Today we went up to Whistler and carved as many turns as we could on the slushy snow that’s still clinging to the mountain. It melted out fast this year; there’s no snow at all below mid-mountain, and even the lower half of the runs above Solar Coaster have been roped off apart from a single fading cat track. The thin snowpack and warm spell in early spring took a heavy toll this year.

In spite of the poor conditions lower down, we were able to take some fun laps in the Jersey zone and get some decent carving in before the snow turned sticky and grabby in the latter half of the day. Then we skied as far as we could between the rocks and grass, rode Wizard the rest of the way down, and raised a glass on the Merlin’s patio to the season past.

Thirty days. I didn’t ski as much as I wanted to, but it was definitely a season that stood out for the quality of the snow that I did ski and a continued shift away from the resort and into the backcountry. After a great start in December the storms simply didn’t come the way they have in the past few seasons, and work commitments made scheduling ski days a huge challenge, but we made the time we did get count.

There are moments from this season that I want to remember forever. That unbelievable storm at Baker, where we dropped from pillow to pillow in the trees and our tracks filled in and were buried deep in the time it took the lift to deliver us back to the top of the run. The untracked basin out near Elfin Lakes where we skied hero powder under a perfect blue sky as 2012 ebbed away. Meadow skipping at Round Mountain the day after the huge storm that kept everyone out of the backcountry, mellow lines with unbelievable snow and the entire mountain to ourselves. And of course, the one that stands out above all the others: Cayoosh. The day I stood on top of the world, and looked out on a view that had never been more amazing. Nothing has been quite the same since then.

So many memorable days, but never enough. I’m starting to move into bike mode – I’ve logged a couple of longer rides, and signed up for the UMCA year-rounder challenge as motivation to get some serious distance under my belt this summer – but as always, it’s a grudging transition. I love the summer, the day-long rides and the ocean swims, but I miss the monochrome world that melts away every spring. It’s always such a long wait for the snow to fly again.

Spring skiing. Truly one of the most awesome things on earth. Goggle tans and patio lunches; t-shirts and hero snow. Straightlining through the slush, leaping off cat tracks, adapting to the changing snowpack and the bumps and jumps it reveals. It’s a time that’s bittersweet, because underlying the fun is the knowledge that the last of the season is bleeding away with the melting snow. But while it lasts, it’s impossible to stop smiling.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks out of commission with a really nasty flu. My immune system, which had a very rough 2012, clearly isn’t ready to start fighting back yet.

I’d made plans for a Saturday ski trip to Whistler, and was coming around just enough for it to feel like a possibility. I did worry that it wasn’t an entirely wise one, but in the end it turned out to be the best thing I could have done. I spent the day wrapped up warm against a biting cold, skiing easy groomers and chalky bowls beneath a clear blue sky. And by the time the lifts stopped turning, I felt a million times better.

With my lungs finally behaving like part of a functioning human body again, I decided to sneak one extra ski day into my week of vacation. Yesterday was the perfect day for it.

I drove up a snowy Sea to Sky, with the trees wearing progressively thicker capes of white from Squamish onwards. My first chairlift rides were in thick cloud, with snowflakes falling lightly from a leaden sky. The mountain was cold and quiet, and I was able to steal first tracks on about 10cm of overnight snow on the blue runs under Franz’s, Tokum, and Dave Murray. The light powder on top of groomers felt like silk beneath my skis. On Bear Paw the snow was boot-deep and unbroken on the edges of the run, with deeper pockets here and there.

As the clouds cleared I headed to Harmony, where I caught a run on largely untracked powder down Low Roll and then through soft, churned up snow through Boomer Bowl back to the chair. It was the kind of conditions the Rockers were made for, and I couldn’t believe the difference they made to my performance. I popped back out at the lift with an unshakeable, lightly snow-dusted grin plastered to my face. For me, these skis are already a game changer.

In between the euphoria of the runs, I saw a sobering incident just below Low Roll. An injured snowboarder lay completely motionless on the snow, being tended to by a friend. Patrollers gathered round and worked on him, and a short time later a heli flew in and he was loaded up and taken away. I hope he’s alright; he didn’t move once, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many patrollers attending a single person before.

Around mid-morning I headed over to Blackcomb and the Glacier, unaware that this was its opening day. The area closest to the bootpack was already tracked out, but on the lower angle slopes to skier’s right and just outside the boundary on the Husume apron there was plenty of untouched powder. I flew down it, sliding into huge surfing turns on a run I never wanted to end. It wasn’t quite as epic as the day last season when a ski buddy and I got first tracks after a huge storm, but it was easily the best Glacier run I’ve had apart from that. The Rockers are the perfect ski for this kind of snow: tons of float, super maneuverable, and a joy to arc through turns on bottomless snow. I was grinning the whole way down Glacier Road.

The Glacier was so awesome that I went back to do it again after a brief stop for lunch. There wasn’t as much untracked snow left second time around, but the Rockers just rocketed over the tracks between powder pockets and I barely noticed they were there.

It was one of those days when I didn’t want to stop skiing. Even frozen feet and hands couldn’t drive me inside. Secret Chute yielded some awesome soft snow, and unfortunately one lurking rock near the entrance that took a core shot out of my left ski. Seventh was bony up top with super fun soft carving lower down (the camber underfoot makes the Rockers surprisingly competent on groomers for their width), but the off-piste slopes were littered with more rocks so I quickly moved back to the Horstman side of the mountain.

Back on Whistler I was able to sneak one final run in on Red before the chairs stopped turning. Even the ski out to Creekside was fun, with half of the runs left ungroomed and little creeks to hop over here and there. The evening light lit up the last traces of cloud lingering in the valleys as I cruised down Kadenwood to the village.

Re-entry to the world after a day on the mountain is always jarring; even more so after days this good, when the snow is incredible and the skies are blue and there’s no place on earth you’d rather be. Yesterday reality came crashing in with a desperate harshness, the tragic news from Connecticut so at odds with the simplicity and joy of the slopes I’d just left. I wish I could have stayed up there, above it all, a long way away from the news and the violence that humans can inflict on one another.

Day two: powder!

With the Creekside Gondola down, we drove into the village and rode Excalibur up to a glorious powder morning. Our first run was full of knee deep turns and shoulder shots, crossing tracks around pockets of untouched snow. We reached the end with quivering quads and mile-wide grins, then got back onto the lift as fast as we could.

From Excelerator we headed over to Jersey Cream, where conditions on the wall were incredible: deep, steep, soft. The Rockers were in their element, floating and smearing through the snow. It’s a ski that was made for these kinds of conditions. We lapped Jersey a few times until the snow started to track out, and then headed to Ross’s where we were able to poach fresh snow lower down the run while slalom racers practiced higher up.

The weather was chaotic, lurching without warning from heavy snowfall to brief moments where the clouds cleared, broken sunshine filtered through, and we could see the winds tearing huge plumes of snow from the ridgelines higher up. We rode Peak to Peak into a dense fog that hung in the valley between the mountains, giving the appearance of gondola cabins emerging from a grey void.

In the afternoon we headed over to Whistler, where we railed a few groomers, tested our legs on moguls much too big for our weary quad muscles, and found some lingering stashes of soft snow on Dave Murray and in the trees around Franz’s. We’d planned to hit Harmony when it opened, but poor timing left us a long way back in a giant line and we bailed in favour of getting more skiing in elsewhere.

After we came off the slopes we hung out by the fireside at the Dubh Linn Gate for a little while, drinking beer and waiting for the premiere of Candide Thovex’s new film, Few Words, over at the Conference Centre. It was an excellent movie and well worth the time; more food for thought than many of this year’s counterparts, incredible ski footage (natch), and interesting insights into a skier who has always let his skiing do the talking in the past.

In spite of the persistent bronchitis and legs that really aren’t too sure what has hit them since the season started, I had an incredible day. All I wanted on the last run was to come back the next day, and do it all over again. My lungs aren’t up to that yet, but with the help of an inhaler they are slowly improving. I hope that the season will begin in earnest very soon.

It sucks being a seasonal sports addict. For six long months, you’re cut off from the activity you love the most. You use other muscles and try to make the best of doing other things. And then suddenly the season turns, and you’re back in a world that you last stood in half a year ago. It feels as comforting and familiar as home and yet as unknown as walking on the surface of the moon. There’s no consistency in your progression when it suffers such an intense annual disruption.

This year, more than any other, I couldn’t wait for winter to start. I’ve been sick since the beginning of July, first with one thing and then another that jumped in while my immune system was still on hiatus. I’m out of condition, still on medication, weaker than I’ve ever been going into a ski season. Weaker by far than I was coming back from my blown knee and surgery in 2011. And yet I’ve never needed to ski more than I do right now. I need some kind of redemption, something to take me away from the things I lost this year that I won’t get back. I need that one thing where nothing else matters and once the turns begin there’s no more room in the world to think of anything else.

Yesterday, it came around at last.

I’d been anxiously hovering over snow-forecast.com for days, tracking storms like an amateur meteorologist. In the end, we got lucky; I opted out of Whistler’s early opening at the weekend to allow an extra few days for my bronchitis-ridden lungs to rest and heal. Those who made the trek on Saturday were rewarded with a 25cm base and howling winds. We waited for Thursday, Blackcomb’s opening day, and got 126cm of additional snow and ungroomed runs all over the mountain.

I’ve been wanting this day so hard and for so long that I’d lost the ability even to imagine it. This new, feeble body that four months of illness has left me with doesn’t know how to carve a turn. The night before I woke from a dream that we’d already been to Whistler, and I couldn’t remember a single turn or run. At Creekside, boots on my feet and skis over my shoulder, it didn’t seem possible. On the gondola, watching the blanket of white deepen as the cables pulled us up the mountain, it didn’t seem possible. On Red Chair, gazing at the snowline that stretched almost the whole way to the valley floor and feeling my face and fingers go numb in an unfamiliar cold, it didn’t seem possible. Standing at the top of Ego Bowl, a single heartbeat away from the first turn, I honestly felt that I must still be in a dream.

My lack of practice and fitness and ability to breathe properly showed. I skied like a gaper from first chair to last. My first couple of runs were all skidded turns, trying to adjust to my weakened body and six months away from snow and a new pair of skis with a full hybrid rocker profile. On the third run I suddenly remembered how to carve, and finally got the new skis up on edge and running with speed. On the fourth run we left the groomers, and as we ploughed through the soft new snow the Rockers came into their element and blew my mind.

I’m not going to make any apologies for how badly I rode them. I had no style, no finesse, no technique: I simply hit the snow and made my way down as best I could. And yet these skis were like nothing else I’ve ever strapped to my feet. They floated. They bounced. They were playful as hell. They were fun.

That’s as much as I can tell you about the Rockers from day one, because I wasn’t able to ski them to any kind of reasonable testing level. What I can tell you is that we skied perfect corduroy under Emerald at the start of the day, knee-deep blower pow on Blackcomb, and soft moguls and heavy crud on Whistler in the afternoon. And I walked from it at the end of the day with a grin – such a grin – because this is my world, and I’m finally back in it. I may be crashing inelegantly through with flailing arms, weakened legs and a total lack of grace, but I’m here. And right now, this year, that’s the only thing that matters.

Monday was Gaper Day. In spite of a weather forecast that looked like a dog’s breakfast and my ski buddy’s unexpected cancellation at the last minute due to a sleepless night, there was no way I was going to miss it. In the event the weather was awful and the snow was mucky slush, but I was so glad I made it out.

The costumes, as always, were awesome.

Some were extra specially awesome. I believe!

There were garywaynes.

The pond skimming was particularly good this year, with some fabulous wipeouts.

And then, just like that, it was over. 39 days of amazing skiing, backcountry adventures, powder days and hero spring snow. The year of no restrictions. The best season I’ve ever had.

Now it’s time to turn my thoughts to the summer ahead, to randonneur rides and GranFondos and dusty singletrack. I love the lazy days and drawn out evenings, the blue skies and the sunshine, the long swims in the outdoor pool and the ocean. But somewhere inside, a little piece of me will always be glancing over at the mountains in the distance and the slight coating of white that still crowns the highest peaks, dreaming of the days when the snow flies and once again, after a wait that’s always way too long, the new season begins.

I always have a hard time picking my favourite season. Hot summer: the beautiful blues and greens of the Burrard Inlet; long bike rides and ocean swims; salt-scented air and dazzling light fading to sunsets blazing across the sky. Deep winter: snowstorms and powder days; the lure of the mountains; the endless dance with the weather and the evolving snowscape and those unbelievable moments when everything falls into place and you get as close as you ever will to flying. Smoky autumn: the flare of fall colours; air still warm enough to ride a bike in shirtsleeves; that very faint chill in the mornings that holds all the promise of the winter to come.

And then there’s spring.

Yesterday I woke early, and cruised up the Sea to Sky with a brief stop at Galileo Coffee. In the Whistler day lots the sun was already beating down fiercely, and up on the mountain the icy runs softened very quickly. There isn’t much snow below the base of Solar Coaster now, but it’s solid from there to the Rendezvous and in the high alpine I even found a dusting of fresh snow on the Horstman Glacier. Seventh was a dream, with icy upper runs softening to perfectly granulated snow lower down. Late in the afternoon I lapped Solar Coaster again and again, catching whatever air I could off the bumps and rollers and blasting down the final slushy stretch back to the lift.

When the clock ran down I left the mountain and drove home to the sun-drenched city, where J and I got on our bikes and rode in shirtsleeves to Kits Beach. In the warm, cloudless evening, we jumped into the Kits pool and swam for an hour beside the ocean as the sun went down. The next day, we spent the afternoon drowsing on the warm sands at Jericho and plunging into the chilly ocean waves for the first time this year.

On Sunday I rode to Lions Bay and back with two of my bike buddies, and then climbed the Grind with J in the evening. There aren’t too many places in the world where all of this would be possible in the space of a single gorgeous spring weekend. Vancouver, you’re the best.