Filed under: loz
Whee! We’ve finally awoken to loads of lovely fresh snow. Of course we’re going home today, but that’s not the point. The point is that this is pissing the arse of of Ant and Alex.
Filed under: ant
So that’s it. Son Of Son Of Gaysontrays is done. Bar the final night out, and the journey home, it’s a wrap.
After breaking my solemn vow never to take an afternoon off, yesterday’s afternoon off really helped me out today. We enjoyed the traditional final day of bumming around on a few runs for a long morning before a pint over lunch. It was the perfect antidote to the last few days of malaise.
In summary, then, that’s another great holiday in the bag. I had a bit of a blip in the middle, it didn’t snow, and Lawrence insisted on turning up every day, but apart from that, it was all good.
Filed under: dec
It is pleasant, when the sea is high and the winds are dashing the waves about, to watch from the shores the struggles of another – Lucretius
After almost three snowboarding holidays I’m getting to the stage where I can chuckle at the misfortunes of other boarders still getting to grips with the basics. Over the last few days, I’ve witnessed some fantastic newbie mistakes.
The classic newbie fall is the Face-to-Ass 180. Ant and I were privileged to witness such a wipeout the other day while going up on the Emerald Chair. Below us, to the right, a female snowboarder lost control on a relatively easy bit and promptly face-planted from her toe edge into the mountain. Her momentum then conspired to bounce her off the slope and backwards over her board where she had her ass handed to her. As Ant and I swung slowly upwards on our chair, she was seen pirouetting sadly down the mountain on her back.
Next up on our wall of shame is the ubiquitous gaggle of Japanese girls who seem to roam the slopes of Whistler in giggling hordes. We spent Saturday morning pissing about on one of the nursery slopes teaching ourselves to ride fakie, i.e. backwards. Waiting at the top of the chairlift for Ant, Dave and I were privileged to witness the sight of roughly ten Japanese girls trying to unload from the chair with absolutely no idea how to do it. Snowboarders are meant to get off a chairlift with one foot out of the bindings and the board facing forward in the direction you’re traveling. It appeared no one had told the girls this, who promptly arrived at the top of the lift in various states of unreadiness. Some had managed to get back into their full bindings, some tried to get off backwards, one even tried to carry her board off in her arms. It was like watching a cross between Takeshi’s Castle and the Keystone Cops. Within 30 seconds, the top of the lift was a mass of girls, boards and giggling as a very frustrated Aussie lifty (lift attendant) shouted at them to get out of the way as the pile-up at the top of his lift got ever bigger.
Our next moment of chair lift hilarity was witnessed by Ant and I at the top of the Big Red Express. As we approached the end of the 5-minute ride, we couldn’t understand why the lifty suddenly started shouting and waving at the two skiers and one boarder in the chair immediately in front of us. We couldn’t figure out what was going on until one of the skiers half fell off the chair – they’d forgotten to lift the restraining bar.
Karma, however, is a cruel mistress and on Saturday afternoon on the last run of the day, I was completely taken out of it by some newbie skier on Upper Olympic. While turning from my heel onto my toe, something flashed between my legs. My first thought was that someone was driving a sled between my legs, a split second later the sight of a grinning, middle-aged, Japanese man sliding under me on his back filled my field of vision. An instant later I was airborne and landed awkwardly on my left shoulder. The fall was sufficiently hard that I lay there for a second or two making sure everything was sill intact. After establishing that I wasn’t dead, I turned to my groaning attacker who was looking apologetically towards me up the piste murmuring Sorry over and over again. I asked him was he ok and all he came back with was Sorry. I figured he couldn’t speak English and gave him a thumbs-up and a wide berth as I continued my way down the mountain. Looking back after a few turns, my skiing friend had managed to completely lose it again and was sliding sideways down the slope on his ass.
Bloody newbies.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Here’s a faked tiltshift pic of the bottom of the Garbanzo Express, taken from half way up Tokum. Original shamelessly ripped off from L J Aggleton.
Filed under: ant
Bah.
Fucking Bah.
While I loved the first 5 days here. the last few have kind of knocked me on my arse. As a rugby player, I’m usually carrying a decent level of fitness into the months of january and february. However, after a gruelling preseason, I managed to pull a muscle in my back which effectively stopped me from exercise for eight weeks until early october. In what was to be the first full 80 minutes of my return, I contrived to break my collar bone. The operation to rebuild it was at the start of november, and—true to form—I haven’t played since, and have only recently started full training again. As a consequence of all of this, I’m nowhere near as fit as I usually am at this time of year.
For the first five days, it didn’t affect me hugely, but the last few days haven’t really been a great deal of fun. Instead of hitting the wall at about 2-3 pm after 5 hours on the board, the wall hits me after about the first run. True to form, when you’re a bit tired on a board, you start making silly mistakes and missing edges. This is exactly what I’ve been doing, earlier and earlier in the day as the trip progresses. One such arseplant seemed to jar the shoulder which has been stinging ever since, so adding in uncertainty about the resilience of my body to fatigue hasn’t really led to me being too adventurous.
Nonetheless, I’m still enjoying myself. A couple of days ago, we hit the nursery slopes for a morning of teaching ourselves to ride switch. It was a pleasant return to the original esprit de gaysontrays; namely learning new stuff, titting around a bit, falling over, and having a laugh. Once he found us after misinterpreting the simplest of directions (go to the middle station, turn left), Alex found us and spent what was left of the morning trying to ski backward. Since then, I’ve been hanging around on not-too-difficult runs, trying to regain my fast-fading mojo. With one more day left—albeit still with no snow—what do I have to lose? The journey home takes the best part of two days, which I intend to spend mostly unconscious, not sleeping next to the fridge, with its cheery every-10-minute wake up call which sounds like someone running while holding a metal bucket full of spanners. I suppose I’m committed to giving it the old college try.
If this sounds like I’m not enoying myself, that’s not the case. I’m doing what I enjoy; namely boarding and hanging around with the boys. I just wish that I could commit myself more to the boarding side of things. Oh well – there’s always next year.
Filed under: loz
Day 8 of 9 dawned with still no snowfall since we’ve been here. Since wednesday however, they’ve been snowmaking like nuts on the mountain, so the quality of ride hasn’t been too badly diminished. After a couple of days on skis, I’ve returned to a snowboard, albeit having discarded my ‘beginner’ package for a ‘performance’ one. The signficantly better board that comes with this has been great – it turns better, straightlines better and holds an edge better. All in all, worth the CAD6 extra a day then.
However, with great boards comes great responsibility and we needed some challenging runs to test ourselves out. So after messing around with a bit of fakey-switch yesterday, Dave and I joined The Grad (who has stuck with his skis) and headed up to the recently opened peak of Whistler. Where we were greeted by -20C temperatures and a wind seemingly determined to blow us to Japan. The combination of extremely hostile conditions and an evil as all giddyup looking face with 5-foot moguls put us off popping our black cherry here. Chastened, we were forced to pick our way down a series of extremely tedious traverses and, err, improvised routes through mogul fields.
This eventually got us to the top of a piste called The Dave Murray Downhill. This is a 2.4km Olympic downhill course that drops more than one vertical kilometre in its length. Finally a run worthy of our boards lay ahead of us. Dave promptly shot ahead at speeds that could only be described as ‘mentally unstable’, Alex chased after him, worrying that being beaten down by a boarder would seriously damage his ski cred, whereas I took a more conservative (i.e. slow) route. One minor slip aside (on a nearly sheer face, so it covered a bit of distance) I effortlessly slayed the bejeesus out of it and glided to the bottom a mere epoch behind Dave, although still in time for cocoa and muffins. Sweet.
Sadly tomorrow is our last day boarding. Pease is currently broken, Dec is swearing at his PSP, The Grad is surfing the net looking for someone to love him bemoaning his ‘friends’ on Facebook and Dave is dancing like a genie (I’m not entirely sure why). Our banter is getting pretty poor to be honest, but there’s the prospect of beer around the corner to aid with that. It’s been another great holiday – snow not quite as good as last year, but lots of sunshine making up for it. Everyone’s improved significantly (and The Grad’s just a precocious shoitebag) and Whistler has been as great as we remember it. Next time it’s jumps…
Filed under: ant
Alas, it’s another picture quiz. Which of these is Ant?
Filed under: dec
Thursday dawned bright and decidedly unsnowy in Whistler Village. Despite the unseasonal lack of fluffy stuff, the quality of the snow on the slopes has been decidedly good. Almost a week into the holiday, I’ve started to find my groove. Granted I’m not the fastest boarder on the mountain, nor the most skilled, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself yesterday.
Aggles, Dec, Ant, Alex & Dave
We’re generally quite stiff the first ride of the day so we’ve gotten into the habit of getting up the mountain, going for a 10-15 minute ride and then stopping off for breakfast. Following the obligatory fry-up and quick read of the morning papers, we hit the slopes for a few hours. Thursday’s plan of attack involved a few easy runs down Ego Bowl and afterwards Whiskey Jack/Orange Peel down to the Big Red Express chairlift. I genuinely enjoyed myself on these runs. The weather was good, the piste wasn’t too icy and I was happily linking turns.
All was going well until I managed to take a wrong turning and ended up halfway down the Dave Murray run. Dave Murray is a black run, i.e. hard, and is where some of the downhill races during next year’s Olympics will be held. Put it another way, in three years of boarding none of us have yet tackled a black. With little choice but to go down the black, and with Alex and Aggles on skis able to guide me down, I managed to get down the run. Sure it wasn’t very pretty and I did spend a spell or two on my ass but I still had at it.
We lunched down at Creekside and then gondola/chairlifted back up Whistler in time to round of the day with some easy runs towards the village. I thought the day couldn’t get any better until when heading to the GLC bar for some aprés-ski, the guy on the door asked me for ID. Turning to the 33-year old Ant who was behind me, the doorman said to me
Oh you’re with this guy? Go ahead.
Whether he thought Ant was my dad or my uncle, we’ll never know. What we do know is that Ant is as unhappy no being asked for ID as he is being asked. Middle age must be a terrible thing.
Filed under: ant
The emphasis of the holiday seems to have shifted somewhat from the first few days. Whereas days 1 and 2 were all about chalking up as much of the mountains as possible, the last few have been more more aligned with the reason I think I came here in the first place; namely the subtle art of just titting around with the boys.
Now that’s not to say that we haven’t explored a bit, because we have. With Whistler Peak still closed because of the avalanche threat, I’d say we’ve covered as much of both mountains as we can. We’ve ridden pretty much everything except Symphony and the Peak To Creek. And there’s still four days left. The mornings seem devoted to trying out new runs, and afternoons seem to have evolved into taking it easy; just riding the mountain with the boys. Nothing terribly technical, nothing terribly taxing, just bumbling around and having a laugh.
Alex and Bingo have defected to skis, but Dec, Dave and I have remained true to our boarding brethren. Although Lawrence may come back, I think we’ve lost Alex for good. In all honesty, who cares? We all seem to be enjoying ourselves—I certainly am—so that’s the important thing.
On a separate note, Alex hasn’t called any other waitresses—and I quote directly—a “fucking alcoholic” recently, so I think it’s fair to say that our sustained charm offensive is really starting to take off.
Well, everyone seems to be awake—or in Lawrence’s case, as awake as they’ll ever get—so I must cut this post short, and promise to get more writing and less sleeping done this evening. I’m not a gambling man, but I reckon that the morning may involve having a bit of a look around, followed by an afternoon of silliness and banter.
Filed under: ant
I love The Gimp. I’ve recently spent a bit of time faking tilt shift photos—a medium of photography which I think is great. So far, I’ve gone from this
the original
After applying a cunning fake tilt shift
to this.
I like both photos very much. But for very different reasons.
