Panorama skiing

  Panorama, British Columbia, Canada
Monday, March 8, 2004

No time for articulate prose right now, I'm too busy with uni work. So here's an email excerpt...


I'm almost home from Panorama, my bus home though doesn't come for about 20 mins so I am at the university library. I left my backpack with the library people downstairs. I had a fantabulous time, it was great. Definitely worth 300 bucks. I am an intermediate skier now, as opposed to a beginner. I was even teaching others how not to snowplough, if that makes sense. It was so much fun.

The first day was hard work though, I went out with Marie (French) Marion (Canadian, from BC originally) and Sarah (fellow Adelaidian, in 21st dinner pictures), but Sarah worked in Canada last winter hence is more experienced. Everyone was much better that me, and I was struggling! We got to the top of the second lift (it takes three to get to the very top) and reached the top of this slope and I was like 'whoa - guys, I'm not sure about this' but of course once you get to that point you can't exactly just turn back. So I spent all day snowploughing down these fearsomely steep (by my standards) and icy peaks. I was kind of disappointed because by the time I left Hotham when I was there I was doing black runs, but I was seriously struggling on these slopes at Panorama. I didn't fall over - not even once all weekend - but I wasn't really having fun, wasting too much energy on staying upright. That night when we were looking on the map - lo and behold we'd been doing black runs all afternoon! No wonder! 4 years with no practice and I'd just been launched back into black runs! It had been pretty damn cold, too. Still it made me feel much, much better.



On the second day I wanted to have fun, so I went out with three people who were not quite as experienced as me (so that I could boost my ego from being worst of the bunch the day before), and I planned our itinerary from the map. It was a perfect blue sky sunshine day, we went on this really long, windy but relatively flat blue run route of about 6 runs to get back to the bottom, it was soooo beautiful, and as they weren't downhill, relatively secluded.

On Saturday night we went to the Glacier, the Panorama resort night club, and as there were about 100 UofC students between the International Business Student Club and the Ski Club, who went with us. I got to know this chick Nadine, who is the girlfriend of Rob one of the German exchange guys, he's from Berlin, and she is too obviously, she's just here for two weeks, so now I have someone I know in Berlin to show me around.

Today was probably the most fun as it had been getting fairly icy as the snow melted in the sunshine, but it dumped down this morning, so lots of fun to play in. I got kind of soggy as the snow in BC is not as dry as in Calgary, and I had to wipe off my goggles regularly from so much snow, but it was worth it for the better skiing.