Snow babe

Seymour is dead. Long live Whistler mountain.

That's right, folks, Mt Seymours, Grouse and Cypress have nothing on this place. On our 3rd day in, we've been particularly lucky with the snow. Sunday was gloriously sunny, yesterday had bad visibility, but the snowfall all day held promises of better skiing today. And so it was. Fresh, deep powder all the way :-) A particularly good run was Cockarlorum (not sure of spelling on that, and no piste map to hand to check, so we'll go with phonetics for now), in the West Bowl, which you access by a drop in, right down onto deep snow and then deep, soft snow all the way.... Q and I have also been doing a lot of moguls, off piste runs and tree runs, and skiing pretty much top speed down the blues and greens. He's been great at teaching me how to better tackle the moguls and tree runs, and (bless him) putting up with my mini temper flares that I'm prone to when I feel I'm not doing something the best way I could. But by the end of the day something had definitely clicked and I'm doing them way better than I was on Sunday. At least my legs seem to be holding up better - I need fewer breaks mid run ;-)

Had a few wipe outs today as well! A particularly good one was in the West Bowl before I'd quite got my balance for quite such deep snow, and didn't come out of a turn well enough. However, the best one was on a fairly easy, long blue (wait, it does get better..). Q was ahead of me just at where the piste went over a lip to a steeper section and suggested I go for the jump. So I did. What he'd neglected to notice was that where I would land was a patch of ice followed immediately by a big mogul. I went onto the ice, got control but failed to spot the mogul. My skis stopped there and I carried on, tumbling down the slope a few metres. No broken bones or bruises though, and once I'd scraped as much snow out of my ear, jacket and hat as possible, we carried on down to the bottom.

We're staying in a lovely hotel right in the centre of Whistler village, about a 10min walk from the main lifts. The lifts all shut at 4pm (Whistler 0 Mt Seymour, Grouse and Cypress 1) here so there's quite a lot of time in the afternoon for other activities. So far this has involved pool and hot tub and I'm eager to investigate the end of season sales due to only having one glove left. I impressively left one glove on the first gondola we went up on Sunday. That's right, even before I'd put my skis on...I'm managing so far with an under-glove lent to me by Georgia (Q's sister) but tumbles into deep snow are better with water proof gloves.

Time to put this baby away now, but we've got another six days here so there may well be another blog entry from here before we leave.