I'm finished skiing for the year! I had my last day today, at Silver Star Mountain Resort, outside of Vernon, B.C.. It snowed, but visibility was mostly very good. Still, the layer of powder on top of the snow was not thick enough to fully hide the icy patches underneath. Silver Star is of moderate size, bigger than Kicking Horse or Whitewater but smaller than Lake Louise or Fernie. Its runs had a good variety of difficulties, but many of them were accessible only through long catwalks from the lifts, so the run times themselves were not terribly impressive. Still, it made a nice way to end the tour.

Favorite mountains: Lake Louise, Whitewater, Fernie, in that order. Whitewater had the best snow, Lake Louise had the best terrain, and Fernie had the potential to best both of them, but I was unlucky with the weather during my visit their. Most disappointing: Kicking Horse, highly hyped but not worth the trip until they add a couple more chairs and a whole bunch of gondola cars. Biggest waste of time: Banff @ Norquay. Stick to Sunshine Valley and Lake Louise instead.

Tomorrow I'm driving to Vancouver, to stay overnight with the Fords, which will be great. Looking forward to meeting Carolyn!

More baby news: congratulations to Kathy Plamondon on her second, a boy, Lórien, born Saturday Feb. 23!
posted by Tom at 2:51 AM | link | (0) comments

I'm taking a day off from skiing. This was a bit of a tough decision, as I only have one more day for skiing, tomorrow, before driving to Vancouver to visit the Fords and head home. There are two ski hills within driving distance of Kelowna, so I'm missing out on an opportunity to check both of them out. Still, I'm pretty burned out from all the skiing in the last two months and there doesn't seem to be much point in paying for a day of skiing that I wouldn't enjoy. So I'm enjoying a bit of a cocooning day, surfing the 'net (broadband access at the hotel!), getting caught up on emails, and listening to mp3's.

Sunday I drove from Nelson to Kelowna, and was blown away by the scenery. I guess I hadn't really figured out where the wine in B.C. comes from, so it was a bit of a shock to come over a snowy mountain pass and suddenly be at the top of a steep switchback looking down into a brown, snowless valley with bare vinyards in every direction and large lake of deepest blue. It was a beautiful day, and as every Canadian knows it was also the day of the great Olympic hockey showdown, which I was listening to on the radio as I drove. So I pulled into a restaurant at the bottom and watched the third period on their T.V. before continuing on up the Okanagan Valley to Kelowna. It felt wonderful to be enjoying the game, and the aftermath glow of patriotic pride, while in a beautiful part of Canada that I hadn't seen before. After a dramatic crossing of the floating bridge across Okanagan Lake I was in downtown Kelowna, by far the biggest city I've driven through since I left Calgary, and it was time to look for a hotel.

Yesterday I drove out to Big White, about an hour south-southeast of Kelowna. The road seemed to go up and up and up as I drove, and eventually the snowline showed up. Big White itself proved to be extremely cold, and clearly the rain which had hit Fernie had fallen as snow here. The rolling mountain tops of the resort, far less jagged and sharp than the Rockies, were covered in fir trees right up to the top. These were weighted down with an incredible amount of snow, so that some were bent completely over and their trunks and branches formed arches big enough to ski through. The snow base was excellent, but Big White had clearly had a large number of visitors over the weekend and there was little or no fresh powder left anywhere. Still, I had a good afternoon before returning to Kelowna.

Last night I caught a showing of Gosford Park at the local movie theatre. I quite enjoyed it. It's a complex enough movie, with enough raw star talent, that it's difficult to take apart enough to discuss in brief. There were some standout performances, and the general production values were very high. However, it felt like much of its promise was unrealized: so many characters could hardly be fleshed out in the constraints of a single movie, and there were many interesting subplots that all had to compete for limited time so that they felt either unfinished or at least rushed. As for the main plot line, its departure from a conventional murder mystery outline seemed rather a shame in this case, and in any case not an improvement. The brief mystery was quickly resolved and no particular detective work was needed by either the audience or the cast to determine the "villan". Individual clues were explained almost as quickly as they were presented. So: full marks for cast, costumes, scenery and characters, but they were let down by a mediocre story.
posted by Tom at 5:16 PM | link | (0) comments

Lots to write about, but it’s late and I’m pretty tired. We’ll see how far I get.

Well, Day 3 in Fernie (Thursday) was much better than the previous day. The weather clouded over and it started to snow. This was bad—harder to see the slopes and bumps, and indeed very foggy to make it worse—but very good in a lot of ways, as the snow had been getting hard and difficult to ski on. So now it was soft and great fun, especially in the relatively untracked deeps of Cedar Bowl. Ok, so I fell down a couple of times, but it was worth it!

So the next decision, with the snow continuing to fall, was whether or not I should stay in Fernie for another day. With the snow continuing to fall, I went to check with the hotel to see if I could stay in the room an extra night. Fortunately, the answer was… no. So I set off Friday (yesterday) morning in the pouring rain for Nelson, B.C.

Yes, it rained all day. The skiing would have been terrible.

Nelson is really beautiful, although I haven’t had much of a chance to explore it in daylight. But it’s set in the middle of the mountains by a beautiful lake, has an attractive downtown area with real shops (unlike, say, Fernie or Golden), and has a good bookstore and at least one great restaurant. And nice people, too. Of course, the rain made it less enticing, and the prospect of trying to ski the next day was unappealing giving the inevitable degredation of the snow quality.

Well, Friday morning dawned with a blizzard. After a nice breakfast at the hotel, I drove up to Whitewater resort. Or at least, that was the plan… The rental car, however, had insufficient traction to make the trip. I aborted at the turnoff from the highway and returned to Nelson. There, I parked the car and hitched a ride up to Whitewater.

The snow had been falling hard for most of the night and all of the morning, and it was deep on the ski hills. When I arrived they were still blasting off dynamite to prevent avalanches. Whitewater is really small, only two small chairs, but the weather had kept many of the normal weekend visitors away and the lineups were quite short. And once they opened up the bowl which had been closed for the morning… Well, it was fantastic. Light powder snow up over my knees, untracked… And just like that, Whitewater goes to the top of my list of places to come and ski at again.
posted by Tom at 11:46 PM | link | (0) comments

It's snowing!!!

A memo to me to check out some ad-related music on the web: the Bud light commercial for Ulterior Emotions is apparently backed up by a real CD available at www.budlightinstitute.ca, Coke has a hockey theme for download at www.coca-cola.com, and Bell has its online jam for download at it's site.
posted by Tom at 12:36 PM | link | (0) comments

For a brief synopsis of Accenture's position on the Enron scandal, click here...
posted by Tom at 12:43 PM | link | (0) comments

I'm wrapping up a four day stay in Golden, British Columbia, home of Canada's newest big ski resort, Kicking Horse. One of the American ski magazines wrote up Kicking Horse as "The best ski resort you've never heard of", which is a nice line. Unfortunately it's been a couple of weeks since Kicking Horse had a real dump of snow, so although the base is quite good the general conditions were tracked up and the resort's big promise ("Champagne Powder") was nowhere to be seen. That lack reduced Kicking Horse to a small resort with only three lifts, including the gondola.

The gondola is Kicking Horse's great new gateway, opening up access to the top of the mountain, the wonderful restaurant perched there, and two main skiable bowls on either side of a ridge line that lead down (eventually) to the area covered by the other two lifts. The green cruiser trail down from the top to the bottom is an impressive 10km in length, so it can easily take 30-45 minutes to complete a run down to the bottom. There are also masses of excellent mogel runs down, although they suffer slightly from having their steepest sections right at the beginning, which makes for a nasty shock when approached first thing in the morning without the benefit of a warmup. The main problem with all of this is that the gondola is only half populated with the 8-person cars, with large gaps between them. This meant that by midday, even yesterday (Monday), the lift line for the gondola was easily half an hour, and got up to 3/4 of an hour on the weekend. And the gondola is the only way up to the top, so there's no avoiding skiing the lower area and getting back into that line every time you want to go up.

I arrived on Friday night and checked in to Mary's Motel in Golden. Golden is a really small town in the bottom of the valley just at the mouth of Kicking Horse Pass, best known for its tortuous railway tunnels leading up into the rockies towards Banff and Calgary. Golden has clearly not completed its transition from a small logging town and highway rest stop to a modern ski village: the downtown 'core' (a short block long) has a number of indifferent but overly priced restaurants with drab frontage. None of Banff's big label shops here! Saturday morning I checked out of the motel and drove up to Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, a good fifteen minute drive up a winding road which looks much shorter and closer from Golden. After one run off of the gondola I decided the snow up the top (and the difficulty of those first steep sections) were not worth the wait in the rapidly lengthening line. I spent the rest of the day in the company of a local Snow Host, who kindly led me around the black diamond runs from the lower lifts, which had no line ups at all, a telling sign. In the evening I checked into the Country Comfort B&B in town, a large friendly household with a big common room, complete with fireplace.

Sunday I went back up the mountain, but after a single run up the gondola the line was again unbearable and I continued to ski the lower runs. I felt distinctly uninspired by the skiing and gave up early to go back to the B&B, where I played Civ 3 on the laptop for most of the afternoon, giving myself a painful crick in the neck. But Sunday evening it looked like it was going to snow, so I had good hopes for Monday.

Yesterday (Monday) dawned cloudy but without obvious new snow. However, it started up as I made my way up the mountain, and by the time I'd completed a warmup run on the lower area (getting wise at last) and made my way up the gondola (very short line up, still at 9:45 am) there was a layer of fresh powder at the top. The mogels that had given me so much trouble on Saturday were tamed by my newly energized legs and the safety blanket of snow and I started to really enjoy KHMR for the first time. This was dramatically improved as well when the clouds parted to let some sunshine through, which made it possible to see the bumps before running over them on the skis. (Sunshine good!) I broke for lunch in the restaurant at the top, which proved to be a full service, top quality dining establishment with surprisingly reasonable prices. I met up there with a couple of snowboarders who were staying at the same B&B in town that I was. They were unfortunately less happy with the skiing as they had hoped for fresh powder and didn't like the mogels at all. After lunch I went back to the hill and although the lineup for the gondola did build back up to a longer length it was now clear that it was worth the wait to get to the top.

KHMR will be a wonderful resort once they add more cars to the gondola and add another couple of lifts to the upper section (which will help to keep people up there and further cut the lineups for the gondola). It's probably fabulous with fresh snow; the bumps would be much more accessible and the lower area, which was quite bare in spots, comfortable for less experienced skiers. But for this trip, it was definitely outdone by Lake Louise, both in size, design, terrain, and quality of the snow.

Today I'm off to Fernie, a four hour drive from Golden. I may change my itinerary slightly thereafter, and stop overnight in Nelson on the way over to Kelowna. Apparently Whitewater resort is not to be missed... My original itinerary can be reviewed here.
posted by Tom at 12:33 PM | link | (0) comments

What a fabulous day. And I almost decided not to go to Lake Louise! After my lesson on Thursday I asked the instructor for his opinion of the conditions at Lake Louise, and he reinforced what I’d previously heard, that Lake Louise gets a lot of traffic and gets icy very quickly. Since it hasn’t snowed here in about a week, I figured a day in Lake Louise would be filled with nasty skidding and possibly painful crashes.

I’m glad I decided to go any way. On the way I took the scenic Bow Valley Parkway, which was beautiful. There were a couple of herds of elk in meadows on the way and I stopped briefly for a photo. On the way I was listening to the radio and heard about a Jimmy Rankin concert this evening at the Banff Centre. More about that later…

Once I’d arrived I hit the mountain. Lake Louise is really very big, with a large back bowl area and even a secondary mountain (actually the original resort) at the back. The main runs on the front were indeed very icy, but there were plenty of other options where the snow was good. And when I got to the back, I was really happy to find a massive wide-open black diamond area with plenty of great snow. Forget what everybody at Sunshine Valley was saying: Lake Louise is excellent!

I stopped at one of the mountain lodges to eat my lunch, called the Banff Centre and was able to get a ticket for the Rankin Concert…

In the afternoon I joined a Ski Friend tour of the mountain. Our designated Ski Friend was John, and he led three of us (including Jeff, a guy from my ski class at Sunshine the previous day) on a wonderful tour of some of the tougher bits of terrain. After some warmup runs we went down a steep chute into the back bowl. Taking a turn a bit awkwardly I fell, lost a ski and slid for quite a distance before stopping. My ski, which had somehow turned around so the brake was facing the wrong way, continued sliding below me and I had a wide time getting down to it. I’m glad I still had one ski to slow me down, or I would have ended up at the bottom of the valley! In the end I was a bit chastened but unharmed and ready to continue.

Finally the wonderful ski day came to an end and I went back to Banff, my hotel room, and a hot bath. After a quick dinner in town, I drove up to the Banff Centre for the concert. The Centre is a sprawling complex of buildings set on a hillside overlooking Banff. The Rankin concert was in the Margaret Greenham theatre, which turned out to be tiny. Total audience size: less than 250, which pretty much packed the place. Rankin mixed a couple of favourites from his family’s group (the Rankins, duh) with his current album’s tracks. He turned out to be quite a performer, and got everybody standing and clapping by the end. I bought the CD.

Tomorrow I’m off to Golden. I’ll be staying at Mary’s Motel overnight, then transferring to the Country Comfort Bed & Breakfast for three nights. Kicking Horse is supposed to have great skiing, with lots of powder… Here’s hoping!
posted by Tom at 11:34 AM | link | (0) comments

Day two in Banff, Alberta.
One of my key objectives for this trip is to get a good crack at the major ski resorts in western Canada. Staying in Banff is a great start: there are three ski resorts within easy driving distance, and my lift pass is good at all three. They are: Banff @ Mount Norquay, Sunshine Valley, and Lake Louise.

Yesterday I started off early from Calgary with a stop at Starbucks. The drive up to Banff was beautiful, with just a couple of light clouds crowning the mountains under the morning sunshine. I stopped off at my hotel, a rather nondescript low budget motel off at the wrong end of the main road, and then continued on to Sunshine, which had been recommended by Dave and Sue. This turned out to be a good place to start. Sunshine is not a large resort, and had nothing to compare to Whistler or Jackson, but below the treeline it had some great snow and great runs. Unfortunately, the wind that apparently had been blowing since the last big snowfall mid last week was still blowing. In addition to the contribution this made to the cold at the top of the runs, the wind had also blown a lot of the snow off where the runs were exposed above the treeline. Once I made it below the icefields, though, I really enjoyed the lower portions of the hill, particularly on the last section of my day, which I spent on Goat's Eye mountain. I even managed a few runs down a double-black run, which was exhilarating!

This morning I changed direction and went to the closest resort, Banff @ Mount Norquay. Smaller than Sunshine, I suspect Mount Norquay's ski-able area is much smaller than Blue Mountain in Ontario, but what a view! From the top of the leftmost chair there is a fantastic panorama over the town of Banff and the spectacular mountains around it. The clouds and most of the wind from Monday had cleared off and the day was clear and bright with sunshine. Unfortunately, many of the runs I wanted to try were closed with avalanche warnings, so that leftmost chair only led to two runs, both steep and covered in tough mogels. However, the snow was very good and I enjoyed a few hours of bumps (with slowly improving technique and comfort, and rapidly tiring muscles) before moving on to the runs served by the other lifts. Here the news was not as good: the lack of recent powder, and the much greater number of skiers, had reduced the other blacks and blues to sheer granite-like hardpacked snow, basically indistinguishable from ice as far as my ski edges could tell. I scraped my way down a half dozen runs in search of something worth exploring, but gave up and took an early end to the day to return to the town and a hot bath.

Banff seems to be a wonderful little place. The people here are very friendly, prices are refreshing in comparison to Jackson, and there's a breathtaking view in every direction. I know there's a lot of pressure to increase the size of the town, strictly limited by the National Park surrounding it, but I'm glad that it's small and can be covered easily by foot. More people would crowd these little ski resorts and take some of the wildness from the magic mountains around them.

Just one other note: I watched the figure skating last night and had my evening ruined by the seemingly fixed judging that favoured the Russians over Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, who skated a brilliant and flawless programme. I hope some changes for the better occur in this damaged sport, but can't imagine how that could be made to happen. I can't agree with Rex Murphy who seems to think this is the worst thing possible for the Olympics as a whole. But it's a shame, and I guess the best thing to be taken from this event is this: after years of disappointments on the brink of gold, we Canadians know that this time our skaters were the best. Even if the official results don't reflect that fact.

Tomorrow I'll go back to Sunshine for a lesson (need to learn how to absorb the bumps instead of skiing around them) and Thursday I'll wrap up this portion of my trip with a visit to Lake Louise. So far, so great!
posted by Tom at 11:33 AM | link | (0) comments

I'm in Calgary! I got in on Friday night, picked up my rental car, and drove over to Steve and Grace's. It's great to see them again. Grace is doing very well on new medication and has substantially recovered her mobility, which is great. They now have four cats (Ambrose, Dog, Sabrina and George) and a Belgian Sheepdog (Cal) so their house is well endowed with fur.

Friday evening we went out to Cal's flyball practice. This is a slightly complicated relay/steeplechase/ball hunt for dogs. Teams of four dogs have to run down a course, hit a box at the far end to get a ball, and run back to their owners. Once they pass the start line the next dog can leave. Cal's been swiftly improving over the last year and is now in the #1 team for their club. Flyball is really fun to watch, and the dogs all seem to have a great time, judging by the amount of exstatic barking and prancing going on.

Yesterday we had a late brunch and I spent a bit of time shopping in the afternoon. After getting Steve fitted for a tuxedo (he's best man for a wedding of a friend here in a few weeks) we went over to the Bradt's and headed out together for a greek dinner. Dave and Sue's children, Benjamin (5) and Natalie (3?) are very cute, but didn't come with us to dinner so I didn't get much chance to meet them properly. Sue showed off her bellydancing skills (and yes, I got photos) at the dinner, which was excellent. I'll post pictures tomorrow night once I get settled in.

Today we're having a quiet day so far watching the Olympics. Tomorrow I'm off to Banff for my first skiing in Alberta. My ski trip itinerary is here.

I'm starting to realize how crazy my week back in Toronto at the beginning of March is going to be. Here's a taste of what I need to do:

- Pick up new passport.
- Complete taxes.
- Fill in tax organizer for Andersen to file my U.S. taxes.
- Refinance my mortgage.
- Pack for two months in Europe.
- See my mom to wish her Happy Birthday.
- Read three weeks' mail.
- Book a B&B in Lisbon.

I'm sure there's more that will occur to me over the next couple of weeks. Oh well... The price of leisure!
posted by Tom at 2:06 PM | link | (0) comments

I just set up a quick Daily Essentials list of bookmarks for me to visit. You've probably done this yourself. Here they are:

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate This site was recommended by a friend a few days ago, and I went and had another look at it just now. Really excellent.

International Herald Tribune This was by far the best international paper I found to read while I was working in Asia. It culls from many other fine papers, has an American slant, but includes a lot of the European reaction that many US papers ignore.

Doonesbury's Daily Dose I check this one for the same reason that I like watching the West Wing. I guess I just enjoy U.S. politics more than Canadian politics -- a lot easier to tell the good guys from the bad guys!

Sherman's Lagoon Ok, this one's just a great comic strip. No other redeeming qualities.

Slashdot Some amusing banter and interesting techie news, although I have my personal filter level set pretty high when surfing this site.
posted by Tom at 12:48 AM | link | (0) comments