Big day on the slopes...

Day 7, Feb 9th

Today was our biggest day so far on the slopes.

Before I left Australia I downloaded an app for my iPhone which tracks your day via the GPS capabilities of the phone. It's a nice little app with quite a few neat features that I haven't had time to get my head around, but when I actually get a chance to read the website and figure it out, I'll be able to post animated graphs of our ski day or individual runs.

At the end of the day, my phone said we had skied 34.8km and travelled 22.3km on lifts.

We headed off in the morning by strolling down to the shuttle stop. Whilst waiting I took this shot with my phone (I left the camera inside today) which shows the row of units serviced by this shuttle stop. We are on the top floor of the tall buiding in the middle of the shot, about 150m up the road...

Lorraine has a day off to give her leg a chance to heal a bit, so she kept Diane and Darren company for the day, along with Kody who had spent the night vomiting into a bucket. Clive, Karmen and Brenda placed the kids into ski school whilst Casey and I went to change my twin tips. There were different staff on and the guy put me into 174cm Atomics. Skiing 170cm at home, I was actually looking to go shorter, but he talked me into the 174cm. He told me I was a 'big guy' (he's obviously studying rocket science when uni goes back) so I needed the length for stability. As it turns out, he was probably dead right. I skied 100% better than yesterday, although I'm still not where I'd like to be. Everybody else is skiing great and we have solved Casey's very painful boot/shin problem. She was wearing her thermals inside her ski boots and the stitching was causing all the problems.

Here are Brenda and Clive's runs down Millies Mile form the previous day...





We headed up the Ridge Rocket Chair where Casey realised she had left her snood (neck warmer) back in a locker. It was hovering between -10 and -12 so as the lift made it's way up the mountain it did become very very cold. She decided she needed to go back down the hill to get it so Clive, Karmen, Brenda and I did laps off the Powder Chair skiing Meadowlark and Sleepy Hollow. We met back up with Casey and headed straight down Powder Keg, a very steep run which leads back down to the Powder Chair.

We decided we wanted to head to Gem Lake for the first time this trip, so we made our way over to Whitefoot and skied down to Blue Sapphire. This is one of Big White's signature runs, great wide blue cruiser, always immaculately groomed and some very steep drops to keep you on your toes. Down to the Gem Lake express for a quick cuppa and off we headed up the 2.4km Gem Lake Express chairlift for some fun times on Kalina's Rainbow. After 2 runs Brenda and I were looking for some respite, so we sat outside the cafe whilst Clive, Karmen and Casey took off for another run. Don't be too tough on us, Kalina's is just short of 4km long and very steep for most of the part. They arrived back to us a bit quicker than expected, they skied it top to bottom non stop...that is one pretty good achievement I can tell you!!

We left Gem Lake behind and headed back closer to the village in readiness for picking up the kids from ski school. Brenda called it a day about 2pm so we went out and did a few interesting runs, particularly a run called Roller Coaster which whilst short, wasn't in mint condition .. lol. We finally went and collected Tayla, Riley and Jack from ski school and asked if they wanted to stay out and do some runs with us, which of course they were excited to do.

We all skied down to the Snow Ghost Express which took us 3 parts the way up the mountain, skied across to the Bullet Express which took us back up to near the very well named area 'The Cliff'. We made our way down and called it a day. It was getting very cold and the trips up on the chair were getting very tough on the kids especially.

We then made the decision to try and ski back to Raven rather than catching the shuttle. It was the best decision of the week so far. It was a very easy glide for even the most tentative skier and delivered us to the back of Raven. It's just a tricky little 5m run/drop right at the end.

After the regulation 2 beer spa, we sat down to dinner and this time it was Brenda and Clive's turn to wash up the things that couldn't go in the dishwasher. of course photographic evidence needed to be obtained for this momentous occasion...

.. whilst the washing up was being completed, Karmen took her customary position in front of the heater.

Tomorrow Clive, Karmen, Casey and I are off to Silver Star, so hopefully we will get some nice shots of the pretty village and a bit of video.

Later...