Twenty Days Passed Me By
If you happen to be a regular visitor to this little journal of mine than I most certainly owe you an apology. Time after time you may have returned, not to find that I have written a new account of the epoch which has been my recent life and travels, but rather to find my most recently past apology for being so scattered and out of touch. Little has changed. I have been what Grete would call a ‘bad blogger.’ I am however here now, and on this sunny, high-sixties, Neil Young laden Wednesday in Salt Lake City to tell you all about the most and least recent developments in this little life of mine.
We’ll start back a few posts and almost a month and a half ago. The Cold Rush; it was most of all the best introduction that I could have had to some skiers that I had an incredible time playing in the deep deep Retallack snow with, and each putting our respective cards on the table for each, and all, to see. From there, via Seattle it was on to Bellingham and Mt. Baker, which, being in Bellingham by itself was great, just being by the ocean and seeing the old friends that I have there was as great a time as you could ask for. It is always incredible to see friends that you haven’t seen or really been in contact with in a long while and realizing that through geographical and temporal barriers you haven’t missed a step.
From there a short trip to Whistler, which was wonderful, but not long enough, then back to Bellingham for a few phone calls to Warren Miller, and a redirection, which was really just a rebound back to Canada once again. Blue River to be exact, the home of Mike Weigeles heli lodge, which is the second oldest around, so by now they’ve figured one or two things out about running a lodge. Blue River is the epitome of backwoods Canada. The train yard and the logging cut blocks are the only obvious reason that the town exists and even has a semi-main highway running right through it. Six blocks by Twelve blocks. These ain’t no city blocks, one end of the town is a ten minute drunken stumble from the other. Somewhere in the middle there you find the lodge, or rather, scratch that, Mike Wiegeles Heli Compound. There are nine heli-pads, there are ten or so four bedroom (eight bed) cabins with a main office, full gym… it goes on. Basically a town within a town. A small town at that. I think the number that I heard was seventy-five percent of the town population works for The Lodge, the rest for the petrol station, Rail Canada, the small market, and the one other restaurant in town. Not a lot happening in Blue River. Oh, I almost forgot the best bar in town (read: only bar in town), the Royal Canadian Legion where I was very excited to have darts flying by my head from across the bar where I proceeded to get fall-off-your-barstool hammered for so cheap they might as well have been paying me… Good times. Oh, right, and I nearly forgot altogether that this is supposed to be a ski journal, so I should tell you about the skiing. We showed up to as much blue sky as you could ask for and really good snow conditions, especially on the glaciers where all that ice acts like a refrigerator, only from below, and so much ice poking through to remind us of what lies below. The other skier that was there with me was Chris Benchetler, who, like me was looking for things to jump off of, but to our surprise it is a whole lot harder than you might think to find a place where the glacier splits wide enough to jump and have it be cool, but not so big that you’ll die, and still have some sort of tranny to land on. Some tough times, but we looked around, skied in the Seracs (big icey chunks of glacier), did a few alpine lines, and even built a good jump. All around fun. Oh, and I also took a nap in the back of a heli on a mountain ridge while Tom (the filmer) was interviewing Mike Wiegele. Deelux.
So that was pretty well it. The Update. I hope I didn’t let down the pensive past twenty days. If so there’s some photos down underneath the writing here that will hopefully pick up my slack.
Since I’ve been home I’ve been doing a lot of spring skiing up at Snowbird, which is really sick, there is so damn much snow up there that we’ll be skiing until the fourth of July… I’ll see you there.
