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.

January 2012

In the 2011/2012 Season I ski toured around 40 days and accumulated approximate 40,000 vertical meters.

The season began well with a cold and snowy November, and we prepared for the season with a few 'inbounds tours' (to parts of the ski resort which were not lift accessible yet) and plenty of fitness training and transceiver practise sessions.

December, later nick-named by all Whistler Residents as Drycember saw me taking the Canadian Avalanche Association Operations 1 course, plus a few more short trips to the singing pass area.

January brought plenty of new snow and we were able to notch up a few more trips.  The notable highlights were skiing the Chisel Couloir on the lower north east flank of Decker, as well as a few snowy days off the back of the resort.  Check out this video from 4 days of local slackcountry.

 

This is a shot looking down the Chisel Couloir from the top.  This line is not super well know since you can't see it from any of the usual ways up and over Decker or Trorey, but it is steep and sustained and I would definitely ski it again.  Its really quick to get to when you know where you are going, just watch out as the entrance is really exposed!