So we arrived in Canada safely…a week ago. Sorry for no post but skiing for the full day and trying to recover in the evenings doesn’t leave much post writing time.
Fernie is a great little town – quite off the beaten track (hour flight from Vancouver, then a 3 – 5 hour drive on top of that) but that is why we picked it. It is deep in the Canadian ‘back country’ and the town only exists because of a mine a few miles away…and the resort. I wouldn’t describe the town as pretty – some of the European villages are much nicer, with quaint wooden houses etc. This town is built for serious snow and cold….normally 2.5m deep at street level and -20 degrees. However, as per our normal skiing holiday practice, we have bought the warm weather with us and there is no snow (town level) and people are happily biking around in T-shirts and even sun tanning in the balmy zero degree weather (these Canadians are tough!), which they call this spring. Luckily
on the mid to upper parts of the mountain there is enough snow (2m) to have fun. The good thing about Fernie is the weather is volatile – so we could well see another, and continuous, dumping of snow…which would cover the village; letting Michelle and Chloe experience the snow as they cant go up the mountain.
Our days are pretty much the same – we get up at 8am, have breakfast and catch the bus from Fernie town to the ski hill, which is 10 minutes away. There is a storage cabin with our ski’s etc and Clarissa and I split up for our respective lessons. Clarissa is doing the ski instructor course and I had planned to do the snowboarding instructor course but changed to learn how to ski. The reason is that when we were in London, I went to a ski boot specialist to get them to custom fit my snowboard boots to avoid the terribly painful feet I get because of the boot pressing against my high arches and instep. The boot fitters advise was to ditch snowboarding in favour of skiing because there is only so much customization you can do to a snowboard boot as it is made of leather…it just reforms while boarding to hit the pressure points that the boot customizer tried to avoid. However, with ski boots, the hard plastic means that any customization stays during the ski motion because of the hard material. Long story, but the short summary is that I am learning to ski instead.
I did try skiing many years ago and hated it – but this time around it is great. I am used to the snow and, because I fell so hard / often when boarding I have little fear of falling on ski’s…meaning my learning curve is fast. I am having lessons each day and will soon join the ski instructor group – not with the goal of actually getting the certification at the end of the five weeks but rather for ski improvement.
Clarissa is enjoying her skiing and they really seem to be challenging her – she even fell twice, which is more than she has ever fallen in the 8 years we have been together. They are doing downhill slalom racing, jumping, skiing backwards and other crazy things.
Today we did an Avalanche Course; which consisted of us skiing around with one of the rescue Ski Patrol me
mbers and he taught us how the mountain, weather, snow type and other factors lead to avalanches. We practiced how to stop problem terrain, how to self rescue, how to find a buried person using prods and transmitters / scanners and showed us the general operations and inside of the ski patrol mountain huts. They really have a fun job – every morning they go avalanche hunting in order to trigger (with bombs, canons, or via skiing) avalanches to make the runs safe. Fernie has one of the highest number of avalanches due to the terrain so the ski patrol is very busy. The most interested part of the course for me was when we dug away a 2m wide and 1m deep section of the snow to see how an avalanche happens. Each layer of snow through the season is highly visible in the cross section of snow – much like the timber rings in a tree…and if there is a good layer on a bad layer the upper layer just slides away with little pressure. So in our snow hole test, the was a bad layer about 2cm thick and about 40cm deep. The avalanche instructor dug around to isolate a pillar about 1m high and 30cm wide – he then out the spade on top of the column and with very little pressure (six hard taps – same force as you would use to slap someone’s hand away from the last chip), and the block broke away at the weak layer level – coming away as an entire block, held together by the good snow well enough to be passed around…and boy is snow heavy! So the lesson was that this 30m slab would slip down the slope with little pressure (a skier) and so no skiing there. Of course, that is for skiing in the mountain and off the ski runs that are maintained by the ski patrol…which we will never do – but it was interesting none-the-less.
…and as I write this, it has started snowing again…
Fernie is a great little town – quite off the beaten track (hour flight from Vancouver, then a 3 – 5 hour drive on top of that) but that is why we picked it. It is deep in the Canadian ‘back country’ and the town only exists because of a mine a few miles away…and the resort. I wouldn’t describe the town as pretty – some of the European villages are much nicer, with quaint wooden houses etc. This town is built for serious snow and cold….normally 2.5m deep at street level and -20 degrees. However, as per our normal skiing holiday practice, we have bought the warm weather with us and there is no snow (town level) and people are happily biking around in T-shirts and even sun tanning in the balmy zero degree weather (these Canadians are tough!), which they call this spring. Luckily
on the mid to upper parts of the mountain there is enough snow (2m) to have fun. The good thing about Fernie is the weather is volatile – so we could well see another, and continuous, dumping of snow…which would cover the village; letting Michelle and Chloe experience the snow as they cant go up the mountain.Our days are pretty much the same – we get up at 8am, have breakfast and catch the bus from Fernie town to the ski hill, which is 10 minutes away. There is a storage cabin with our ski’s etc and Clarissa and I split up for our respective lessons. Clarissa is doing the ski instructor course and I had planned to do the snowboarding instructor course but changed to learn how to ski. The reason is that when we were in London, I went to a ski boot specialist to get them to custom fit my snowboard boots to avoid the terribly painful feet I get because of the boot pressing against my high arches and instep. The boot fitters advise was to ditch snowboarding in favour of skiing because there is only so much customization you can do to a snowboard boot as it is made of leather…it just reforms while boarding to hit the pressure points that the boot customizer tried to avoid. However, with ski boots, the hard plastic means that any customization stays during the ski motion because of the hard material. Long story, but the short summary is that I am learning to ski instead.
I did try skiing many years ago and hated it – but this time around it is great. I am used to the snow and, because I fell so hard / often when boarding I have little fear of falling on ski’s…meaning my learning curve is fast. I am having lessons each day and will soon join the ski instructor group – not with the goal of actually getting the certification at the end of the five weeks but rather for ski improvement.
Clarissa is enjoying her skiing and they really seem to be challenging her – she even fell twice, which is more than she has ever fallen in the 8 years we have been together. They are doing downhill slalom racing, jumping, skiing backwards and other crazy things.
Today we did an Avalanche Course; which consisted of us skiing around with one of the rescue Ski Patrol me
mbers and he taught us how the mountain, weather, snow type and other factors lead to avalanches. We practiced how to stop problem terrain, how to self rescue, how to find a buried person using prods and transmitters / scanners and showed us the general operations and inside of the ski patrol mountain huts. They really have a fun job – every morning they go avalanche hunting in order to trigger (with bombs, canons, or via skiing) avalanches to make the runs safe. Fernie has one of the highest number of avalanches due to the terrain so the ski patrol is very busy. The most interested part of the course for me was when we dug away a 2m wide and 1m deep section of the snow to see how an avalanche happens. Each layer of snow through the season is highly visible in the cross section of snow – much like the timber rings in a tree…and if there is a good layer on a bad layer the upper layer just slides away with little pressure. So in our snow hole test, the was a bad layer about 2cm thick and about 40cm deep. The avalanche instructor dug around to isolate a pillar about 1m high and 30cm wide – he then out the spade on top of the column and with very little pressure (six hard taps – same force as you would use to slap someone’s hand away from the last chip), and the block broke away at the weak layer level – coming away as an entire block, held together by the good snow well enough to be passed around…and boy is snow heavy! So the lesson was that this 30m slab would slip down the slope with little pressure (a skier) and so no skiing there. Of course, that is for skiing in the mountain and off the ski runs that are maintained by the ski patrol…which we will never do – but it was interesting none-the-less.…and as I write this, it has started snowing again…
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