Teddy Bear Trees

The plan was to explore the Christiana Ridge area across from Bostock but the van wouldn't start at the Visitors Center on Sunday morning. Bollocks! Non of us being mechanics we quickly exhausted our list of amateur obvious solutions. It seemed like a starter or solenoid type problem; the battery was fine but at each turn of the key the only noise heard was a single disappointing 'click' from under the hood.

Nick suggested we try to bump start it. Now I consider myself a bit of a bump start aficionado, a true connoisseur of the art, but this looked pretty dubious. The van weighs well over 2 tonnes, the parking lot was almost level and covered in compact snow, and there was hardly any space to get a good run at it. The only thing worse than a dead VW van in the middle of nowhere is a dead VW van in the middle of nowhere in a really inconvenient place. But Nick was confident so he and and Brenda (all 100lbs of her) got behind and gave it everything they had.

The van hesitated for a moment, then began to slowly, ponderously, painfully roll across the lot. After 20 meters we were moving at no more than a leisurely walking pace with no signs of an imminent increase in speed. From my place in the driver's seat I watched the snowbank at the opposide end of the lot get bigger and bigger through the windshield. I jumped out and added my own weight for 10 steps or so and then quickly hopped back in again as we ran out space. It looked hopeless. I got 'er in 2nd, popped the clutch and....

Vrooom!

No bother at all. I was amazed.

Confident in our ability to do it all again we lined the van up for a repeat performance at the end of the day and went for a couple of runs in Teddy Bear Trees.



That's the best photo I can come up with, taken from across the valley on Grizzly Shoulder. We'd been up there a couple of times before but always in poor light and we'd stayed completely in the trees. This time we were able to climb further along the ridge and drop in on the cleaner lines that begin higher up.



We had a couple of really good long runs that left the tele skiers in our group gasping for air. No photos of the skiing; it's one of those runs that doesn't really have a safe place to stop on the way down. Teddy Bear Trees must have one of the best effort-to-reward ratios in the pass.

We bump started the van again and got her home without incident, which is when I realized that Kelowna is actually a really, really flat place.