Extremely Canadian Steep Clinic – Day 2

Oh, it is also St. Patrick’s Day – but that is certainly secondary to the awesome skiing and the clinic I did today.

We had another 15cm overnight, clear skies and brilliant visibility – we were very excited at the morning meeting. Today was Blackcomb, and we headed up the gondola gleefully eyeing the fresh powder. Our first run was a bit of a tree/groom mixture towards Solar Coaster – a little line I had never done, and a handy run to know.

As we unloaded Solar, we were pleasantly surprised to see that 7th Heaven was already open (9am at the latest) so we made a bee-line down Expressway and skied straight onto the chair – so much for lift lines. We did a warm-up run down the middle of 7th, cutting on and off the groomers and straight back onto the chair.

At the top, we headed over to Couloir Extreme and got some fresh powder down it – awesome. From there we headed into a mixture of Hooker / Blowdown for some more powder turns. In fact we had powder turns all day.

You probably don’t want a run by run play, but today was sick so I sorta want to tell it that way

Anyway, suffice to say, plenty of fresh snow was the order of the day.

I really have to say, that the Extremely Canadian steep clinic was a LOT better than I expected. So a big thanks to Steve Clarke for 2 days of awesome guiding and tuition. I believe you can book private lessons and request certain instructors, and Steve is certainly worth the recommendation.

I may not be the best skier around (far from it) but I thought I knew the mountains fairly well – well Steve showed me a lot of new terrain, all of which was sick (true the recent snow made it better). He also managed to get me to do a few new entrances and even my first cornice drop! I really felt comfortable skiing with Steve and our group (2 others – so almost a private lesson), and I think the main difference was I believed it when Steve (or the other instructors) took me somewhere, and told me I could do it – sometimes when my friends take me to lines, I get the impression we are there because they want to ski it, and not because it is something I can do. With Extremely Canadian, it seemed they did a great job of picking lines / challenges that were just right to ‘push’ my limits – yet still be doable. I can’t wait to go back and do that drop again

We had some great lines in the Jersey Cream Bowl, Spankys Ladder region and even the Blowhole was epic – we did the steep entrance on the skiers right, which is something I have never really considered doing (no idea why since it was easy in the end).

I even got to ski a run through Spankys with Peter Smart, the Extremely Canadian owner – and he showed me a variation of some lines I have done before, but he linked them in a way that suited my ability just right. We entered a different way, and exited a different way (a way I intend to do a few more times – a great knife edge !)

Overall, I really enjoyed the clinic – and NO it was not a freebie, my flatmate gave me the clinic as a Xmas present – I just feel they deserve a good word.

As always, I will mention what I feel was the ‘bad’ points of the day – firstly there was a slight wind crust to the powder (only in some places – top of 7th and the main slope of the Blackcomb glacier – everywhere else it was darn nice!). Also, while we had brilliant sunshine for the first half of the day, the afternoon saw the new system come in (more snow ) and thus we had some variable visibility.

That’s about it – today was simply another sick day !

Forecast = More Snow

Update: I forgot to mention the awesome apres they put on for us at Merlins. Plenty of nibbles, and plenty of beer. Pity I was driving and had to stop at only 1 pitcher They also handed out T-shirts and other merchandise – cool.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Snow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.