Whistler 2012 – Angus and Craig – 26/1/12 – 7/2/12

Angus and I did a quick trip to Whistler to stay with Garry and Lorna and their new baby daughter Abigail who were holidaying there for a month.

Garry had arranged for his sons to come over as well and as it turned out Kael would be there at the same time that we were, which worked out perfectly for us as the boys were good company for each other and Garry and I could go skiing harder stuff on the days that the boys were in ski school.

A tired Angus eating Burger King at Vancouver airport
We were waiting for Garry to pick us up as he had to drop off his son Elijah who was flying back to Sydney to go to school.
It was convenient I must add that the airport had FREE WiFi – not like Sydney airport

By this stage we had been travelling for 18 hours 30 mins, waiting around airports etc for 8 hours and awake for 1 day, 2hours and 30 mins.
We still had  about 3 hours to wait for Garry and a 2-3 hour drive

Needless to say, I needed a beer and it was Australia Day, so when we arrived Angus had a quick toasted sandwich and went to bed, Garry and I went to the Brew House, drank some pale ale and had some pulled beef sliders (mini burgers) with horseradish cream.
Some more beers and tapas styled food then back to the condo.

The place we stayed at was called Arrowhead Pointe in the upper village of Blackcomb, with a short walk to the main run it was only minutes for us to get to the lift.

There was a bus service to Blackcomb and Whistler Village which was handy for getting to and from the shops. You could actually walk down the ski run to Blackcomb if you want and then its only a short walk thru a park to Whistler Village.

On the Friday, our first day of skiing the four of us did a bit of a tour of the mountains.
The boys were pretty well matched for skiing ability and and they had fun skiing around with us.

On the Saturday Angus and I did a bit of skiing on our own and managed to find our way back to the condo via the home trail which took us to the back door.

The 3 major mountain lodges Rendezvous, Glacier Creek and Roundhouse all had execellent WiFi where i could upload photos to Face-Tube or call people on Skype.
The Rendezvous Lodge even had a NIntendo lounge with Wii connected to large LCDs
Something that would never happen in Australian ski resorts.


We decided that due to the jet lag, the crowds, and the weather(raining in the village) that we would have a day off skiing on Sunday and do something touristy so Garry suggested a zip lining tour.  

Zip lining is like a flying fox where you are connected to a cable and go from tree to tree across valleys and creeks etc.

There is an extensive network setup with tree platforms etc and the tour we did included a run that was almost 1 kilometre. Infact it was dubious whether or not Angus would make it across as you had to be a certain weight to do this tour. In the end we had to go over to the office the night before and get Angus weighed, he came in 2 kgs under the 34kg/70lb minimum for the tour but they said it would be OK.

It was a great day and something that we had not done before

Sunday night is the Fire and Ice show and after some sight seeing and shopping in the village we grabbed a hot dog and chips from Zoggs (which would become our favourite junk food place) and watched the show from the bottom of the lifts.

On Monday Garry and I did some skiing as the boys were in ski school and there was some fresh snow to be had. We skiied over at the Symphony bowl and did some tree skiing which was cool.

I got to try my new powder skis but found out (after forward fliping) that they are too short!!!
Great for trees or tight chutes but no good on big alpine bowls – oh well forget AK

That night we went to Dubh Linn Gate Irish pub for a few beers and a meal

I had a few beers “in” my meal  – Steak and Guiness Pie plus some extra Guiness

On Tuesday Angus did not want to go into ski school so we went for a tour together.
Kael had boot problems and wasn’t sure how he would go so we arranged to meet him and Garry at Roundhouse Lodge on Whistler for lunch then we went for a ski.

Garry suggested that we ski the Peak to Creek run and end up at Whister Creekside.

We skied the face of Whistler Peak and headed down the west ridge and ended up in some very steep glades that we heaps of fun

Wednesday night we went to the Tube Park which is just up the hill at Blackcomb Base II.

It was great family fun for about $10 each, another thing that Australian ski resorts have forgotten about…FUN !!!!

Just add FUN to the long list of things missing from Australians ski resorts like

SERVICE, VALUE, VARIETY, ENTERTAINMENT, CREATIVITY, INTEGRITY

Thursday was Kaels last day, so after saying good byes we headed off skiing and left Garry and Kael to do father and son stuff.

We had some breaky at Glacier Creek Lodge and since the weather was good we decided to do a run up the Glacier

  We caught the Glacier Chair up to the Tbar and entered the glacier

 After lunch at the Roundhouse on Whistler we took some photos and headed up the Peak Chair

We then Skied the Glacier Bowl and all the way back to Whistler Village

We took a run down the Glacier as it was foggy last time and the views were worth it 

Friday night saw us doing some last minute shopping for presents.
Most of the shops are open til about 9pm and the village has a great atmosphere

We stopped off at our favourite haunt Zogs Dogs, for some dinner

It was a good chance to take some photos around the village at night

After breakfast we went ice skating at the Whistler Olympic Plaza.
Again, something for the Aussie tourist industry to learn – You dont need to rip everyone off

FREE skating, $5 skate hire….nuff said !!!

 We decided to walk again and since it was only 3pm the trip acorss 3 ski runs was interesting

 After it was over we had a bowl of chilli from the Chilli Tank, which is a WWII army soup kitchen trailer.

So that was it for Whistler, the rest of Saturday night was spent packing and we left early Sunday morning for our bus trip back to Vancouver.

 The views along the way were interesting as its strange to see snow and sea in the same photo

We made it to the airport at Vancouver with just enough time to check in and get some lunch
Our Flight to Dallas got us there at about dinner time but all I wanted was a beer
There was an Irish Pub where I had a Guiness and Angus skoalled a Shirley Temple 

When we got on board I was  pretty worn out and didn’t look at the boarding passes.
I kept saying to Angus “just keep going down the back”.
I looked up and we were at row 65 and when I checked the boarding passes I thought
“somethings wrong here…its says row 38” and we turned around and went back up the front
Turns out we were upgraded to Premium Economy which Angus thought was cool.

Teddy liked the upgrade too

After some movies, “The Ides of March”, “The Big Year” and “Tower Heist” we arrived home in Sydney after a sunrise stop at muggy Brisbane.

The  majority of the stills and videos were taken using an iPhone 4s.
Some were taken on a iPhone 4 and Canon G10.

There were about 500 photos taken, which explains why it took 2 weeks to put together teh videos, slideshows and edit this blog, so after a break and another look I may add some more and embelish the story a bit more.

I put together a few videos / slide shows of the different things we did on the trip

Whistler 2012 – Skiing 1
Whistler 2012 – Two Glaciers
Whistler 2012 – Zip Lining
Whistler 2012- Bobsled
Whistler 2012 – Angus at Ski School
Whistler 2012 – Ski School Adventure Camp – DVD
Whistler 2012 – Peak 2 Peak

Nepean River Packrafting – Bents Basin

Earlier this month I bought an Alpacka Pack Raft and have been waiting to give it a try on some rapids.

Last year when Darren bought his packraft we did a few trips on the Colo River.
I used a $50 blow up boat which was great as an introduction into the sport, however my boat was not as portable or durable as a proper packraft and certainly would not be as usable in rapids.

The raft I bought is called and Alpacka Denali Llama , it is 2.4m long and 2.4kgs and is designed to be carried in a backpack to allow you to bushwalk or mountain bike to a river and then after running the river bushwalk or ride out, you can even lash your bike to it its that tough.

Anyway on Sunday we decided to try it out on the Nepean River at Bents Basin.

We drove to the reserve and walked a few kilometres along a ridge to get to the other end of the ravine that runs into Bent’s Basin and put in on a gentle part of the river.

Paddling it on flat water was surprisingly easy and its a very comfortable boat.
After a while we came to a weir and then straight into some moving water which was fun.

There are about 4 sets of rapids ranging from Grade 1 to Grade 3 which was perfect for me as a beginner

Here is a link to Darrens blog, I left it to him to do the trip report as he was the photographer.

Darren’s Blog link

Heres a link to a video of one of the rapids

Video Link

Water Dragon Canyon

Since I’m still exhausted from the weekend which consisted of about 14hours of canyoning 6 hours of cleaning out the shed and then Sunday arvo at the Scouts day, I have taken the easy way out and linked to Darren’s blog

Link to Darren’s Blog 

I have some GoPro footage of the abseils that I will edit one day this week

Great canyon and great experience
I’m getting more confident on my abseil technique and even set one up myself this trip.
I wont go into details but it involved a dodgy log and a slippery waterfall.

I need to get more confident in my climbing though, I had to get Darren to take my pack a few times as I felt like I was going to overbalance and the exposure was too great for me to risk it un-roped

Will update when I edit all the dead time out of the footage.

Lake Parramatta Stand Up Paddling

It was over 35 degrees C last night when I picked the kids up so I thought I’d take them down the lake.
There were quite a few people down there swimming, walking dogs, cycling or just sitting around the foreshore trying to cool off.

We usually take the kayaks and it takes two cars or the trailer to get them down there.
This time I thought we would try Stand Up Paddling as I can fit the small  board in the van and the larger two on the roof.

We didn’t have much time ( about 1hr before the gates shut)  so I rushed around to find swimmers and paddles etc and as such forgot our rashies, life jackets and the most important thing the GoPro so I had to use the iPhone.
I actually need a bit of time to experiment with the GoPro now that I have a fancy new LCD attachment to turn it into a more usable waterproof camera for happy snappy stills as well as fully sick 60fps 1080p action vids.

I wonder if anyone has ever done Stand Up Paddling at the lake before?
If so for the record, it was Angus who got to do it first.

He used a small kids windsurfer that I picked up up for a song a few years back from Cash Converters
Must try to actually use it for windsurfing one day!

It’s not that stable as you can see he fell off a bit (mostly on purpose to get wet) but good enough for him at the moment.

I spoke to Wind Surf and Snow on the weekend  about getting a small board for him or Emma to use.
The options are not that cheap as small second hand SUPs go for almost a grand.

Emma used my 9’6″ board and had no trouble paddling it all around the place

I used the new 11 footer which went pretty fast on the flat water once I removed the leg rope

Thanks to Angus for the photo

Here’s a vid from my iPhone
I tried to upload the raw footage but it seems every time I try to upload anything decent size/resolution it rejects it. DOH!

Maybe I need to upload it to somewhere else and just link to it…i dunno… I hate bloody computers

Emma and Angus at Thredbo circa 2006

After editing the recent clips from my GoPro and doing some house keeping I was cleaning up one of my PC’s hard drives and I found some crappy old videos off my Nokia phone of the kids skiing and mucking around in the snow from about 2006..

It just shows how much technology has advanced in multimedia, even my old Nokia N95 did DVD quality

I know I’m slack but worse still I have footage of Emma’s first ski on Mini DV tape somewhere that needs to be edited.
We setup a PC a year or so ago to do this but haven’t got around to it.

Now that Jenny has become our resident photographic and multimedia expert I might let her do the back editing of the old low res standard def VCR stuff and I’ll concentrate on editing any new HD GoPRo stuff that I may capture.

When she was too young for ski-school we used to drop Emma at the creche and go skiing and then pick her up inthe arvo and walk across to Friday Flat and let her have a ski by just walking up. She started by skiing down between my legs and then progressed to skiing a short way on her own.

We did the same for Angus I think this was the first year that hehad a go on skis, he was almost 3 I think , then next year he was old enough for Thredboland.

Here is a few clips of them skiing Friday Flat and making snow angels in the picnic area near the river across from the service station / alpine apartments, poor Angus was the butt of a few jokes after his comments at the end of the clip, he sounds a bit like Elmer Fud eh?

Bike Skiing Mount Kosciuszko

Craig “Telecrag” Martin  and I decided to do a “last ski for the season” trip since the weather was looking good.


I hadn’t done much skiing since our holiday in August when it rained and the snow was crap, I tried to get down for a back country ski in late August / early September but weather, snow conditions and other issues prevented it until I went kite skiing with Darren and Tim ( see below) in late September link to Darren’s Blog


 By the time October came around I was thinking of the beach but when the oppourtunity came along to “bend the knee”  I thought great lets do it.


We brought our bikes as well as we thought that if the snow was’nt that good or the weather turned we could ride on Sunday. 

Our intention was to go up towards Blue Lake and ski the bowl or chutes behind it however you cant really see the runs from the start of the track and the snow was a bit thin up on Carruthers Peak which would have ment down climbing to start the ski run. We would also have had to walk all the way from the crossing to the top so we decided to ride to Rawsons Pass and ski Kosci, that way we could spend all day out there and ride back to Charlotte Pass in minutes!

Morning on the main range

We headed up the track and stopped in a few spots to enjoy the spring scenery

A little way along the road we were passed by a truck carrying a digger, Telecrag said they were going to extend Mt Kosciuszko due to gloabal warming – my guess was they were just gunna dig out the toilet pit at Rawsons! Well someones full of shit – 🙂

At the Snowy bridge there was a rare site in Australia – Icebergs!

One of the Power-Rangers stopped by for a visit

Only a month ago we were snow kiting over this valley

Its Morphing Time !!!

Wonder how deep it was in winter

Etheridge

We stopped at Seaman’s Hut for a rest

Earnin’ ya turns

Lake Cootapatamba

Telecrag

Some of our tracks

The lake from the walkway

More of our tracks

Mount Kosciuszko

Main Range from Rawsons Pass

Northcote

Carruthers Chutes

 The digger had done us a favour

We got back to the car at about 6pm and thought we would just camp in Jindy, have a hot shower and get a nice meal at Bacco to go with the red Craig had brought so we drove to Perisher to find some 3G signal and Googled the caravan park and booked a spot over the phone

View from our Campsite – notice the water level – you could walk to those islands not long ago!

We parked at the dam and road to the trail head and back
You can see the plume of water in the background as they have been letting water out of the lake

Like I always say “There’s plenty of time for golf when your dead” !!!