What is this, April? Mid-February Spring Skiing at W/B!

Submitted by amym on Thu, 2010-02-18 18:46

For my first night off in a week, I decided to take a cruise around Whistler village to check out the sights and sounds, and also to catch the medal ceremony at the celebration plaza. Barenaked ladies played a free concert right in village square, and, as you can see from the photo below, people still love them. Of course they played 'If I had a Million Dollars,' and cops were directing traffic around the massive crowd. These are the grumpy cops who aren't getting paid to ski all day, I feel bad for them.

The xc ski racers are pretty badass. The woman who got bronze in the sprint event on Wednesday fell off the track earlier in the day and probably broke a rib or two, then went on to get third in the final. The Scandinavians dominated in the women's events. It's really cool to see the medal ceremony and the venue for it is pretty elaborate.

Next, Our Lady Peace played (best Canadian band ever? haha maybe not, but it sure takes me back to my junior high days) and it was a pretty good show. You can line up to get into the show if you don't have a ticket, they'll let you in, it just takes a while.

A fairly early night led to a fairly late wakeup. I met up with Ryan Prentice to enjoy a very empty Whistler mountain. He jumped off some stuff. Especially some sketchy stuff. What you can't tell from this photo is that he actually took off a good 20 feet from where he is in the shot. He wasn't very happy with me for getting him to do that. Oops.

Sketched out Ryan:

He cheered up after that because we took the Peak to Peak across to Blackcomb. We were joined on the ride with Avalanche rescue dog Nora and she snuggled up for the ride. I'm pretty sure the patrollers that get to work with the dogs have the best job ever.

Here's Ryan giving me the Evil Eye for making him jump off stuff. Whatever, it was his idea to go shooting anyway.

One last order of business for the day, a pretty cool little drop we were admiring from the chair on Blackcomb. The sunshine left the snow feeling nice and soft and temperatures were great. Unfortunately patrol had to close the glacier down because of some naturally-occurring size 2 avalanches, so for those headed out into the backcountry please take the warmer temperatures into account.