Veron’s Adventures

Cape Town, South Africa

A blog post from living around the Olympic venues of Whistler and Vancouver for a month…

A week before the Olympics started we found an apartment for ‘a reasonable olympic price’ in Whistler and decided to spend a month skiing in British Columbia, visit some Events and check out Vancouver during the olympic Madness.

Whistler

I stayed in Whistler, one of the most well known ski-resorts in North America, about 1.5 hours driving from Vancouver. Whistler hosted all the downhill events for the olympics so the usual ski and board crowd was replaced by olympic athletes, followers and fans that didn’t go up the mountain to ski themselves. So an electric atmosphere in Whistler village and almost empty slopes, we had the best of both worlds…

The Peak to Peak gondola that links Blackcomb and Whistler mountain is the longest ski lift in the world and makes it possible to ski in two huge ski domains in the same day. I took this picture at 9am after a night of heavy snowfall, and where one would expect the queues to be long and the lifts to be packed on a day like this… I was the only one in the gondola.

For comparison’s sake; in the opening weekend day in Whistler there were 25.000 boarders and skiers on both mountains(whistler/blackcomb). During the olympics there were about 4.500 boarders and skiers on both mountains on a weekend day. Why? People stay away during the olympics assuming everything will be packed, because they think a lot of runs are closed, because rental prices are out of control. The locals (the people from Vancouver and around) can’t come to Whistler if they don’t have their own parking space since the police blocks the roads and screens everybody coming in for Olympic security’s sake.

The Result?

A LOT of room to ski

Javier and me hired a ski instructor for a day to work on our (powder) ski techniques. And even though some ski guides told us we had an advanced / expert level we figured out that day that we did pretty much everything wrong that’s possible

There were a lot of stories about the snow (or lack of it apparently) in Whistler.  There was no snow? It was raining on the mountains? Bullshit. It is understandable though since it was about 12 degrees celsius in Vancouver (much warmer than normal in February) which was Olympic news. Truth is that Whistler village is at only 600 metres and yes it rained there quitte frequently… but every time it rained in village, it was snowing at least 1000 metres higher on the mountain resulting in very good snow and ski conditions.

We decided to go backcountry cat skiing for a day. This means you get on a snowcat (basically a caterpillar vehicle designed to move on mountains packed with snow) to get dropped off on mountain peaks in the backcountry with a small groups and two guides. It is amazing and puts skiing into a different perspective.

Much better in pics!

We picked a perfect day to go, not a cloud in the sky after a night of snowfall…

Skiing on ungroomed runs in the backcountry is a different story….

BUT ITS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!

:)))))

Ready to hit the fresh powder…

alone on fresh snow with stunning views, it doesn’t get much better!

If you’re around, go catskiing with PowderMountain, it’s a great experience!

Speedskating

Huge in The Netherlands, tiny in the rest of the world. Since us Dutchies skate on Amsterdam’s canals while waving to hookers and smoking weed every day in winter, we rock at long track speed skating and care about it more than anywhere else in the world. So being Dutch, I woke up at 6am on the 13th of February to head to the Richmond Olympic Oval in Vancouver for the 5000 metres medal race for men.

I wasn’t the best prepared olympic tourist that day. I didn’t have my ticket for the race yet and when two Canadian hustlers bought the 12 last available tickets at the ticketbox there was no other way than buying on the black market or going back home (no option obviously)

So I ended up buying a ticket from a canadian trailer trash dude that can probably live off of his resell profits until the Olympics in 2014

Anyway after that it was all about the first olympic speed skating race in the Sven Kramer Olympic Oval…

The ‘Kleintje Pils’ band started its warming up early. I’m from such a ridiculous country

A solid 70% of the 5.000 spectators was from The Netherlands.

Sven Kramer said goodbye to Shani Davis early in the race to conquer his Gold Olympic medal.

Seeing a Dutch guy win a Gold Olympic medal was a unique and probably a once in a lifetime experience…

Back in Whistler, Sven (buddy I was traveling with, not Mr Kramer) and me felt like it was time to push ourselves a bit more and decided to go for the sickest adrenaline rush of our lives so far; Heli-Skiing

When we gathered at 8am for the one hour drive to Squamish airport it was obvious that it was going to be an interesting day. Since we went cat skiing before with the same company we were considered to be experienced backcountry skiers so we ended up sharing the Heli with Olympic medal winning skiers and a professional freestyle ski legend and their camera crew. Did I mention I hadn’t skied in 10 years before this trip?

Getting dropped off from the Heli and have it fly away… with all the wind and snow blowing in your face… until it’s far away enough to make you realize it’s just you standing up there on the highest peak, with only one way down; skiing…. such an amazing feeling!

This was the first run we did that day. The pros said they had been waiting for 20 years to ski this mountain you can see from the highway, but up to this point it had never been skied before. We were fortunate enough to do it on the first heli run of our lives…

Skiing in the wild… where nobody ever skies… overlooking the Pacific Ocean… MAGICAL

Challenging runs…

Ready to ski this wall?

The Tantalus range in British Columbia is ski Mekka…

Not a bad place to have lunch

There should also be a video of me getting rocked launched out of my skis after hitting a crusty part of snow. It should be aired on the ski channel USA soon, will post it here as soon as I get my hands on it!

So I wanted to continue with some Vancouver pics but I’m having trouble uploading so I will leave it at this. Maybe I will post some of them later but for now you will just have to believe that it’s a very very beautiful city!

Warm greetings from Cape Town!

Veron

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 12:20 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.