After a day full of "real" faceshots at Marmot Basin:
we went to an avalanche awareness day in Jasper where they were serving some amazingly good FREE food!!! It was a pretty cool evening with couple of different speakers that were trying to improve our knowledge or to inspire us doing more crazy things.
We drove to Prince George where we had our only third day without skiing since we started on January 5th. We clean our clothes, ourself, bought some food and got a snowchasers.blogspot.com sticker for the car! And talking to some local guys, we were able to gather some informations that lead us to Sugarbowl-Grizzly Den Provincial Park (http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/explore/parkpgs/sugar.html).
This is a British Columbia provincial park located about 100km East of Prince George. The park has 3 cabins that are maintained with donations. There use to be a road that leads toward the interior that was plowed but they didn't this year. This changed the approach to the first cabin (8 Miles Cabin) from 2km to 13km. The elevation gain to this cabin is about 500m. The 8 Miles Cabin is a fairly nice place that lodge about 20 persons, but doesn't has much good skiing around it.
The real skiing is located around Grizzly Den cabin (a really cool A-frame that accommodates about 10 persons, has firewood and a propane stove) . This cabin is 3km from the 8 miles cabin and another 500m elevation. From there, there is some good terrain to have short laps on it (150-200m). Since the last week was really warm and sunny, we hoped that the North and North-East facing stuff would still be good. Well, it was not baked..... but it was windblown...
We had a couple of laps on pretty much hard-crust-windblown snow. This wasn't very good but we had a great view of the surrounding mountain and we were happy to discover new terrain in Northern BC.
The following day we checked a north facing clear cut near the 8 miles cabin. That was the best snow of the last few days, but it was pretty flat (only 15-20 deg) and not so interesting. We built a kicker and Babiche has been able to get the best out of it!
Here's a picture of him taking off!
And another one of the crazy frog landing!!
We packed our stuff and headed to the ski out. It wasn't as bad as the way in. But the 13km still sucked. The ski out keep on going up-and-down forever...
We would say that the terrain we found doesn't really deserve the hike in if you really want to get some good turns in. If you want to spend some time waiting for a storm to come, have a party with friends or have a few mellow laps well then it might worth the effort!
We are now heading toward Powder King, (2h30 North of Prince George) to check the backcountry before they open the resort that is only open Thursday to Sunday.
And we will leave you with a quote from Will Gadd (a famous athlete that was in Jasper):
"Nobody ever died wishing they had spent more time being a desk"!
Pray for snow!!!!
evans
we went to an avalanche awareness day in Jasper where they were serving some amazingly good FREE food!!! It was a pretty cool evening with couple of different speakers that were trying to improve our knowledge or to inspire us doing more crazy things.
We drove to Prince George where we had our only third day without skiing since we started on January 5th. We clean our clothes, ourself, bought some food and got a snowchasers.blogspot.com sticker for the car! And talking to some local guys, we were able to gather some informations that lead us to Sugarbowl-Grizzly Den Provincial Park (http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/explore/parkpgs/sugar.html).
This is a British Columbia provincial park located about 100km East of Prince George. The park has 3 cabins that are maintained with donations. There use to be a road that leads toward the interior that was plowed but they didn't this year. This changed the approach to the first cabin (8 Miles Cabin) from 2km to 13km. The elevation gain to this cabin is about 500m. The 8 Miles Cabin is a fairly nice place that lodge about 20 persons, but doesn't has much good skiing around it.
The real skiing is located around Grizzly Den cabin (a really cool A-frame that accommodates about 10 persons, has firewood and a propane stove) . This cabin is 3km from the 8 miles cabin and another 500m elevation. From there, there is some good terrain to have short laps on it (150-200m). Since the last week was really warm and sunny, we hoped that the North and North-East facing stuff would still be good. Well, it was not baked..... but it was windblown...
We had a couple of laps on pretty much hard-crust-windblown snow. This wasn't very good but we had a great view of the surrounding mountain and we were happy to discover new terrain in Northern BC.
The following day we checked a north facing clear cut near the 8 miles cabin. That was the best snow of the last few days, but it was pretty flat (only 15-20 deg) and not so interesting. We built a kicker and Babiche has been able to get the best out of it!
Here's a picture of him taking off!
And another one of the crazy frog landing!!
We packed our stuff and headed to the ski out. It wasn't as bad as the way in. But the 13km still sucked. The ski out keep on going up-and-down forever...
We would say that the terrain we found doesn't really deserve the hike in if you really want to get some good turns in. If you want to spend some time waiting for a storm to come, have a party with friends or have a few mellow laps well then it might worth the effort!
We are now heading toward Powder King, (2h30 North of Prince George) to check the backcountry before they open the resort that is only open Thursday to Sunday.
And we will leave you with a quote from Will Gadd (a famous athlete that was in Jasper):
"Nobody ever died wishing they had spent more time being a desk"!
Pray for snow!!!!
evans
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