Last week the awesome people at Rip Curl Canada decided to fly Tim (my co-worker from our Burlington store) & myself to BC for a quick day of catboarding. Why? Pretty much just cuz they're rad I think. What's catboarding? It's when you get into one of these:
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| (actual cat we piled into) |
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| (actual run we did) |
The travel itinerary looked foreboding: the plan was for us to catch a 7am flight out of TO to Vancouver then boot over to the Rip Curl offices for a little chat then jump in vehicles & start in on an impressive drive to Rossland BC. The first flaw in this fine plan was when I missed my flight. Yep, first time for everything I guess. Slept right through my 2am alarm & woke up to the sound of Tim texting my phone: "en route to the airport, how you doing?". I was not doing good at all, in fact I was pretty much having a hernia. I had enough foresight to pack the night before so in a mad scramble I frantically threw everything in my car & stomped on the gas.
Leaving Huntsville @ just after 5am for a 7am flight is like trying to get into The Pub at 7pm on St. Patty's day - not happening. Nonetheless, I made the effort & my poor car valiantly reached new speeeds and I rolled into the airport at the exact time my plane was taking off. Fortunately, Vancouver is a popular spot, and thanks to Tim's research I was able to catch a flight just an hour and a half later @ 8:30, upon landing I would have to just cab it across Vancouver to the RipCurl offices. Disaster averted.
I had planned to meet my friend and former roommate Tick at the aiport for a quick bit of bro time as he lives out there now & I rarely see him but I hadn't counted on missing my flight.
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| Tick. |
Thankfully he didn't have much else to do that day because he actually stuck around & was waiting with 2 empty coffee cups when I stumbled into the luggage zone. Bro time was had while I waited for my board bag to get spat out & then we both hopped in a cab & headed to North Van. After dropping Tick at a skytrain station I ended up @ The RipCurl Head Office to some well deserved razzing after which we promptly hucked our bags on the top of the rented Navigators (yeah, RipCurl does it proper) & headed out of town.
I love driving in BC, and it had been a while. As we made our way out of Vancouver the scenery turned from foggy and flat to mountainous and beautiful and us Ontario boys, tired as we were, ate it up.
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| We stopped in Hope for a truck stop lunch. Going by the graffiti in the bathroom stall there wasn't much hope in Hope. |
We soon picked up libations that fit conveniently in the cooler-type compartment in the middle of the Navigator as well as other posse members and continued on to Kelowna. There we met up with the other Nav which was filled with Rip Curl dudes plus some retail folks that had won sales contests in their respective shops & thus were also in for some catboarding the next day. After many road beers and a stop at a wicked pizza joint we rolled into Rossland.
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| I forget what this place was called or where it was, but the pizza was ammmmazing. |
The next morning I woke up extra early (somehow) for 2 reasons: I was sore and having some kind of idea of what I was in for that coming day, I needed to try to become unsore. Hot tubs are awesome for that, and so while I watched the 6am snow fall on Red Mountain I stretched as best I could and got stoked for the day.
By 8:30 everyone was geared up and hanging out in the living room where we met one of our guides for the day, a radical Aussie named Keiran who was also one of the proprietors of the catskiing operation we would be with all day, Big Red Cats. Waivers were signed, we all piled into a party bus and eventually unloaded after 20 minutes of upward driving at "the pit". The pit is the staging area where we would be going over avalanche safety procedures, loading into the cats & then heading the rest of the way up into Big Red Cat's 20,000 acre tenure in the range behind Red Mountain.
As our other guide Chris went over avalanche safety with our group I quickly came to realize that this was not going to be anything like even my few times riding tracked out pow days in Whistler. Judging from the looks Tim was trading with me as we strapped on avalanche transceivers, he felt the same.
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| More than happy to wear one. |
After a quick practice session searching for each other (actually our transcievers) under the snow, we all piled into the cat, it lurched into gear, & we continued our journey upwards.
What followed was the best day of snowboarding of my life. The top of our first run was breathtaking because a) I was pretty much scared of ending up in a tree well my 1st run but also because b) there was sweet, sweet knee to thigh deep powder in all directions. Even the members of our group that had done this before were beyond stoked on the conditions, so we knew we were in for some gnarly riding, and that's exactly what we got. It took 2 runs for Tim & I (the only Ontarians) to get our powder legs, and from then on in it was face shots, huge layed out slashes & giant smiles the rest of the day.
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| Timmy, stoked. |
The runs were diverse & our guides were amazing - right away you could tell they knew the terrain inside & out and clearly loved their jobs (no doubt). What does it feel like to ride powder like that? One word: floating. We cruised wide open powder fields, tight trees, steep stuff, burnt tree zones & for a few of the shredders whose riding clearly indicated they had put in some heavy days this season, cliffs. It was so rad to watch Rip Curl dudes Myro & Drew, as well as other posse members & our guide Chris send it off cliffs & drops from the bottom of a run. Awesome.
The only glitch during my epic day came on the 2nd run that I decided to film with my helmet-mounted gopro. Using this trip as the perfect excuse, I had picked one up 2 days beforehand and was stoked to try it out. The sticky mount that held the cam onto my helmet seemed pretty secure, a perceived fact that I had even mentioned on the cat ride up. About 3 quarters down our second run, with my cam happily filming away, my general stoke-age overcame me & I cranked up my speed, popped off a roller & promptly cartwheeled, starting with my head, into a giant mound of snow. The first thing I noticed, other than that it feels great to fall into powder, was that my gopro, inlcuding helmet mount, was long gone. After frantically looking uphill towards my bombhole I quickly realized that the chances of finding my cam in 40 sq ft of knee deep powder were about the same as winning a Toyota on Roll Up The Rim. Luckily for me, Tim was sticking with the buddy system & had stopped up above. After frantically digging up snow, even more frantically after I realized everyone was waiting at the bottom for us, Tim came up with gold at the exact moment I had stood up to leave it for the bears. Thank You Tim - there would've been that oh-so-bitter edge to the day if it were not for your methodical chopping search method. Stoked, we rocketed through the rest of the run and jumped into the cat to continue with our awesome day.
For footage of this little tumble, check the footy to the left - when it's clear the camera is buried, fast forward a bit, cuz I don't know how to edit these little vids yet, sorry
The rest of the day was epic, and we wrapped things up after an impressive 11 runs (even by the guide's standards they said) and smiling like retards we headed back to the chalet. A hot tub session avec beers was definitely in order and after some dude soup time, we exited the tub & freshies in hand were treated to an amazingly delicious catered dinner that stuffed us all to our eyeballs. After dinner mandatory Shot Ski shots were done by all, using the nicest custom made shotski that I have ever laid eyes on. Really, a custom made shotski, with double sized skiboot shaped shot glasses. Now Drew had cleverly gone into town before dinner and picked up a pile of beer, which we got right into & managed to completely decimate by the end of the night. Beers turned into drinking games and those that had gotten past the exhaustion level sat down to an intense game of ZOO.
It would have taken at least 3 buckets of water to wake me up from my sleep that night, but it was another early morning the next day that saw us all half-heartedly toss our board bags back onto the top of the trucks and head back out on the road. After a delicious lunch at a sweet euro deli in Kelowna & lots of high fives Tim & I caught a flight back to Van and finally Toronto. Being weird, I can't sleep on planes and by the time I rolled my board bag outta the aiport it was almost midnight EST and I was starting to get to that strange beyond tired point where people probably start to see things. Undeterred I chugged the coffee that Tim's mom was gracious enough to provide for Tim & I upon arrival, jumped in my poor car once again & this time made my way slowly home. My car though, still harbouring feelings of hostility about its treatment on the way to the airport, had other ideas. After making sure the fuel gauge was not working it promptly ran out of gas right before Barrie. Which meant after a friendly cop & finally the weird CAA dude stopped by, I rolled into Huntsville around 3am. I only mention this, because even with the rattling start & end to my trip, it was still worth every second.
HUGE thanks to everyone at Rip Curl Canada that made this happen, Chris & Keiran @ Big Red Cats & all the awesome people I met on this trip who made it epic! Cheers!
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