Kickers are fun!!

Whistler, BC 0C Sunny and Cloudless!
Well well, its been a fun day here today. Jimmy, Pete and myself all had the day off to come up and check out the slopes. We headed up early to find the clouds nowhere in sight, which gave awesome views everywhere you looked. The picture above was taken yesterday which was also pretty clear, but as you can see the village was still under the cloudline.

Yesterday Jimmy and I headed up the mountain and signed up for an intermediate lesson at the snowboard school. We get all lessons for free the only catch being you can't book, just rock up in the morning and ask if there's any spots left. The lesson was a good session, the 4 of us in our class were all pretty much at the same level so we were able to do some more stance work than usual, then in the afternoon get into taking off and landing jumps, which was definitely good practice for today's sesh! Had a bit of a chat to the instructor and found out they have a little snowboard school terrain park for learning how to jib and ride rails etc so we'll definitely be hitting that class up when there's enough steady fall for them to groom the terrain parks. They also run a Quicksilver sponsored course up here which sounds cool, focusing more on freestyle riding and apparently involves a bit of hiking to get to good terrain.

Alas, today we had lots of fun. All 3 of us headed up early and did a few quick runs on our favourite piste and off-piste sections. Then we stopped at our regular resting spot which is a cleared area off to the side of one of the main runs, this little spot has a tendency to turn into a nice powder keg after fresh fall so it's wicked fun all the time. We ended up building a kicker which started off as a small project and eventually resulted in us spending 3 or so hours there packing the snow to try and form a booter which ended up about 3 or 4 feet tall. Ended up being an awesome session, lots of air and trick attempts. We took a bunch of videos today, I've uploaded the one I took on my camera of Jimmy then Pete hitting the jump. Awesome fun, and a nice soft powdery landing meant our multiple falls were nice and soft! :D


11Dec 08 from Nick Osborne on Vimeo.

Anyways! Tomorrow I start training at work. We're meeting in Whistler Creekside which is sort of a detached village about a 10min bus ride from the main village that sits at the same height as the main one except is a bit around the base of Whistler mountain. The place I've been posted at is actually two locations, the first is Dusty's Backside which is down in Creekside and is more like a bar & grill, and the second (where I'll be primarily working) is up the Creekside Gondola at a cafe/grill called Raven's Nest. It sits just about halfway up the mountain and is just above the cloudline so we should get some awesome days. It's only a small one compared to alot of the other places that seat like 200-2000 people, we only seat 50-60 at the Raven's Nest which will make it alot more fun. There's an outdoor patio area with seating as well as an outdoor grill that one of us in the team will be running each day through the week which sounds like awesome fun. On sunny day's they run the outdoor grill and you stand out there cooking burgers and stuff whilst chatting to the guests sitting on the deck, wicked! Apparently I'll be working Raven's Nest and then if necessary we back up Dusty's Backside which should be a nice change every now and then.

Looking forward to starting work finally, and now we have this great new hobby of building kickers, can't wait to get back on the mountain. The Peak 2 Peak gondola opens tomorrow morning as well which should be pretty cool, apparently it's being webcast live at 6am Aussie time so if you're up it should be worth checking out. There's 3km of slack between towers, and in the middle of the sag its 450m or so from the ground.

Dinner calls so I'll be off!
Catch