House Trained Lifty Looking For a Flat......

After all this time living in the lap of luxury up in the Benchlands condo, my time there is finally coming to an end, and soonI shall be moving to pastures new. This may well be a good thing, as I think a change of scenery will be pretty good. Having said that I will miss the hot tub, the location and the general space of it, but we'll see what we can find.

So, life over here has been pretty much chugging along as normal. Not too much has been happening, but at the same time it's all been pretty good. The weather has been pretty awesome for the last two weeks or so. The sun was out constantly, with temperatures at the peak rising to about 10 to 15 at the peak. This is definitely pretty warm for snowboarding, and I was sweating wearing two t-shirts through the park.

I had some awesome days off this week. I'd had a few weeks where I didn't really feel too much like snowboarding on my days off, and I'd only go up on one of the three days. This week though, I hit the slopes all three days, and I hit them pretty hard. Unfortunatley literally a few times, but nevermind! I basically spent the entire time riding the park, and had some of the best rides for a long time. I carried on practicing over the kickers, gradually going bigger and bigger. It really is a good feeling that's pretty difficult to describe, but definitely something I'd recommend. I now no longer have any real worries about not making it over the knuckle of the landing, hitting the sweet spot of the landing more and more, making it so smooth. In fact I even managed to go too big on some of the medium sized kickers, which unforunately I missed the sweet spot and landed on the flat! Becoming more and more confident in the air means I've been trying some different grabs, and did some tail grabs the other day, which was super fun (As they say in Canada!). Another thing I tried this week for the first time was the halfpipe. I'd never really fancied it initially, thinking it just looked too big and scary. But now that I've done it I can't understand why no one else does it! It's so addictive. As yet I haven't fallen in the pipe, and just the rhythm you get into is a great feeling, as you do jump after jump. Also, after a few runs it really is exhilarating, dropping in and gradually building up more and more confidence not to speed check before flying up the first wall, and eventually getting out of the top of the pipe. It may not look to impressive from the outside, but it feels great, and is pretty scary. Although you may only be a foot off the top of the wall, the walls are about 10foot high, so you're still going to fall about 11 foot back to the floor!

Anyway, other than riding, I've had a few fun nights recently. Living so close to Lost Lake, we decided to make the most of it and have a BBQ there one sunny evening. Following the BBQ, it was decided more drinking was needed, and so off we headed back to the condo, for the longest hot tub marathon session yet. 3 hours later everyone was pretty wrinkled, but lots of fun was had and drinking done!

Unfortunately my time working on the Harmony Express Chair has come to an end, and it ended with a bit of a whimper! I'd been working on the chair since I started working on the lifts, and I'd been the only person who had worked every day on Harmony when it was open during the spring season. Therefore, as this was the last weekend of operations I was hoping to send it off with a bit of a party atmosphere. Unfortunately this wasn't to be. Although Sunday was fine, rain stopped play on both Saturday and today (Monday). With the rain falling all the way up to the peak, this apparently hugely increases avalanche risk, so there was no choice but to shut it down!

However, today did end up being quite good fun! My task today was basically to tidy up and close Harmony down for the season with a fellow lifty. So although there was no last day fun, my colleague was sled trained, so we were able to take a sled out to the bottom of the lift. With me hanging on for dear life, we tore up the hill, stopping off the hill to check on some other lifty's, where instead of helping set up, everyone took it in turn to ride the sled (Continuing the theme of slightly illicit activities mentioned in this blog, I hope none of my supervisors are reading this!). This being the first time I've actually driven a sled, I can kind of see that they would be kind of fun. It was pretty exhilarating driving down this cat track at roundabouts 90km/h, kinda bouncing all over the place! On the way back from work, with the fully certificated sled driver behind the handle bars, we did nearly crash though! The thing with snowmobiles on slushy slopes, when you're going pretty fast downhill on an off camber slope, it can be pretty difficult to stop, turn, or do pretty much anything! Hence the fact people probably would've laughed seeing a snowmobile gradually slide closer and closer to the edge of the slope, with two guys leaning so far over they're nearly touching the snow to try and get the thing to turn! So that was pretty fun, and I also got to work a half day, but because of Victoria Day today, get paid for double time and a half, meaning I was probably better off today than working a full normal day!

Still, accomodation hunting must continue apace, as time is running out! Lets hope we can find somewhere nice!