Whistler/Blackcomb 3/6-7/2017

Two days skiing here down and two to go. Whistler reported 4" on Tues and 7" on Mon (and 8" on Sun and 10" on Sat according to OpenSnow). I heard it was very crowded Fri and Sat. Mon was busy and Tues was a little less. My wife who flew into Vanouver on Sat and skied Mon with a too big intermediate group led by an instructor from Tremblant. Group was split in the afternoon and she went with the upper group and got into some tough terrain with bad visibility so she quit at 2 and got led down mountain by DanoT who needed to check on his dog. She was in a better group Tuesday with 5 intermediates including the leader.

Warning to UT: EpicSki and PugSki voted to return to UT for annual Gathering based on Snowbasin being added to MCP and Alta and Snowbird being separated so you get two days at each and no longer pay 1/2 of combined ticket price, even if skiing after Alta has closed for the season.

Tony Crocker led group that included the Gathermeister, who is an instructor at Whistler and her brother from Victoria into a lot of the good stuff near top of Whistler on Mon. He used Horseshoe Bowl to see if members of the group were ready for more difficult lines and a few of them declined to do the cornice entry. I was first off cornice and did about an 8' drop into powder and hip checked the landing. Everybody else went for an easier entrance (shown) Tony Crocker in the 4" new. Maybe there was a cm to in conversion error?except guy in picture, who is an instructor at Kimberly and was getting big air all day and landing them. After an early lunch, Tony Crocker led us into West Cirque and into the Cockalorum entrance to West Bowl. We finished the day with a lap on Symphony and multiple laps on Harmony where their tracking shows us loading a minute after the 3 pm close. We skied to base about 3:30 using Dave Murray downhill and other runs with 24.5K according to their tracking.

On Tues, I got into Blackcomb Glacier area three times. We started on Whistler, but after two runs on Big Red, the group leader, from NY who is living here for the season and has 62 days skiing here so far this year, decided to use Peak2Peak to move to Blackcomb rather than brave what he thought would be poor visibility at top of Whistler. The first run was Diamond Bowl where snow was good at top, them a little scraped of where it narrowed in middle before getting good again towards bottom. The second lap he was going to repeat Diamond with other people who joined our group so I led 6 people into adjacent Ruby Bowl which is much wider and where snow was very good. When they opened T-bar to top a guy I rode chair with and I were able to get into Sapphire Bowl from the Blowhole although visibility made route-finding tough. After the meeting and vote, I led my wife and another intermediate from top of Jersey Cream to bottom of Solar Coaster, then I got a lap on each of those chairs before skiing down slowly with some EpicSkiers. I got to base at 4:30 with 25.4K

Edited above where I had Harmony and Symphony reversed on Mon when we had six laps on Harmony and one on Symphony.

I have just a few things to add to tseeb's report for Monday. His launch of the 8-footer in Horseshoe Bowl:


And the landing:

Tseeb did not lose a ski or even roll down the hill much in the powder. Monday was the deepest 5 inches I have skied in a long time. As busy as the weekend was, the 16 inches from the previous storm was thoroughly tracked but not severely packed down. The two runs we got Monday morning right after Harmony opened were very comparable to the runs in the same area with Extremely Canadian Saturday.

Gathermeister and brother in the powder below the easier cornice dropoff:

Only the 4 of us who entered Horseshoe via those cornices remained as a group for the afternoon. The Kimberly instructor moved to a faster group and the other 4 people declined to risk the exposure of the West Cirque entry.

We were meeting for an early lunch at 11:15 to beat the crowds. I suggested we drop into Glacier Bowl from high skier's right as I had with Extremely Canadian and then take to T-bar to lunch. This yielded another powder run comparable to Saturday.


Looking back up at Cockalorum:


Our group led a charmed life with the visibility Monday. We skied West Cirque just as it started to cloud over. The cloud did not lower onto the Peak until we were skiing in the trees below Cockalorum. Yet as we skied Sun Bowl into Symphony the light improved over there. Gathermeister and I also collaborated to find Harvey's, a scattered tree run from Harmony Ridge dropping skier's right onto Symphony's exit trail.


I volunteered to be a guide at Whistler Blackcomb after hearing that last year's Gathering at Aspen was short on guides. Whistler like Aspen was a new destination for the group and I knew that I would have current beta on conditions from the two days with Extremely Canadian. Liz commented after Monday that there seemed to be a gap between the intermediate and "cornice-jumping" groups. I volunteered to fill that gap Tuesday, planning to ski steep terrain but no cornices or sketchy entries over no-fall zones. This was a good idea for me too as it was my 17th ski day out of the past 19 days and my legs had been worked thoroughly by Extremely Canadian.

I started with 10 people but soon lost Liz, who went to Glacier chair right after it opened rather than to Jersey Cream. We had two warmup laps but I noticed that 7th Heaven had also just opened and thought it would offer some good powder skiing for the group. Reported new snow was 4 inches but it was was the opposite of the 5 on Monday. It was more wind affected and thus skied shallower in most places while Monday's new snow had skied much deeper than reported.

Weather was similar to Friday, snowing off and on all day, bad vis up high and some wind too, though not nearly as bad as on Friday. High temps remained in the 15F range as they have for all of my ski days since Lake Louise on Feb. 22. Despite the wind in the face exiting 7th Heaven the group liked the skiing. The new snow skied well with far less competition for it than on Friday, almost no tracks on our first run right down the middle. Several repeated this for the second run while a few of us went skier's right to Everglades. Liz found that on her own and thought it was better than on Friday.

Third run 5 of us went out to Xhiggy's Meadow. This area has a nice fall line but was soft windpack rather than the powder I had skied there Friday. The other 4 people loved it and convinced another two to join for a repeat. On the repeat I pushed farther left at the bottom to get some powder in lower Lakeside Bowl. No one followed me in there due to bad visibility. Second Xhiggy's run:

Good skiing but not a photogenic day.

We next went off the back into Horstman Glacier. This had bad vis too, though I thought the snow was so soft and consistent to be comfortable skiing keeping the orange trail markers in sight. We had no normal lunch stop because of the scheduled group meetup at 1:45PM but we took a quick break at Glacier Lodge from 12:10 - 12:20 and Liz was able to rejoin us then.

We rode the Glacier chair. Liz was eager to see the melted out Blowhole entry, and that run to upper Sapphire had been my first priority for this group, now 7 people after 3 dropped out to take an early lunch. But many of the group had struggled with Horstman Glacier visibility and we could not even see the base of the Showcase T-bar while riding Glacier chair even though Showcase was open.

So instead I led the group up Spanky's Ladder, where rock boundaries provide better orientation than up on the Blackcomb Glacier. We traversed across the top of Garnet Bowl as you would heading skier's right to the chute entries to Sapphire. But instead we went left to the high entry on skier's right of Diamond Bowl. I had been here with Extremely Canadian and this way is a longer steep fall line and had no scraped off snow like the more commonly skied entry skier's left coming from Garnet Bowl.

The snow was excellent but it took a long time to get the group down due to the visibility, which in Liz' case was further impeded by foggy goggles that she eventually removed. I gave a few Extremely Canadian type instructions at the top and we all got down Diamond Bowl without incident.


They were all happy they skied it and those remaining for the rest of the week hope they can get back there when they can see better.

It was no surprise Utah was voted for the 2018 Gathering, as it's a perfect fit for the group in terms of cost, accessibility and ski quality. They were last in Utah in early February 2014 and next year will probably be late February or early March.

After lunch we ran into a couple of Canadian Epic members, Danny and Jo, who offered to lead some of us to a tree run on the Crystal chair. I got in there and soon separated, wound up following another group down part of the Crystal liftline with tree divergences around some choke points. I had never been in this terrain so it was good to see it though It was exhausting at the end of this extended trip.

Danny lives near the eastern end of Lake Ontario and commented he knew MadPatSki and thought we had met before. I said, "Oh yes, Patrick from Ottawa." Danny said, "He lives there but we met at Mammoth." That would have been June/July of 2006.

We are flying home today after 5 great ski days at Whistler/Blackcomb. It's a statement to snow quality that Liz' daily driver skis never got out of the bag on this trip. She was on her Armada powder skis all 5 days.