Oh, how I'm taken away...

Many adventures behind! So, I'll try and put the winter so far in a nutshell (or a few paragraphs).

Winter began with huge amounts of snow falling in November. Ewen Clarke, good friend of mine made a video of our trip to Jumbo Pass hut over the Remembrance Day weekend:

Jumbo Pass - November 2009 from Ewen Clark on Vimeo.

After this crazy start to the ski season, I mellowed things out with some much needed girl time. I lead a group of 7 amazing women into the Alpine Club of Canada's Elk Lakes Cabin for the weekend. Emily Laycock helped me with this one, and did an awesome job c0-leading her first ACC trip! We found some awesome snow in a nice N facing alpine bowl to the S of the hut on Mt. Foch. Ridiculous amounts of cheese, drink, and chocolate PLUS all that skiing made for an all around wicked weekend.

The lot of ladies outside the humungous ACC Elk Lakes cabin (above).

In December my sister Julie came out to visit me in Canmore to try out ski touring for the first time. She is an awesome xc skier, so when she strapped on some downhill skis for the first time it looked pretty good! We spend a day skiing at Sunshine, where Julie found the green and blue runs "too flat and slow", so we mostly skied on the blacks and double blacks in the trees! Then we skied up Observation with another friend of mine, Brace Lee, who is a true ski bum if you have ever met one! We had a great day up there, even though we started off in -30C temperatures. The next few days Ian joined Julie & I for a few days at the Pass. The first night we stayed at Wheeler Hut, and then spent two nights at the Asulkan Hut.

Above, a picture of the three of us (well, our shadows) skinning up the triangle moraine on a spectacular December afternoon.

Above, Julie & I happy as ever on top of Triangle Moraine in the Asulkan Valley (Asulkan Hut behind us to the left).

Okay, more tomorrow- my banana bread just came out of the oven!