Old School Look at Cypress

It was foggy so I thought I’d try some vintage looks.

This tree is right at the top of the Lion’s Express chair. We watched with amusement today as a ski instructor spoke to his class of about 8 kids, all gathered round near this tree. 7 of the kids were paying rapt attention, but the 8th was facing the other way, wacking at the snow covered branches with his ski pole.

Cypress in the Fog

We had an insane run at Cypress Mountain this morning.

I’ve boarded in foggy conditions before, but nothing like what we encountered this morning on the first run. MB and I were excited to be making first tracks again, but it became immediately obvious after we stepped off the Lions Express chair that it would be slow going.

It was totally nuts. I couldn’t see more than 2 metres in front of me, and subsequently was going dead slow. What I could see was pretty much just white on white. Goggles didn’t help, and other boarders (very few of them) loomed into sight at the last minute.

I quickly discovered that when you can’t see, your sense of balance gets totally messed up (d’oh).

I found myself sliding sideways across the hill when I thought I was going down. I wiped out a number of times on simple turns even though we were on a green run (after bailing off a blue). What if found was that I had no sense of how far I was leaning into the turn, and no proper sense of when to pull out.

Very very disconcerting, and a bit frightening. I can certainly see how people get lost and disoriented in white-outs or heavy snowfalls.

At least it’s not raining.

Looking back towards Guest Services as we walked back to the car

Cypress Mountain December 28

The heavy snowfall the last couple of weeks is the prime topic of discussion on the lifts. Everyone agrees the conditions are the best they’ve been in years. Even though the season got off to a sketchy start, the last 2 weeks has brought fresh snow almost every day.

For more photos, visit my Cypress set at Flickr.

The Cypress Mountain road this morning, well before the first big hairpin. Early this morning they were stopping cars to check for winter tires or chains, but the road seemed to me to be in better condition today than the last few times we were up.

Loads of powder everywhere. We hit the first lift up again today.

New Downhill Area at Cypress

I did a quick stitch job to show the new downhill areas opening up at Cypress this year. You can grab the large version - it’s about 500K and is 2800 pixels wide.

Anyone interested in a high-rez version (10,000 pixels wide) just email me.

Sniff of Snow on Local Mountains

It ain’t much, but at least there’s SOME white stuff up there.

This was shot at Cypress sky area today.

I managed to find just as much by the upper parking lot

Long way to go before we’ll be riding any of this.

Meanwhile, we bought our family downhill seasons passes this week. What a hassle.

I’ll blog (at length) about this later, but Cypress has really got to do something about their online sales (hopeless) and their customer service.

I can’t believe the hassle involved with just trying to buy a pass.

What a pain !

More later.