This past weekend, Lauren and I went up to Whistler/Blackcomb for a trip sponsored by one of her clients. On Saturday, I headed up with a couple of guys, one Whistler local, Charley, to do a backcountry tour of Blackcomb. Getting on the blackcomb gondola, we uploaded to Excelerator, then up Glacier Creek and finally the Glacier T-Bar. Booted up to the top of Blackcomb glacier and traversed over to the skin tracks. From here we skinned up for about 45 minutes to a ridge and dropped into a sweet bowl and headed over to the next climb. At this point, I don’t know what things are called. I was just following Charley up and over and down a few ridges.

I do know that we had to climb a sick boot pack called Stairmaster to get up to a ridge over where most heli-ski operations land.

Had a sweet descent and then did a fairly shallow skin back up to a point overlooking the Blackcomb glacier again.


We then chose two different gullies and split up into pairs and got some sick turns down to the blackcomb glacier road which would lead us back to the ski area.

More photos can be found here.

On Sunday, with the crack-of-noon club, we got up to Whistler peak and skied West Cirque and Glacier Cirque at least 2 times each with runs into Everglades and Bonsai and finishing up with Peak-to-Creek twice. Perfect conditions and bluebird skies all weekend with no lines after noon on Sunday. Couldn’t ask for a better weekend at Whistler.

On Saturday, March 29th, turn off your lights and all non-essential electronics for one hour starting at 8pm. Besides being a good idea to turn off all electronics when you’re not using them, there is a worldwide effort to bring attention to climate change by doing it for one hour on Saturday.

http://www.earthhourus.org/

Reuter’s article

I recently discovered a blog about white peoples’ likes and dislikes. Who knew?

Stuff White People Like

That’s my girl:

Dear WAMU,

Honestly. “Whoo Hoo?” That’s what you came up with for your newest ad campaign? Have you completely lost your minds? Been reading the latest self help book about how the most obvious thing is usually the best answer and you took the first chimpanzee noise you heard your kid make and labeled it pure genius? Because it’s not. This is not even close to bad. This is lazy. The worst. I suppose I can’t blame you entirely. You hired a young, snappy marketing team, I’m sure, to help with this. Some group of extremely unimaginative but extremely well dressed men and women with artistic glasses and blocky jewelry. They probably took a look at your monkey language scribblings and rubbed their chins thoughtfully and nodded to one another slowly and made you feel really important and smart for an hour. I would have been taken in too. I watch TV. I know how enchanting the well dressed can be. Especially if they smell good and shake your hand, and say words like “move forward” and “branding” and “product placement” too.

Full article here.