Recent news from Canada

Picture: Down back out Loop Brook, Rogers Pass, Glacier National Park, B.C.

Since Castle Mountains we've been doing an Avalanche Course with Steve Blagbrough from YAMNUSKA (all this was described in Norwegian, sorry guys). The 5 day-course took us to Lake Louise surroundings and ended up on Rogers Pass in Columbia Mountains west of the Rocky Mountains in Glacier National Park. The latter area is a great area to go backcountryskiing in and it started out nice with lots of new snow (and pretty sketchy conditions avalanche-like), however we did get a sunny week afterwards which made us stay in the area another week. First in Golden (trying out Kicking Horse Ski Resort as well) and later in Revelstoke, just on the otherside of the Mountain. Revelstoke has just recently (December 2007) opened up with lifts and gondols. It used to be a resort for Catskiing and Heliskiing only, but has already proved itself to be a pretty nice resort. We did a couple of days of skiing in the resort and it turned out pretty nice. They are much better at grooming the pists there than they are in Kicking Horse, that's for sure! We didn't check out much of the backcountry around the ski resort though. Kicking Horse got a lot of nice terrain but it was all tracked up so you'd have to skin pretty far to get fresh snow, which we did a couple of times. That proved to be really nice and I even made my first colouirs. Rogers Pass, however, proved to be the best area to linger in as it still had unplowed snow even over a week after the last snowfall.
Now we're in Nelson and we've been skiing 3 days in Whitewater Ski Resort. Pretty small Resort but got some nice backcountry skiing and lots of local telemarking skiers. You can either ski around in the forest and get down to the lift or you can go down the "Backside" as they call it which will take you down to the road from where you'd have to hitch-hike back up. We're staying here till Friday, then we're off to Red Mountain, close to Rossland. This skiing resort is like an hour's drive away from Nelson and is supposed to be bigger than Whitewater and more a mountain-like resort as opposed to a ridge-like one as Whitewater is. Eventually we'll have to east as we're all flying out of Calgary, however on a bit different times. As for me I am heading out on next Wednesday. Spending the Easter at our respective family's places will do good to get a break off skiing (well, what do you know, it might be cross-country skiing instead).
The last two months of the course we'll spend in Northern Norway and Sweden.
We're receiving news from back home (Oppdal for instance) about heavy snowfall. Night till Wednesday it came close to 1 meter of snow in Oppdal, which makes me wonder what the hell we're doing in Canada.... Oh well, we certainly have had some nice days here as well, especially after the snowfall on Monday which added up with the previous days gave us about 20 cm with snow. But come on 1 meter!