Gord did some checking around and found out that we could get 2 days lift passes and one nights accomodation ON the mountain. That's right, there's a hotel at the top of the gondola, and we're going to be staying there. For $120. Yes, $120, and just so you realize what a great deal that is lift passes for an adult are $62 a day. I've been bouncing up and down all week with the excitement of this upcoming trip.
Thursday morning we woke up at 4:00 and hopped in the car after a brief brief breakfast and proceded to drive 5 hours south and west from Edmonton to Banff. The roads were perfect the whole way there, and virtually empty. What kind of moron is on the highway that early anyways.
We arrived at the hill around 9:00 and were directed to guest services, where a valet parked the car for us our bags were taken and gondolaed up to the top of the mountain and set in our rooms. Fully dressed with skis and poles in hand we boarded the lift and arrived to see this.
That's right, fresh powder, and nothing but black diamonds. Fear being for the weak we dove right in. That's not completely true, I was pretty careful for the whole first day, but with Gord filming I wasn't about the back down from everything. Black diamonds, double black, moguls, ice, rocks, tree runs I was in for it all. I made myself a much better skier that day. By 2:00 I was literally ready to collapse, we hadn't eaten since 4:00 and I'd only had an orange then, so we went in, I bitched and moaned, and ate and ate and ate and ate. Then we headed back out.
Our final run took place about 4:00 when the lifts closed
Yes that's me, note the little Canadian flags at the end of my poles? I'm an idiot, I'd accidently grabbed the wrong pair, I skied the whole weekend with poles that were half as long as I needed. So It REALLY forced me to get down and pick my turns.
Gord was out in typical fine form
You cannot see it, but that's a 3 foot drop he's about to shred off of, and land. Amazed I was...
Anyways, we checked in without having to leave the mountain. Two showers later we were downstairs in the restaurant sitting in HUGE comfy chairs around a fire. We were literally the only people there, so we had 6 waitresses helping us. I think they were a little bored. The food was amazing.
Having been up since 4 that morning we went back upstairs and lay down for a nap. 45 minutes later someone knocked on our door... waited... knocked again. I yelled, "WHAT?" and got an, "oh sorry." They left. 10 minutes later someone knocked again. He was here to hook up the phone. Okay, well we're up now, what do we do?
Back downstairs for a couple beers. I'll have a pint of the Sunshine lager. No draft beer
it's opening day... okay, I'll live. Can I have a Sleemans? No we're all out right now. Okay, well whatever's cheap then. We were drinking Canadian, glee! I ahte that stuff.Our Waitress was Amy. She seemed rather bored so she was content to talk to us when her boss wasn't watching. Talked about a lot of stuff and we managed to convince her to meet us bright and early for breakfast and skiing the next day. She was a heathen snowboarder, but we didn't really hold it against her.
It had snowed ALL last night, and there was easily 3 inches of fresh powder on the whole mountain. That's right, fresh powder, so of course I caught a tip almost imediately and went down. POOF, attacked by a snowmonster, but at least he was a soft one. Once I got myself sorted out, Gord gave me a few quick tips on skiing powder and away we went.
I was so impressed, Gord and I have a habit of avoiding anywhere snowboarders like to go (wide open flat spaces) because they scrape the hills bare of any sort of snow and leave ice crystals underneath. But Amy stayed with us the whole way, moguls, tight tree runs, vertical drops. It was hella fun, and she was great. Of course she paid for her courage more then once, managing to fill her goggles with snow in a hard fall, which is damn tough to do!
About 2:30
Gord and I took off from the mountain assuming (correctly) that it would be very difficult to get out later. And we were right, on our drive out we found the parking lots all full, the overflow parking lots all full, and the road up the mountain had cars parked along both sides for over 2 km. People were hiking 2km to get to the parking lot, then another km to get to the lift just to be skiing.
We'd been carving powder for 2 days so we had no problem with leaving a little early. A short 5 hour drive home concluded one of the best weekends I've had in a long time.
That and Amy offered to hook us up with cheap skiing if we ever came back. I love having friends
As a sad side note, two people were airlifted out on Friday. One guy tried to do a 10 ft jump and managed to break both legs in a landing. The other guy went head first into a rock, he didn't survive that.[/i]
