Monday, November 27, 2006

Knox Mountain

Having only lived here for 18 months I don't really know what a typical winter is like in Kelowna. If I were to go by my impressions from last winter I could summarize in one word..."grim!". There was snow on the ground for about 10 days in December. The rest of the time the temperature hovered around freezing and it was grey and damp.

So this year has been a complete surprise. Late last week the temperature started dropping, the snow started falling, and it hasn't let up for days. I've been in a good mood ever since!

I hadn't realized how much I enjoy living day to day in a "real" winter. Certainly here in Kelowna we escape into real winter every time we head to the mountains on the weekend. But it's not the same as having snow in the yard and hearing the crunch of cold snow under your boots and just plain living with snow and cold every day.

To celebrate I dragged a very reluctant Brenda out to Knox Mountain on Sunday. Knox is about 2km north of our place. It's a killer climb on a bike in the summer so I figured we could squeak in a few turns on our tele gear.

Strange to see snow over what is essentially desert...

Not too busy at the first lookout today...

Looking down at the mill and the logs that were floated across the lake...


Yes, we did actually turn.

Malakwa Gorge

On Saturday we made our first trip of the season to Malakwa. There was another first on this trip which has made me resolve to always bring extra camera batteries. Read on...

Malakwa is about a 2 hour drive north of Kelowna (map). The skiing here is accessed by driving up an active logging road that is maintained throughout the winter. Ah yes, logging, a mixed blessing here in BC. You generally need a 4-wheel or an all-wheel drive vehicle to make it up the road in winter -- or at least a vehicle with good clearance and tire chains. Last year we typically skied at kilometer 15 and 18. The terrain there is just fantastic. This year the road will be maintained only to kilometer 12 and perhaps even less than that after Christmas. So today turned into a bit of an exploratory trip on the terrain around 12k.

Due to said battery malfunction I only managed a couple of photos. Here's Fred at the trailhead with his magnificent $25 skis...

Brenda and Steve doing the boot shuffle...


To make a long story short we didn't make a lot of turns in today. I think after a couple of hours we realized that this would be the case and we resigned ourselves to simply trying to connect this new area with the other areas that we were already familiar with. We slogged up an existing skin track for 3-4 hours and thank goodness there was a track because trail breaking was brutal. We made our way along a ridge line kind of wondering where we were. The sun broke through on one side of the ridge and we realized that we were above the north facing bowl which is the main feature of the kilometer 15 area. The south winds had loaded the bowl with fresh snow and there was a large fracture line near the top as well as other signs of recent avalanche activity. Needless to say we didn't ski it.

Anyway the point of this long post and of mentioning the whole camera thing is that here we were treated to the amazing spectacle of a Brocken Spectre.

A what!? To quote Wikipedia...
"A Brocken spectre...is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer cast...upon the upper surfaces of clouds that are below the mountain upon which the observer stands. The spectre appears when the sun shines from behind a climber who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist. The light projects the climber's shadow forward through the mist. The head of the figure is often surrounded by the glowing halo-like rings of coloured light."

We each cast a giant shadow that hovered in the distance and was ringed by circles of rainbow like colours.

It was quite a sight. Here are some Brocken Spectre images via Google Image search.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Asulkan Cabin

A long weekend in British Columbia. Brenda and I went to the Asulkan Cabin in Rogers Pass with Fred. We arrived at the hut after dark on Saturday evening. It had started snowing soon after we left the parking lot and it didn't let up until we returned on Monday afternoon.

Our fellow hut dwellers were Jeff Colvin, Joel, Chantalle, Sheri, Steve, and Steve's dog Oscar (all from Revelstoke) and Kyle, 2 friends, and their dog Samir (all from Vernon).

If you view the larger version of this photo you can just see Samir on the steps to the hut...

















It snowed like heck, the wind howled like crazy, and we skied the tree triangle for the entire weekend. Just another typical stay at the asulkan!

Here's Brenda...

and Fred...

and some ptarmigan...


More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/agparker/AsulkanCabin

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Inauspicious Beginnings

For this blog and for the ski season. Since acquiring a pair of Jak BC skis over the summer (half price!) my old skis have become official rock skis. I thrashed the heck out of them at Apex yesterday during the ACC Okanagan's AGM. Conditions were, in a word, diabolical. Oh well. The season has finally begun!