Day 2: The Remarkables? (July 29th, 2006)







I woke up this morning a little sore from yesterday's antics and decide that I should invest in some padded shorts before making another run at the parks. Today I'm venturing out to the Remarkables. I wait for the shuttle with some of the guys from the 11 week course who are going up for their avalanche training course. Apparently most of the instructor course work is done on Coronet Peak, and pretty much everyone agrees that the Remarkables are vastly inferior. "The Remarkables?" asks one guy and quickly answers himself: "more like remarkably shitty." That's a ringing endorsement.

I should mention that I'm still struggling with conversation. The group has guys from New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and even a welshman. But I'm categorizing them all as semi-unintelligible. It's not just the accents, it's all the strange words. "Skiing off piste?" is of course asking if you're heading out of the boundaries. And I had a time not laughing when they were discussing the nice "fannies" they saw in the bar last night. But my most frequent problem is understanding greetings. I know they're saying something like "hey how's it going" but I don't think they're using english words. So I just assuming that's what they said and things have been working so far.

Even worse is bar talk. As much as I enjoy bars, I've never understood why people insist on attempting full on conversations in them. Between the loud music and the hundred people screaming to talk aver the music, it's never seemed like a great venue for converstation. And now that I'm down here, I get to add another variable, attempting to discern the important words through loud music, hundreds of screaming voices, and a bastardized pronunciation of the english language. (I'm kidding, of course. I love the accents, but I feel better blaming them than my inability to understand my own language.)

Getting back on track, my first impressions of the Remarkables were pretty dismal. I tried each of the three chairs out, and didn't find anything exciting. The snow was miserable and the visibility was flat, making it difficult to see any bumps. I headed in for an early, long lunch (there was some live music which helped pass the time) and wondered why people talked so highly of this place.

Thankfully the afternoon was much better. The sun came out, making visibility better and softening up the snow. Over all it wasn't bad, but I can see why people like Coronet Peak better.

Tomorrow is going to be my first off day. It's supposed to snow tomorrow afternoon and night, which apparently makes the mountains quite miserable. Some new snow would be great, though. I've learned that while it hasn't snowed that often this year, when it has snowed it has snowed a bunch. The last snow fall was on July 21st (about 20cm), I'm ready for something fresh. The base is measure in cm (not meters), which means that they've got less than 3 feet of base snow. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for an ugly day tomorrow.