Feburary 2012

Ahh... February.  A great time for touring.  The lines are filled in, the days are just that little bit longer, its not a bitterly cold/rainy as January...  At least thats the plan.  As it turned out sunny days in February were few and far between, and when it was sunny the snow was mostly horrific.

A few of the highlights thou included an 'up and over' style tour on Rainbow, where we started from the Callaghan, skinned up via Hanging Lake, then over the Summit and down the East Face.  The East Face of Rainbow is one of my all time favourite runs.  It's wide and long, has a gazzilion features on it, and gets steeper and steeper the whole way down.  I've skied it several times from heli drops on Rainbow and it rarely disappoints.  This was one of those rare days unfortunately.  The snow was indescribably rancid breakable crust, the steep part at the bottom was covered in avi debris, and as it was the afternoon instead of in the morning it was in the shade instead of bathed in glorious sunshine.  But anyway, the skin up was nice, took us about 6 hours to the summit from the Bi-athlon range. Here are some photos.

Later in the month there were a few other shorter trips to Decker and Husume and the like, mostly in horrific visibility, and also a great trip to Chief Pascal in the Duffy, which yielded some of the deepest turns of the season.

Towards the end of February Andy and I took a nice full day trip to the Singing pass area.  Although it wasn't totally sunny and the skiing wasn't totally gnar, we managed to do lots of filming, and the resulting edit is one of my favourites of the season.

Cloudy Powdy from Dan Cudlip on Vimeo.


At the end of the month there was a heli drop to Rethel Mountain, close to Wedge.  I got hit by my sluff and tomahawked all the way down the Rethel North Couloir, which was quite frankly completely terrifying and kind of put a downer on the day for me, but before the the views were great!

Untitled from Dan Cudlip on Vimeo.