Fernie Day 5: Lost For Words

It's our fifth day in Fernie, it's 7am here. My Blogger settings are still configured for the UK, so sometimes the day number won't match the post date... Today will be our fourth day on the mountain; yesterday was our third - which is what I'm going to tell you about now (I was way too tired last night!)

There was more fresh snow yesterday morning when we set out, enough to get us excited. They'd also opened most of Lizard Bowl which meant new, fresh powdered terrain to explore.

Ciara, Simon and I were looking for some fairly open terrain to get Ciara used to really picking the speed up in powder; with it being so deep here, it's a totally new ball game for her (and me, kinda).

We found it, dead easy, just next to the Bear Chair. There was so much snow we could just lap it... Some deep bits, real fresh going through the trees, nice cat tracks to get air off, so good.

And that was the story of yesterday. Quite literally it was powder all day. You see, it didn't really stop snowing at all. Tracks that were there at the start of the day were filled in by 2pm. By 3pm it looked like a fresh dump. Seriously, during the course of the day there was comfortably 6 inches of new snow!

Lapping in Lizard bowl in the morning, we moved to the White Pass area in the afternoon and continued to get fresh. Mart has been saying that he's probably only ridden 6 runs or something since he's been here - but it's been powder all the way. I still don't even know what this mountain looks like. I haven't seen any groomed runs. It feels like I'm away from the runs all the time, but when you check the trail map at the end of the day you see that you've been on a marked piste!

And yesterday the snow was special. I've never seen anything like it. We were all lost for words. It was so light and fluffy, like cotton wool. I tried to take a picture of it, but I don't think it does it justice.

Looking now at the data for the last 24 hours, Fernie is reporting another 20cm of fresh snow. I knew it. The forecast for yesterday was 3cm, and we got 20! The Griz heard us calling all right! That's a full meter since Saturday when we rolled into town.

There's no way I can shave this beard off now - despite the pain of facial freeze. I'm sure the Griz will understand that I trimmed the 'tash a little :)

Oh, I forgot, I also dropped a pretty sweet cliff yesterday, just under the Timber Bowl Quad. Mart had his camera out and I got a pretty nice shot. Yeah! The landing was steep and fairly soft, but not as soft as I would have liked. We dropped a smaller rock formation earlier in the afternoon and the landing was untouched, steep, and easily 40cm fresh. That's more like it.

Here are some other pictures Mart took with the 30D... pretty cool. Will today simply be more of the same? It just won't stop snowing, so why not, eh?