Glacier Assault
On our second day at Whistler/Blackcomb, we decided to check out Blackcomb Mountain. We had purchased Fresh Tracks tickets for the entire week, but switching mountains is no longer a problem due to the new Peak-to-Peak cable car. After a few runs on Whistler, we crossed directly between the main lodges and began our day at Blackcomb.

The first few runs weren't great. Most of the snow had been blown off the Seventh Heaven bowl, and we scratched our way down to the lift as best we could. After a bit of a wait for a lost team member, we headed back up to the top and tried going down the other way, to the bottom of the Glacier Express lift. Here we had lunch and prepared for the rest of our Blackcomb adventure. Our plan: to take on the Blackcomb Glacier!

The Glacier Express lift took us up to just above the bottom of the Showcase T-bar. Seeing the T-bar, Jon blanched and began muttering about the only thing he'd asked for on the entire trip was that we not ride a T-bar! Well, he and I had had some bad experiences at Breckenridge, but I was hoping things would work out better for us here. We got in line.

Don got on first, followed by Jim. I was a couple of places behind Jim, and Jon was a couple behind me. Unlike Breckenridge, they didn't make snowboarders ride with anyone else, which is nice because apparently we have only about a fifty-fifty chance of making it up the mountain even in the best conditions. I lined up at the gate, watching for the anchor-shaped bar at the end of the springloaded cable as it came up, fast. the lifty got it behind my front leg and I grabbed on just in time. The tension loaded up, and suddenly I was moving forward. I stumbled almost immediately, but got the board lined up straight, looked straight ahead, and was fine for the rest of the trip.

Not so some of my companions! Don was wandering back and forth along the track and looking shaky, but he managed to hang on longer than Jim, who went down less than halfway up the slope, which rises 150 vertical meters. He somehow kept his grip on the bar, spinning, flipping, and kicking up a cloud of snow. Probably three quarters of the way up, Don finally snagged an edge and was down and out. As he collected himself and sat up, he got a close-up view of the spectacle of Jim sailing by on his back, still spinning and kicking.

I made it to the top and tossed away the bar. Jon made it too, without any troubles - in fact for the rest of the day he kept recommending we take every T-bar we saw. We looked over a tourist information sign about the glacier while we waited for them to trudge up the steep hill - no mean feat at over 7,000 feet.


From the tourist overlook, we got our first view of the glacier, and it was impressive. My photos, taken with my telephone, really don't do it justice. It's just huge; a gargantuan bowl - large even by the standards of this giant mountain. It's just one enormous bowl full of snow, a huge playground. After taking a couple of snapshots at the edge, we dropped into one of our favorite runs of the trip. It went on for ever, of course - we covered six miles from the top of the glacier down to the lift - and the snow was soft and fluffy. Near the bottom Jim, Jon and I even ventured a bit out of bounds (not too far, though - we could see the tracks from people coming down from the ridge and back into the resort), where we found a wonderland of deep powder. The glacier run was simply fantastic, and we all felt like heroes once we'd done it!
- posted by Joachim @ 10:12 AM