Well it has been just
over 3 months since our last story and during that time we’ve been doing a lot
of skiing and snowboarding... and not much else. Our original plan was to move to Canada for
the winter, get a job on a ski hill and be ski bums. However we didn’t have much luck at getting a
ski field job (no ski bum job experience and too many serious jobs on our CVs),
but in the end we were glad we didn’t get a job. Instead we got to go ski every
day we wanted to, all the powder days, and we weren’t bored out of minds
scanning tickets for $9 an hour.
We based ourselves in
a small town called Golden in eastern British Columbia. The main reason for
going to Golden was the local ski hill: Kicking Horse. Kicking Horse has steep alpine
bowls with several gnarly ridges and lots of chutes. It is definitely not a beginners hill in fact
it doesn’t even have a learners slope. It was a great season, a bit patchy in
December, but then we had a big dump in January and then consistent snowfalls most
weeks after. We had more powder days
than we can remember but the standout run of the season was first tracks into
Fuez bowl after a foot of snow.
We ended up living
slightly south of the town in a nice house with Colleen who owned the place. We
also had a another flatmate for about 6 weeks but unfortunately he fell off a
cliff at the ski field and hurt himself pretty badly so had to head home to
Ontario. We were kept fairly busy just doing the chores round the house. The
drive needed shovelling every time it snowed and there was always wood to split
for the wood burner. We also had to shovel snow off the roof a couple of times
leaving big snow banks around the edges of the house, these got put to good use
as snowboard jumps.
Golden isn’t a pretty
town. But it has a great location,
situated close to three national parks with several ski fields within day trip
distance. The town is pretty small, with
a population of just under 4,000 + a few ski bums. It’s one of those towns where you run into
everyone all the time, recognise half the town by face from seeing them around
at the supermarket or pub and everywhere in between. The town centre is pretty small but has all
the main types of shops, although some shops do double up on functions...to get
a passport photo in Golden you have to go to the shoe shop. Surprisingly for a
small town it had several good restaurants including one of the best rated in
Canada.
After spending 2 years
in Australia we got used to extreme heat now it was time to acclimatise to
extreme cold. A warm day in Golden was
-5, a cold day -25 or less. The number
of days when the temperature got above zero I can count on one hand. You could tell how cold it was by how fast
your nostril hairs froze when you walked outside. I even ended up with frozen eyelashes one day
when we went snowshoeing at -27 degrees. The cold weather caused a few issues
for our car. The locks all started
freezing up (we were reduced to climbing
in the boot of our station wagon for a while as both the passenger and driver
door locks stopped working) until our flatmate told us about a magic bottle of
lock de-icer that you can buy from the local hardware store. When it was really cold the car windows would
only freeze on the inside (it was too dry for ice to form on the outside).
On the days we didn’t
go skiing we often went snow shoeing.
Golden has a number of mountain biking tracks which become good
snowshoeing trails in winter. Nearby
Yoho national park also has a number of trails open to snow shoe on in the
winter. One of the highlights was snow shoeing to a frozen Wapta Falls. So we now have a pair of snow shoes each
which may not see much action back in New Zealand.
We managed to get a
few odd jobs at times. Mainly cleaning flash holiday houses on the ski hill. They
were all huge and one would take all day to clean. At another we thought we
were done until we opened a door we thought was a cupboard only to find it was
a huge home theatre. Chris also did a bit of work clearing snow off roofs.
