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world championships; the back end..
Made it to the FIS world championships in quebec. Psyched to be competing in yet another world championships (there's been quite a few!). I had some politics to deal with prior and after showing up here, but we're onto the business of competing. Being out in quebec you need to get ready for anything and everything weather wise. last week, i heard the snow as great. on the weekend it poured rain. tomorrow it's going to be -30! yeah it's a little icy, and a wee bit cold.
The cold snow wrecks havoc on your base. What happens with cold snow is the crystals are very, very sharp. In halfpipe we carry quite a bit of speed through the flat bottom and we hold the same edge for quite a while. So those sharp little crystals dig into you base. As you take more and more runs, your base actually starts to get noticebly chewed up by these crystals. Having an event in copper last week (where the snow is cold) then followed up by here basically ruins 1 or 2 boards. Today the board I was riding had finally had enough and the ptex base was not only chewed up, it had gotten so bad that the ptex was actually lower than the steel edge. When this happens your board becomes very twitchy and digs in at unexpected times. I had some troubles on my heelside today and when i saw that on my base I quickly put the 2 together.
After practise, my good friend and old temate Hugo Lemay took me down to a race ski shop that he knew had a good stone grinding machine. The tech had never seen a base so chewed up in his life. I told him to grind it down as much as possible to get the base and edge back to being flat. Having designed the boards I'm on I knew exactly how thick the ptex was and figured there would be enough to get it back into shape.
After the sweet stone grind, the real work started. When we have a new board or a fresh base, generally we will 'feed' the base with wax. I follow a feeding program that I've worked out over the years, but it takes a good deal of coats to get a board ridable. 3 hours of work waxing and tuning the edges. usually I'll be in the tuning area for a while but 3 hours is a very long while to be working on primarily 1 board.
some tools of the waxing trade. When the racers show up the tuning room becomes much more crowded and serious it seems.
Tuning is a key component of doing well in contests these days. last week I made a mistake and used a new file guide while tuning my edges for the conetst day and it was different than my old guide and my board rode like poo. This week I'm back to my old file guide. Little things at this level can ruin your contest. Hopfully I learned from my mistakes last week, and my work tonight will have my boards running like they should be.
catching up..
geez, having a kid kinda sets you back on some stuff. like my website..
it's the middle of january already and it feels like it started snowing yesterday. This season is setting up to be interesting. So far I've passed a level 1 guide's course, competed in a world cup, shot for a noboard/powsurfing article, toured a bunch and started on a project with arcteryx (more to come on that)
Guide's course was sweet. lots of avalanche rescues, crevasse rescues, a day in a cat, a day in a bird, and lots of digging in the snow!
being rescued.
The world cup was at Copper mtn last week. I didn't have the time or resources early season to head to colorado (and there was no december contest there this year) so showing up for the world cup I hadn't ridden pipe at all. Had a few days prior to the comp and things were looking pretty good. until the contets day where I screwed up my tuning! yeah. rarely do I mess up my tuning on contest day but last week I definitely screwed the pooch on my edges in particular. I'd bought a new file guide for my edges that is supposed to be the same as my old one, but I think it makes a slightly sharper edge which I'm not fond of. So when I started dropping in for practise my board was all over the place. Just not tracking right and super hooky. It sucks. Couldn't make it past the second hit. At first I thought it was the cold snow, but as I dropped ina few more times i started to realize it was my board. fairly quickly I figured out where the problem was with my edges and borrowed a diamond stone to try and fix it. couple runs later still not fixed. I then swapped boards and my other board had the same problem, but not quite as bad. uhhhh! fixed that one just in time for practise to be over. very frustrating. My plans for the contest were not materializing in the least seeing as I had trouble getting past my second hit and hadn't done anything more in practise than a frontside 720. Thankfully I learned quite a while ago to trust my riding and somehow linked together 2 different runs and made it to the bottom of the pipe. I'm not saying those runs were awesome (I finished dead middle of the field), but having gone from not landing anything to landing something is good for the mental state. but I wasn't making finals so I bolted to get back home to be with my family.
i took the little guy for his first turns over xmas
and his first touring day yesterday..
powsurfing
noboard and powsurf drops! great few days without bindings
some front yard booter action at my parent's over xmas
and lots of touring to get to spots like this!
currently in quebec to compete at the world championships then it's back home and on the touring program. lots of mountains to ride!
NZ eh.
they say 'eh' in New Zealand. just in case you didn't know. just differently then how people say it in Canada.
Ohh NZ. I love heading down there. After BC I thinks my favorite place on earth. Snow, waves, crazy landscapes and fun riding. Usually I spend a few months down there each year but this year I was a little pressed for time so I only got to go down for 2 weeks. But it was worth it.
As I sat in the Aukaland airport i did my typical weather and conditions scouting. Some years I've gone straight into chasing waves for a few days prior to heading down to Wanaka, others I chase pow. Not having brought my surfboards this year i was hoping for pow. Olympus -45cm and not open. Craigieburn 37cm and opening today. temple basin 35cm. YES!
As soon as i got my rental car in Christchurch I headed up into the Canterbury mountains to ride Craigieburn. Craigieburn is one of NZ's notorious club fields. Awesome terrain, no people, no grooming and nutcrackers. The nutcrackers is a rope tow on steriods. And to be able to hold to it, you need to wear a harness and a nifty little metal contraction (the nutcracker) which is tied to the harness. Grab the rope, hook the nutcracker on and hold on to the tip of the cracker. Sounds easy right? well the rope seems to go a million miles an hour and the first pulley is not very far away. So you need to grab on, set up the nutcracker and get your hands out of the way before that pulley. Cause it your hands are on the rope, say good by to your fingers!. They're very interesting and truely kiwi. and kids are allowed on them. it's amazing.
Having made my way through the single lane dirt access road with couple thousand foot drop offs, grabbed my ticket i was back into pow! Having never been there i had no idea where i was going, but i noticed on my way up some people were able to ride down to the road so that looked like a good plan. Getting to the top and heading over the ridge, however i was confronted with a rather foggy entrance into the unknown maze of chutes.
I love riding the unknown and having it hidden in fog, just made the first few laps that much more interesting! However eventually it started to clear a little and was able to hike and explore some more.
and after coming out of the upper chutes I was generally greeted with this view...
My plan was to stick around the clubbies and ride Olympus and Temple Basin the next few days, but the weather had other plans. by the end of the afternoon it had gotten quite warm, misty rain to the peaks, and snow was starting to slide everywhere. well, it was awesome while it lasted and I bolted for Wanaka.
The whole rest of my trip was spent riding Snowpark and Cardrona. I'd gone down with pipe riding in mind so I was mostly focused on that. Snowpark's pipe was really good i thought. little slow (pitch is a bit flat there) but the walls were really nice. Cardrona's I didn't really like. Rode there for a few days and pretty much hated it. The weather was insane for pretty much the whole time. Springtime slushies everyday. The riding at snowpark was really fun. friends from all over the world were there, conditions were good, the pipe was good, jumps were good. Good few weeks down there. So thankful for my friends Will Jackways and Abbey Lockheart having me at their house for the trip. Great hospitality and amazing views out front from their pad...
Thanks NZ! Hopefully see you next year.
Mission day.
With spring rolling around and more sunlight, I kind of got curious as to how much multi-sporting I could get done in a day. check the video and find out..
mission day would lead into mission week. Down at the K2 offices for 2 days, off to snowboarder magazine's Superpark at Mt Batchelor for 2 days, back the the k2 office for a few hours then home to Squamish and toured into the tantalus range and did what is normally a 2 day trip in 1. Posts on these are coming soon.
jl
2 days and 4 big lines
It's 6am on Saturday and I'm slowly wakingup and getting ready to do the spearhead traverse for my first time (and I'm going solo), when i see a msg from a friend saying something about 'Angel line'. hmm, sounds interesting. A quick call to Ture and he says they're leaving right now and I should come. 'OK, I'll be 20 minutes behind you'
Quickly packing my lunch and grabbing my gear I head out the door and drive up to the trailhead. Upon meeting the rest of the crew, I'm informed that not many people ski this line, so we need to keep it mysterious a little. Hence my messing with the photo below to remove the peak.
'angel line' is that nice looking spine down between the trees.
To not give away too many details, 5 hours of climbing later we're on top and greeted by an awesome spine and 3000+ feet of epic powder. The video is down below.
Anyways, after a great run I suggested we do a chute nearby that I knew of but everyone claimed 'responsibilities' and had to leave. So I left to rest up for Sunday's mission.
ture climbing to angel line.
Sunday greeted us with another beautiful day as my friend Kyle and I drove up to the Duffy Lake. Our plan was to climb and ride Mount Matier, Slalok and finish off with Heart Strings. A few groups would end up doing the first 2 mountains as well, but to tag a third line into that makes for a pretty long day.
Kyle had plans to ski fly off the top of slalok so opted for his ski setup and carrying his wing. He knew this would slow him down some, and it quickly became apparent to me that I needed to run ahead and get Matier on my own. Leaving Kyle behind at keith's hut, I wandered my way up the anniversary glacier. Along the way I ran into another Kyle who had come up by himself hoping to run into a crew of people to ride with. "You can come to matier and slalok with us if you'd like.."
our lines off matier and slalok
He was keen to come check it out so up the glacier we went. After having lunch and waiting for Kyle #2 to catch up on top of the anniversary glacier I led the way up Matier. My climbing may have been in quick mode, becasue i ended up leaving this kyle as well and climbing up to the summit by myself. By this time my friend Kyle had reached the joffre-matier col and was watching from down below.
on top of Matier
I quickly strapped in and started riding down and met up with kyle #2 who was just getting to the more technical (read harder and ice axe required) section of the climb and he was quick happy to call that his climb and drop in from there. A quick high five and I dropped in towards slalok and he went towards the anniversary glacier. I took the most northerly line I could as i figured any aspect with west in it would have had some melt freeze from the previous afternoon's really warm sunshine.
good views from the top of Matier
linking back up with the original kyle we quickly made our way over to Slalok's east ridge. A little bit of steep skinning got us up on the summit. We quickly pondered the wind and the ability to ski fly in the gusts. not really wanting to risk it, Kyle decided to ski the line. he's a snowboarder and only started skiing this season so he could ski fly. So dropping into slalok was easily the biggest line of his skiing life.
looking down while skinning between matier and slalok
kyle and I on top of slalok
kyle's a spec down there somewhere
Everytime I've been to joffre lakes Slalok has called out to be ridden. Nothing really techincal but it's a super fun line with mostly consistent pitch from top to bottom. It's a huge face and has a few good size convex rolls and ends in a few chutes so it's very intimidating. Normally our big lines are in chutes or spines so you have somewhere to run if the snow decides to slide. On slalok, there's nowhere to run really.
We decided for kyle to drop first since he would take the longest, he would stop mid way at a safe spot and I would pretty much ride the whole line in one shot. Man can you open up the turns and let the board run! Super fun high speed turns for most of the way down. Just loved it.
kyle'ss spec from this angle as well. he's somewhere in the upper section of the couloir.
Kyle's biggest ski descent. pretty good for a snowboarder.
slalok from the head on angle
the gear that gets me there. K2 panoramic splitboard, k2 poles, arcteryx quintec pack and my old ice axe.
stoked to get on Slalok!
Upon finishing Slalok, we quickly had another snack, thanked the mountain for letting us ride it (we felt like ants) and made the switch to touring mode to get up our last line of the day, Heart Strings. Heart Strings is another classic line that involves some fun scampering and boot packing about to make your way to the entrance. The first time you go, you really wonder if you're on the right track or not. However Kyle and I had been there a few times before so we felt like we were home free after Slalok.
balance
me slashing in heart strings.
We made our made to the top and dropped in for another long run pretty much right down to the highway.
Super happy, 3 classic lines in an 11 hrs round trip. oh wait, we still need to hitchhike back to the car on a pretty empty highway...
cloudy day messing around
quick clip from messing around in the backcountry today. cloudy, snowing, kindabad light for most of the day. but always fun to be out riding.
bright shiny thing in the sky?
Sometimes it gets so cloudy and stormy around whistler that you start to forget what a bluebird day looks like. After receiving a bunch of new snow last week, the skies finally cracked and gave us 3 days of pretty perfect weather. With fairly stable avalanche conditions it was a good time to get after some lines.
Friday, my friend Dave Basterechea (owner of www.cheetachfactoryracing.com and www.getpow.com ) and I met up pretty early with 2 different options in mind. The north facing chute of Triconi peak or getting up cloudburst mountain, which icy logging roads and my wife having to get to work have thwarted 2 previous attempts at. But they’re lines I’ve wanted to get for a long time.
The day started cloudy and snowing so we opted for Cloudburst which we knew had good trees to ride. So off we went on our snowmobiles with our splitboards in tow. We had to punch into some long forgotten trails to make our way over to our drop off spot then threw the skins on and started touring up. By this point the sun was out in full force and we started to wonder if we’d made the right choice. Oh well, too deep into it right now. 
dave scoping from way down low
As we made our way up the mountain, new zones started to poke out of the trees. The first sight of a new area and the possibilities it holds is one of the most exciting things about snowboarding to me. New possibilities and unkown options. Super deep powder also helps..
After a little while of poking around, looking at options, and setting a skin track we’d made our way to the peak. And the convective clouds started to build like clockwork. There goes the view, there goes the light. Maybe we did make the right choice today.
We were on a casual timeline so we leisurely ate our lunch and discussed our options for what we wanted to ride. Having picked this nice spine zone as our major focus we strapped in and made our way day. 
hmm, that looks fun. and fun it was!
The light was less then epic but the snow was glorious. We ended up doing 3 good sized laps from the alpine to down below treeline as the weather constantly shifted from full sun to hard convective snow showers. 
dave and his k2 panoramic splitboard
Saturday, I’d had a few options with touring around squamish or Duffey lake with several groups of friends. My wife wanted to go splitboarding and somewhere new. No problem. She’s only 6 months pregnant. So after some early morning discussions we settled on another day (for me) on cloudburst. Kimmie’s wanted to climb that mountain for a while, so with a nice track in from the previous day off we went.
The day was a beauty! I can say it was very casual for me. Normally my wife is quite fast (ok very fast) at climbing, but being pregnant she has to watch her heart rate and take her time. So I’d send her up the trail, go dig some pits, poke around and then run to catch up. Watching her climb the summit ridge was like watching someone climb everest. Step, step, pause. Step, step, pause. But it was awesome. I love touring with Kimmie.
kimmie about to top out
Eventually we made it up top, and Kimmie’s smile was ear to ear. We took some photos up top as the view was unreal. Cloudburst is one of the few stand alone mountains in the area and it offers amazing 360 degree views.
pretty self explanatory. Obviously my beautiful and pregnant wife. never mind me, that kid is going to have a hard time keeping up with mom!
family that plays together..
After soaking in the sights for a while, it was time to ride. We pretty much followed dave and my tracks from the day before. Blower turns everywhere for the whole lap. Amazing day with my wife.
little slasher for me. That wav went for a few hundred glorious meters.
That night I got a call from my long time friend and neighbor, photographer Jeff Patterson. Turns out his snowmobile broke down way in the backcountry and had the parts to fix it (hopefully). I agreed to take him out there and we had Gaeten Chanut who was going to come and meet us there as they’d spent the last 2 days shooting together.
Normally, in the mornings this spot is packed in the parking lot. As I pulled up there was nobody. Not a soul. On a bluebird day. It was kind of spooky. Jeff pulled up and we loaded all the gear onto my snowmobile. Boards, camera gear, primary and secondary clutches, tools.. My sled was loaded down, so we took our time making it out.
We made it past the normal riding area and were headed deeper to get to jeff sled as we ran into a problem. My track was spinning on a super icy technical climb. Jeff jumps off and my track is still sliding. I lose momentum and start sliding backwards towards some big trees. I’m out! I jump and a second later my sled flips and slides. Somehow it stops short of the trees. As jeff and I decide to figure out the best way to flip it back over (and not have it slide into the trees) we hear a strange sound. Hmmm..
We flip my sled over and oil comes gushing out of the belly pan. Oh no. Turns out my Yamaha snowmobile has breather on the oil pan and if the sled flips and stays in just the right position, you can drain a lot of the oil. Thankfully there’s not a lot in there. However, with no oil my sled is not going anywhere. And we’re a few miles away from jeff’s.No cell service back there aAnd there’s no one to be seen anywhere. What to do? Take my shirt off and enjoy the sunshine. We had some time so we discussed a few options as to how to deal with our situation. First thing, let’s wait for Gaeten. 30 minutes later gaeten show’s up to jeff hiding from the sun (he’s a redhead) and me shirtless lying on my sled.
We tell him our new predicament and we hatch the plan to try to fix jeff’s sled. After a few shuttles and a bit of snowboarding we’re at jeff’s broken snowmobile.
The clutches come out, the tools come out and the sled gets torn apart.
those clutches are not light to carry!
Thankfully, we get it together pretty quick. As we worked the sun had crept around and started to illuminate some pillows and spines nearby. Leaving jeff to finish gaeten and I quickly hiked up top and got ready. Braaaappppp!!! Jeff’s sled starts up and he does a quick test lap. “All good! Let’s shoot some stuff.”
We get busy jumping, riding lines and slashing turns. As we’ve hit every worthy thing in our immediate vicinity, we remember that my sled still needs oil. Off we go in that direction.
As I’m standing ontop of the next bowl over I see a rider on a Yamaha sled. Quickly yelling at jeff and Gaeten to stop that guy and ask if he has oil, they race off leaving me to strap in and enjoy another glorious lap in the pow.
Amazingly the guy has a litre of oil. He just saved a long ride out to my car to grab oil. Some cash for the oil and we’re all set to go. Get back to my sled, put the oil in, fire it up and we were off to find more stuff to jump.
my view from one of my lines shooting with jeff and geaten
Pretty awesome 3 days in the sunshine (mostly). Thanks to my kimmie, dave, geatan and jeff for the good times. Looks like the snow is coming back in this week for a reset. Can’t wait to get back out there
jl
AVALANCHE!!!!! course
After wanting to take the Canadian Avalanche Association's level 1 operations course for 12+ years, I finally took it. It's a week long course, and really good opportunity to learn from some amazing instructors. I wanted to get my knowledge a little more formalized (and did) which was sweet.
The course was being held at my old home mountain of Lake Louise. The rockies have typically a thin, kind of sketchy snowpack, so it's a great place to go dig pits. And this year was no exception as there's claims of 40-50 year sketchy snowpack! but to find out more I had to first get to lake louise..
Generally it's a 9 hour drive from my house in squamish to the Lake. However, when i was just outside of Revelstoke they shut the highway (due to avalanches) 5 minutes prior to me being there. So from where i was I had 2 options, north or south and neither were (or are ever) a good option. So I had to backtrack two hours to Kamloops, then drive north to Jasper, then south on the icefields parkway, slept in my car for 3 hours, woke up and drove the last 2 hours to Louise. My 9 Hour drive turned into a 20 hour mission. but I made it there only 30 minutes late. Which for unintentionally touring around BC is pretty good.
a few hours of rallying on the icefields parkway
Our first day we toured out from lake louise ski area. Which was getting hammered. It was torture to hear the hoots from the people riding while we dug pits and did our beacon rescue exams. Thankfully my group finished early and I was able to sneak off and roll some laps.
Something I noticed from our beacon exams. If you ever plan on going in the backcountry, in addition to learning how to use your beacon and probe correctly, really take the time to learn how to dig efficiently and quickly. I was kinda blown away by some people who couldn't really dig. Time is of the essence in a rescue scenario, and you should be quick at everything. And somehow some people can't dig, don't be one of them.
But back to the sketchyness, of the snowpack. The Alberta rockies currently have a giant layer of perfect surface hoar that's buried down about 60+cm. Surface hoar generally acts like ball bearings in a snowpack and produces some great avalanches. However it's not really good to tour around when it's like that. So we did a lot of sideways touring during the week and dug lots of pits. And all of our pits said "keep walking sideways" because up/down was not a great option for avoiding avalanches.
Generally our days involved waking up at 630am to take the morning weather observations, a few hours in the classroom, go for a mellow tour somewhere, dig in the snow for a few hours, then ride down or tour out. Afterwards it was back to town for the afternoon weather observations prior a few more hours of class. Pretty close to 12 hour days everyday of the course. The you had your studying and homework to do at night as well. It all makes for a pretty busy week but it was all good.
aftermath of some testing..
group huddle
walking sideways
One of the realy cool things we got to do during the week was watch the banff national park's avalanche crew go to work on some mountains above the trans canada highway. They dropped some mega explosives from the helicopter up on the ridge tops and pulled down the 2 biggest avalanches (class 3) that I've ever seen live in my life. It was really asight to behold, and a good reminder to never get caught in something like that!
first one.
second one airing
woh! we did end up making it up to the alpine. however we walked up a very, very mellow slope to get there. I think I did 3 turns over 2 kilometers going downhill.
me above bow lake
a glimpse at the future, my new arcteryx quintec pack (awesome!) and k2 speedlink splitboard poles (also awesome).
our instructor pointing at something.
one of the instructors checking out my pit on exam day. I ended up doing pretty well overall and passing the course
exam day. pits in a meadow. You don't need a slope to test the snow. and it's a lot safer this way.
The alberta rockies are still getting snow and it's looking like the weak layers are there to party until spring time. So expect to see some more big avalanches in that area and here are the 2 chief culprits..
big surface hoar!
these are a treat as well, depth hoar
Big thanks to our awesome instructors and congrats to my whole class for passing.
an even bigger thanks to Ullr for rewarding my patience all week and hammering whistler blackcomb the night i was driving home. felt so good to finally ride all day in deep powder after digging in it all week.
Play safe out there.
jl
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