Burn Out Ridge: Tea Time

Actually, I don't mean tea time or tee time for that matter. What I mean is that after much persuasion Tess decided to join us in our adventures into the night time snow. I had to catch a flight out Saturday night so T and I only skied Saturday but the boys stuck around for the full weekend. We brought up the pulk which was sweet (thank you again rents) and this allowed for way better packing and for lighter packs. The nearly full moon made the friday night skin fantastic and headlamp free! We set up the same place as last time however enjoyed much milder temperatures and an almost too hot sleep....well for me at least! Tess not so much. After many attempts by me to warm up her feet with my hands and tonnes of large bear hugs she had a mediocre sleep at best. Just couldn't get really warm (we have to work on that!).


The next day we toured up the familiar cut block however were forced to turn back due to large whumphing and shooting cracks. A bit of morning nerves and a team pow wow later, we decided to retrace our route and search another aspect. As soon as we swung around from the N-NE aspect to a more southerly aspect the stability changed for the better. This is when the unimaginable happened. Well it wasn't that bad, but we were passed by 3 skiers coming up on sleds. We had heard sleds across the valley and we were becoming ok with that, but to have them poach our terrain... Steal what we had slept overnight for.... grrrrrrr. We decided the only way to deal with this was to rip up their skin track and pass them to the top only to snake back our fresh pow. Once we caught up to them I recognised them as a group of 'old timers' from Vernon who we'd seen at the Gorge the year before. Our group had a brief discussion and decided that old dudes on tele's were granted exemptions. (To note they had only sledded up the road and then parked and started touring).

Anyway, we had some amazing skiing through the burn forest and into the open cut block. Tess, running on very little sleep, was feeling a little punished so her and I built a big kicker (Ok she mostly watched me build it) and we hit that a couple times which was a blast. I haven't done that in a long time and I wish I would have had more time. I managed to actually stick my first 360 attempt which was sweet and now I need to work on doing it with any sort of grace!

The boys cruised up for another lap and then we had to say good bye and cruise back to the car. Yannick and Peter had a good day on Sunday and came back with the official conclusion that the semi snow cave was way better for humidity control than the tent for sleeping. It means less gear too which is great.

Check out the pictures here and here.


Oh ya, and Peter had his new NTN setup for the first time and it proved a little to get used too!!! A couple of spectacular wipe outs but still a smile! I'm super curious to try it out and see how it skis.