of places, but they were all fairly expensive, so I opted to stay in Vancouver, and ski Whistler during its opening week. 

As it turns out that wasn't a bad option at all.

Whistler has had its biggest November snowfall on record with over 10 feet of snow having already hit the ground.  Jen/Cheryl/Glade and I went up for opening day, and with the exception of a few rocks the conditions were outstanding.  I could not have asked for more...  But when I went back to Whistler on Wednesday I got more.

Wednesday saw the ski trifecta emerge: Great Visibility, Great Snow, and No Lift Lines.  It's very rare to hit all three of these anywhere - let alone at Whistler.  The conditions were good enough for me to convince Glade to skip school and come boarding. 

He was glad he did. 

We spent almost all of the day skiing closed terrain up in the Harmony Bowl area.  Requiring only a 10 minute hike it was far enough away that it kept out most people.  Even at the end of the day we could see some of our tracks from the first few runs standing alone in the distance on otherwise untouched slopes.

I put a few photos up on my Flickr account.  Here's a good one.

Given we were in the backcountry we both brought our avalanche tranceivers, shovels, and probes.  I lost my shovel handle after a barrel-roll wipeout at some point in the afternoon, but otherwise there were no close calls, or injuries to report, so the day was very successful. 

The amount of untouched terrain at the end of the day was hard to imagine.  We sat down at the top, ate an energy bar, and rested after another 10 minute hike and just stared out at it.  In that time we didn't see anyone at all, and even on the last run we burned down through a sea of snow as we had throughout the day.  Simply amazing.

Anyhow, we went all day, then came back to the North Shore to grab dinner.  We both had steak and beer discussing how hard it would be to top a day like this.  The biking season is over, it's time to ski.