Fortunately, the upload was completely wrong. Pow day!

I’d seen that there was snow forecast overnight, but given that it was May 4th what I wasn’t expecting was to arrive at Whistler and find midwinter powder. It had fallen after the night’s grooming had been completed, so at first chair the entire mountain was an unbroken blanket of white. We lapped Jersey while we waited for 7th to open, and with just a handful of people on the mountain we were able to get run after run on untracked snow on Jersey Cream Wall.

When 7th opened later in the morning, we raced as fast as we could down the cat track to the chair. Lakeside was closed, but Xhiggy’s and the Everglades yielded a series of glorious runs in knee-deep snow that felt more like February than May. My powder technique still has a lot of gaper moments, but it’s come on one hell of a long way compared to last season.

I skied until the powder was finally tracked out, and then we headed down for a late patio lunch at Merlin’s where we were able to shake our heads over a beer and wonder if we’d just dreamed the morning. We had time for a couple more laps before heading back to Van; on the lower part of the mountain the snow was super fun slush under a blue sky, with absolutely no hint of the winter wonderland hiding above the mid-mountain cloud.

I’m quite certain that will be the last powder day this year. Given how late in the season it is, I’m not complaining.

I arrived in Glacier at 7.30am, and had time for a leisurely breakfast with Zack Giffin before our guide Joseph arrived. My ski buddy B wasn’t able to make the trip, so I wasn’t sure exactly who I’d be setting out with. In the event my tour partners were Stephanie and Norman, an awesome couple from Vancouver who were infinitely better skiers than I am.

We piled our gear into Joseph’s car, and he drove us up the Glacier Creek road. The snowline was still low enough that we had to leave the car a good 5km below the trailhead. A bike and trailer in a snowbank raised a few questions, but mostly we were just eager to get going. We strapped our skis and skins on, and headed upwards. For the first kilometre the snow came and went, and we found ourselves switching between bootpacking and skinning until the coverage got a little more consistent.

The snow-covered road ended at the Heliotrope Ridge trailhead, but we ignored the summer hikers’ trail and headed directly upward through the trees. The snow was a funky, crusty mess of leaves, moss and twigs, but the skins made it easy and before long we popped out at the foot of a drainage below the ridge. Cloud hung low overhead and Joseph pointed out our destination: a tiny notch of rock far above us, just below the place where the sky began.

We started skinning straight up the drainage, with Joseph holding the pace slow and steady in the front. The snow was much wetter and stickier than anything I’d skinned on previously, and I was happy to discover that this made it much easier to keep going without slipping than I’d found on similarly steep lines. (I’m starting to understand what a backcountry gaper I was at the start of the season; as well as the issue of having skins too narrow for my skis, I also know now that I should have purchased nylon rather than mohair, which is better suited to gliding than climbing.)

Skinning is a wonderfully mind-clearing activity. Once you get into a rhythm you simply keep moving – kick, glide, kick, glide – until suddenly you’re a thousand feet above your starting point. All the bullshit and stress falls clean out of your head, and the only things that matter are you and the mountain and the snow and the steady rhythm that keeps you moving forward.

At some point we crossed the freezing line, and the light rain that had kept us cool turned to snow. On a lonely island of grass and rock two ptarmigan bobbed their heads briefly, and then the cloud closed in around us and we skinned the final stretch to the ridge inside a white mist that hid the world away. On the ridge we stopped for a break and some food, and the shifting cloud gave tantalizing glimpses of the glacier and icefall ahead.

After a brief refuel we continued on a steady ascending traverse across the glacier. The cloud closed in tight around us, giving no hint of what lay above or below. The whiteout was so intense that when I looked back at Stephanie and Norman, it looked as though they were skiing down from above even though I knew they were climbing the skin track behind us. I literally couldn’t tell up from down.

We climbed for another hour or so before Joseph decided it was time to head downwards. We transitioned in a bubble of fog, with absolutely no idea what we were heading into. Fortunately Joseph knew the glacier even better than the back of his hand, so he led the way. It’s hard to find the words to describe the sensation of turning my skis onto the fall line as I left the skin track. Descending absolutely blind onto the face of the Coleman Glacier was both hugely disconcerting and enormously exciting. The slope was very low angle to begin with, which was probably just as well considering how little we could see.

After a half-dozen careful turns behind Joseph on the perfect corn snow, the miracle happened: we dropped out of the cloud and suddenly the mountain opened up in front of us. Directly downhill, there was nothing but snow. An insanely, immensely huge face spreading out before us and angling sharply downward just ahead of the roll where we’d emerged. To the left, a great white curve leading back up to the ridge. To our right, a crazed jumble of snow and the huge blocks of the icefall scattered across the glacier’s tongue. Behind us, a sudden break of blue sky and the immense, impossibly high peak of Baker itself.

At that moment, I would have done the 5,000ft climb all over again to be exactly where I was. Hell, I would have done it twice if I’d needed to.

We skied down the steeper face of the glacier, and it was beyond words. Perfect spring snow, easy skiing, turns so huge and wide that it felt like I was in a different, larger dimension. A space where anything was possible.

We flew down to the freezing line, where the snow got grabby and we bore hard left over a series of ridges. At the toe of the glacier we descended through a short, narrow gully and then into the trees, where things got interesting for me. I haven’t done a whole lot of tree skiing, and this was dense forest with a rotten, debris-filled snowpack. For the first part of the ski out I lagged badly behind the others, and found myself doing a fair bit of sideslipping and barely missing trunks and logs.

After a while we reached a ridgeline, and put our skins back on to hike up and over. I hadn’t realized that my sodden skins weren’t sticking to the skis that well, and as we came down the other side of the ridge my skis suddenly lost their ability to hold an edge and I skidded and fell on a big pile of disintegrating snow. When I checked out the culprit, there was more than an inch of ice packed between the skin and the ski. I knocked it off, put the skins away, and prepared for the final ski out. This time I stuck close behind Stephanie, and as she did the route-finding I began handling the rotten snow and tight trees much better. By the time we hit the final descent down to a creek and bootpack back up to the trailhead, I actually felt like I had a pretty good flow going for the first time since we’d entered the trees. The final stretch was an easy cruise down the bumpy road.

We also solved mystery of the bike in the snowbank as we arrived back at the car. The owner was strapping a pair of skis to the trailer as we passed him, and explained that he’d cycled from Bellingham the night before, camped on the trail, gotten up at the crack of dawn to climb, summited Baker, skied down, and was now preparing to cycle back to Bellingham before dark. Hardcore.

It’s nearly a week later now, but I’m still on a high from the tour. It was the perfect way to round off my first season in the backcountry. Joseph has an amazing knack for picking routes that push you the perfect distance outside your comfort zone: far enough to make you try things you would never have done on your own, but not so far that you don’t want to try those things again.

Monday morning seemed like a total anticlimax. At the same time, there’s something kind of awesome about answering the question “How was your weekend?” with “Oh, pretty good. I skied down an active volcano.” For all the backcountry skiing dreams I had when I lived in the UK, that’s something that never even crossed my mind. I’m pretty stoked that it’s now something I can say I’ve done. The only problem is that I really, really, really want to do it again.

I skied Seventh till it got completely tracked out, then headed back over to Solar Coaster and had some fun carving down Springboard and jumping off cat tracks. It was quite a bizarre juxtaposition; powder and deep winter in the morning, and spring hero snow in the afternoon. The run back down to Base II was a glorious high-speed blast that I desperately wanted to repeat. At this time of year, every day is a gift and very few days start off like that one.

I’ve found three trails so far. One is way beyond what my rusty XC skills can handle, and I had to walk a lot of the larger jumps and bigger drops. One is a decent match for where I’m at right now, with lots of technical challenges and manageable obstacles; and the third is a nice, flowy track where I can really enjoy myself. All three are short, but that’s fine when I only have 45 minutes to spare.

There have been some mishaps along the way. On the first ride I skidded off a large, slippery root and crashed into a tree. Today I hit a log jump without quite enough speed to clear it, and hooked myself up on the top log as I tried to quickly pump the pedals around. The bike stopped dead, I flew over the bars and crashed down into the undergrowth, and the bike toppled slowly off the jump into the muddy landing zone. As I lay sprawled in the ferns it did occur to me that it might have been smart to give someone in the office a heads up on where I was going. After three days of this, my lower legs are more bruise than skin.

Regardless, I’m having a blast. I’ve finally gotten the ETSX out on some real trails, albeit short ones; I’m working on my skills (and holy smokes, do they ever need it); but most importantly, I’m out riding singletrack on my lunch break. I get back to the office sweaty, muddy and exhilarated. This beats the hell out of my regular lunchtime gym workout.

More to the point, it’s simply amazing that this is even possible. I work in the downtown core, amid office blocks and high rise towers. Yet I can spend my lunch hour deep in old growth forest, ploughing through thick ferns that have overgrown the trails and dropping down into heavy mud and nearly breaking my neck on obstacles that I’m clearly not ready for yet. And then I pop out on Stanley Park Drive and fling the dirt off my tires as I race back to work for the afternoon.

I remember London. I remember how soul destroying it was to live in a place where the natural world was an illusion, glimpsed briefly in manicured parks before the thunder of traffic to the left or right or airplanes painting trails of toxins across the sky shattered the mirage. Here in Vancouver, we really do have it all. The convenience of the big city, with nature not just on our doorstep but pushing through it in places.  I am so grateful to be in a place where these things are possible.

The morning was actually far better than I expected. About five centimetres of snow had fallen overnight, and the freezing level had dropped. Garbanzo was closed, and it only took me one run to realize that as a result no-one was skiing Dave Murray. I caught first tracks, second tracks, and third tracks before anyone joined me. The slope beneath the fresh snow was pretty icy, but there was enough of a layer on top to catch a whisper of an echo of those powder days out on Diamond Head and the Blackcomb Glacier.

I’d hoped to get up into the alpine, but the peak stayed veiled in impenetrable cloud and strong winds were whipping down from the Saddle. I tried to visit as many mid-mountain favourites as I could, knowing how long it would be until I saw them again. I even skied out to the village a couple of times, extending the runs just a little further while the snow was still good. After lunch the winds really started howling and I spent the final couple of hours in the terrain park. My confidence in the air is coming back and although I’m still sticking to smaller features, I was catching more speed on the kickers and finding lips to jump off around the edges of the glades on the way back to the chair.

The end came too quickly, as it always does. Blackcomb is open for another month, and I’m hoping for a handful more days and some more of that glorious spring skiing before the season draws to a close. I know that from here on, everything will feel like it’s winding down and I’m just not ready for that. This year more than any other, I truly want it to last forever.

My last visit to Whistler was an absolutely perfect spring day. Icy first thing, softening to hero snow mid-morning. I couldn’t ski enough runs, go fast enough, keep going long enough. I love these conditions. I love the spring. Slushy snow that’s heavy enough to build into bumps that you can air all over the run, but soft enough to slice like your skis are a surgical scalpel? Bring it on.

Late in the afternoon when we’d climbed high to find some slightly firmer snow for my friend K, I turned left and took a run down the Blackcomb Glacier. After a week without precipitation, I was still crossing pockets of powder and blowing through soft heaped snow. All I had to do was point the skis downhill, and then deke them left and right enough to avoid going completely out of control.

This is what I should have been doing all of this season, and maybe last too (though there was a different need for caution then that makes it hard to assess now.) Point. Click. Chute. It’s that easy. The faster and harder I go, and the more speed and aggression I bring into my turns, the easier it is. It’s that simple.

I’ve hit that point in the season where everything has clicked. I’m feeling confident on the slopes, in the air, on icy groomers and in crazy bumped out basins. I don’t want the days to end. I want to keep on skiing like this forever. This is what really sucks about loving a seasonal sport: every year, it has to end. And five months from now, my legs won’t remember the lessons they learned as this season drew to a close. They’ll be tense, difficult, jarred. They’ll have to begin all over again.

In the meantime, there’s a bare month of the season left. I hope that as many of those days as possible will be ones like this.

Yesterday I’d planned to go back to Whistler, but a niggling cold and the thought of it being even busier than Thursday were enough to change my mind. Instead I slept in for an extra couple of hours, then headed to Grouse under an unbroken blue sky. The sun was warm and the icy runs quickly softened and turned to perfect spring snow. After a couple of warm up laps I cruised the blacks and double blacks for a while, then gave in to temptation and went back to lapping the Peak and Expo as fast as I possibly could. Given the beautiful day the Olympic Chair was surprisingly quiet, and I had a blast jumping from a little lip down into Deliverance and then rocketing across the bumpy snow down Expo.

I’d originally planned to head home for lunch, but I was having so much fun that I stuck around until mid-afternoon. Once again, it was a great reminder of how lucky we are to have the North Shore mountains so close and accessible. I know there are days ( to be honest, more often than not) when I’d be cursing the limited vertical and jonesing for a peak to creek run, but when you just want to get out on snow you can’t beat having three ski hills right in your back yard.

It doesn’t seem like it should be anywhere near time to start writing about the spring cycling season. My mind is still very much in the mountains. And yet yesterday was the 2012 Pacific Populaire. I signed up for the 100km distance even though I haven’t cycled further than 20km – or even been on my road bike, for that matter – since October. I figured that if I could do the ride 30 days out from a blown knee, I could certainly finish it in spite of being completely out of cycling condition.

After a late night drinking beer and participating in a hot sauce eating contest (perhaps not the ideal preparation) the morning did not dawn promisingly. When I woke at 7am, I could hear rain pounding on the bathroom skylight. An hour later it had mostly tapered off, and I made my way through the soaking streets to the muddy registration area at the Riley Park Fieldhouse. There were a tremendous number of cyclists gathering, and everyone was in good spirits in spite of the dubious weather.

For the first couple of kilometres I was part of a huge pack of cyclists riding elbow-to-elbow, but then the traffic lights thinned the group out as we passed through Kits on our way to Marine Drive. On the UBC hill I realised that my quads were in no way recovered from the heavy skiing on Friday, but speed had never been a primary concern for this ride; it was more about getting back on the road bike after the winter, and having fun.

The clouds started to break as I crossed the Arthur Laing bridge into Richmond. To my surprise, I didn’t need to look at the route card once on the first half of the ride. It makes me realise just how established my life here is now: I know these streets like the back of my hand, and every one is permeated with memories of other rides. Just before the Woodward’s Landing control, I gave a nod to the Ossur HQ where I was fitted with my knee brace just before the 2010 Populaire.

At the control I ran into my friend P, and after getting our cards stamped and ingesting fistfuls of cookies and carrot cake we waved a hello to J, the third member of our group, who arrived just as we were departing. P and I joined up with some riders who were motoring along at a decent 32km/h; I knew my tired legs wouldn’t be able to keep that pace up for any distance, but it was fun to ride as part of the pack for a while.

The second half of the ride also brought home just how much of a personal challenge the 2010 ride had been. I remembered zoning out in my own little world of pain somewhere in the strong headwinds on the New West Highway, but as I pedalled along yesterday I found that there were whole stretches – including the transition from the highway to River Road – that I simply didn’t recall at all. This time the winds were gentler and I stuck with the fast group as far as River Road, where my quads decided that 28km/h was quite speedy enough. My neck and right shoulder were also feeling the unaccustomed hours on the bike by this point, and I had to stretch them out repeatedly to try and ease the twinges.

I crossed back into Vancouver on the Canada Line bridge and headed through blossom-filled side streets back to Marine Drive. Under blue skies the kilometres ran down surprisingly quickly. The hill up to Arbutus on 25th felt like just as much of a slog as last time, but infinitely less painful. I let my speed drop on the final stretch and just enjoyed the last of the ride back to Riley Park. When I got there I splashed through the mud to get my card stamped, then found a patch of sunshine to wait for J and P. (P was actually going way faster than me until a flat tire waylaid him on the New West Highway.)

My official time was 4:15, which is slow compared to my GranFondo times from last summer but not bad at all considering my total lack of preparation. My legs and lungs did well apart from the residual quad tiredness, but my problem shoulder was pretty sore today. I need to spend some time cycling up mountains to get back into proper cycling shape, but realistically I know that’s not going to happen while there are still opportunities to be skiing down them.

I’ve got the morning routine dialed now. When the alarm sounds at 6am I throw on the gear I laid out the night before, and feed the flock of small excited cats who are just thrilled that breakfast is an hour earlier than normal. The door clicks behind me at 6.15, and I’m on the road  with time for a brief stop at Galileo for a triple-shot latte and a breakfast burrito.

On Friday I arrived at a snowy Creekside to the sound of dynamite charges echoing from above. The Whistler alpine had been closed for two days due to high winds and storm loading, and the patrollers were working hard on avalanche control. While I waited for the alpine lifts to open I did some skiing on baby powder pillows on Bear Paw and semi-tracked snow on Franz’s Meadows. I was riding the ‘guns, which don’t have quite as much float as the Praxis but are slightly snappier and easier to turn. I’m really starting to appreciate the difference between my various skis, and the fine lines between which is the best fit for the day’s conditions.

Peak Chair opened while I was riding up on Red, which meant I missed the opportunity for first tracks but did get to see some excellent carnage on Air Jordan. I scooted straight over to Harmony, which was busy but still had untracked lines to offer in the area around Low Roll. It was the longest powder run I’ve had on the Shoguns, and they really impressed me. They’re not quite as surfy as the giant Praxis, but they rebound beautifully out of the turns. Lower McConkey’s was cut up into soft, deep crud that was a little tiring on the legs, but super fun.

I spotted from the chair that with most riders heading over to Symphony and the lines at Peak Chair still insane, there were very few tracks going down Jacob’s Ladder to Glacier Bowl. I was able to grab another glorious untouched run that left me yelling for joy as I emerged onto the foot of the Saddle.

After lunch I took a ride to the Peak, thinking that I’d head over to West Bowl. Unfortunately visibility was down to zero at the top, and since it’s been a couple of seasons since I last skied West Bowl I didn’t feel confident exploring in a whiteout. I took Peak to Creek to Bagel Bowl to hunt out a little more untracked snow, then somehow found myself on the Creekside ski out. The freezing level was rocketing upwards and the snow on the lower half of the run was very wet and heavy; my quads were burning in protest by the time I reached the gondola.

I went back up to the peak for a run down Whistler Bowl and Shale Slope; the snow was still in decent shape but the whole area was fogged in with very flat light. After skiing back down I stuck to the area around Franz’s Meadows for a couple of runs, then took a deep breath and went to visit a certain jump in the terrain park. Admittedly I hit it very slowly and carefully, but the brief moment in the air finally laid the last ghost of 09/10 to rest.

It was definitely a day of two halves, but the morning provided another exceptional set of runs. By the final run down Dave Murray to Kadenwood my quads were trembling from the effort of ploughing through the heavy afternoon snow, but I still didn’t want the day to end.

We made our way to the zone where we’d finished our second day on the AST1 training course back in December. Just a little to skier’s right of the ridge below Body Bag Bowl, it’s an area of rolling slopes and glades that we figured would be perfect for some low consequence sidecountry skiing. In the early morning chill the snow was still light and soft, and we spent a couple of happy hours lapping our own private powder slope. The run may have been relatively short – about 250m – but the skinning was far more fun than riding a chairlift, and we were skiing untracked lines while the snow in-bounds had been tracked out long ago.

By noon the snow had softened considerably in the sun, and the turns were getting heavier. We skied out through the glades and then down the cat track to Solar Coaster, where we tore down the groomers at warp speed all the way to the village. On the Merlin’s patio we sat in shirtsleeves in the sun, and toasted the arrival of the spring skiing season.

In the afternoon we made our way back through the crowds to Seventh, where we found that Xhiggy’s and Lakeside had been closed due to solar warming. We headed further down and made the traverse across a more stable part of the bowl back to the sidecountry. Initially we set out for the top of Body Bag Bowl, but given how sun-affected the snow was and the number of tracks coming into the bowl from above we ended up climbing the eastern flank. This gave us a run of mostly untracked but very heavy snow down to the treeline. As we tracked back to skier’s right to cross back into the resort, we  must have passed a dozen kickers being lapped by bare-chested skiers; we noted for future reference that this is clearly a prime booter zone.

As we admired the jaw-dropping views on the Peak 2 Peak ride back over to Whistler, we high-fived a day that worked out pretty much perfectly. Sunshine, the weekend and the end of spring break had made for a packed day at the resort with runs that were long tracked out. In contrast, we got powder turns on deserted slopes. It was strange standing on the flank of Disease Ridge and looking back at the slopes swarming with descending skiers; it felt like we were in a different world. I love it that we have this as an option now.