Round One - Rain: Following the amazing summer which lasted into October, we had the wettest November on record. Now you'd think in a city with such a reputation for rain that they'd cope amazingly well with it. Hmm. You'd be wrong. The reservoirs were so full of run-off from the mountains it contaminated the water supply with silt so we had a ban on drinking the water for three weeks. This was accompanied by power outages all over the place which in turn meant the roads were a nightmare - no traffic lights y'see and they do like their traffic lights here!
Round two - Snow: Once all that was almost done with, the weather turned cold and we got a dump of snow, which made most roads impassable on normal tires and saw even more power cuts and what traffic there was pretty much stood still. I think there was about 18in over a weekend. And living as I do on a big hill, I resorted to bussing it to college for the first couple days. That was about three weeks ago and there's still snow lingering.
Round Three - Storms: The latest round was a bit more aggressive with storms off and on for a couple weeks - in a kind of mini-review of the past six weeks, one day I was awoken by heavy rain, the next hail and the next peeked out the curtains to see more snow! Unfortnately though, with the ground so wet combined with high winds, there were a lot of trees down. In fact the highway through Stanley Park (from the Lions Gate Bridge) to downtown had something like 25 trees across the road, cutting off the city from the West Van.
BUT..... the storms did also bring snow. You couldnt ski much on the local mountains because of power cuts but the storms subsided in Whistler on Friday so a bunch of us were up at 5am saturday to get some freshies! :-D
It was still pretty cold -10 to -15 but I had my woolie socks on...
Of course, I was out with the locals (I include Jon in that as he's lived here two years and did do a couple seasons in Alps) so it was off the lift and into the trees!
Now I can ski alright but in 2ft of pow I find it very hard to pick my line - pretty important when you're threading through the trees!
...and its pretty steep (this bit was out of the trees but the photo does show the gradient pretty well)
thats Jon by the way
And again
and again.....he was the sympathetic one who'd wait for me as I stumbled my way down the powder
by the end of the day the wind was picking up a bit and to me delight other people were getting tired (I was knackered hours ago!) so we headed down....
....with just a quick stop for coffee (or hot cider in my case) on the way down.
Another brilliant day at Whistler.
