Jan 10 - what's that sound ?

How quickly we forget. I remember a quiet moment during one wedding or other when I started a film rewind. That attracted many not-so-kind looks. Once it starts, you have to wait it out. At that point you wish that you had a manual rewind camera.

I took some pictures off our balcony yesterday of the snow covered trees with the two pocket cameras that I brought on this trip. Coming back inside, I pressed "rewind" on the film camera and Sandy wondered what the noise was. "Film rewinding", was my response ... "film?" was her exclamation. Truly the best pictures that I've taken skiing are those with either of my little film cameras. The little Olympus Infinity Stylus Epic takes great pictures and film has a huge dynamic range compared with digital, capturing details in the shadows as well as the sunlit snow. Film, with its effective 100+ mega-pixels, I seem to remember reading, still captures the most detail. Digital picture-taking is more convenient and more easily shared. It's everywhere these days. It has changed the world, with videos hitting the internet supplying the "real" truth. Most of it, however, is not photography. It's reality-TV, not drama.

It snowed all day yesterday, accumulating a few more inches, softening the surface and making for better skiing than the day before. Based on "what's open" however, on the Whistler website, we won't see the Whistler high alpine open before we head home. That will be a first ... we'll be below the treeline most of the time. I guess that's better than people dying in avalanches. According to one person on a chair yesterday a small avalanche went across Pika's Traverse in Harmony on the one day that Harmony was open. No-one was hurt but it shows how touchy the snow-pack is right now. Once they open these lifts it's impossible to restrict people to marked runs ... it's mostly open bowls. Since avalanches always happen to everyone else, people ski in areas where you think they must have a death wish.

Based on the weather prediction, yesterday's snow is probably the last we'll see during this trip. It's going to be warm, above freezing in the valley and even above freezing in the alpine for a couple of days. Once the snow warms up in the morning that makes for good skiing, but it can be a lot of work since the snow is heavy. I like spring skiing ... Sandy doesn't like the heavy snow.

We went into the Village last night for dinner. I went to 5pm Mass first and Sandy took the bus to meet me at the Sushi restaurant. it was good, but not as good as our restaurant in Florida. I ordered the "More Challenging" Sushi selection on the menu. More Challenging means that you get some Uni -- sea urchin. With its consistency of cold pureed liver, it takes some getting used to. I've had it before. The only thing redeeming about it, really, is the novelty.

Today, if we get moving in time, we'll go up for the "Fresh Tracks" breakfast. That necessitates taking the bus into the Village, leaving here around 6:30. They have an excellent breakfast buffet, which mostly becomes our lunch as well, and then they open the hill for skiing. Those having the Fresh Tracks breakfast start skiing at the same time as people start uploading at the bottom so we get some time to make fresh tracks on new snow or freshly groomed corduroy, before mobs of other skiers push the snow into moguls. We usually do Fresh Tracks once per trip.

It was much busier on the mountain yesterday, since it was Saturday. Lots of kids in ski-school groups were on the runs. Normally we're up in the high-alpine where they don't take the kids, but not this trip. We will likely head over to Blackcomb, taking the Peak-to-Peak gondola (I think that I have Sandy convinced) later in the week when we'll have sunny skies over the 7th Heaven area.

That's it ...