Kristjan, Connor and I spent the night in Golden on Friday so that we could get an early start on Saturday. Based on the quoted opening times from the Kicking Horse site, we got there about 8:15 - supposedly 15 minutes before we could trade our Snowmax cards for lift tickets and 45 minutes before the lifts were to open.

Turns out we were late. There was already a line up for the ticket window (all 2 of them) and the gondola started running very shortly too. Stood in the ticket line for 20 to 30 minutes before an employee started manually punching the Snowmax cards. Meanwhile they couldn't even find Kristjan's card. Once we were ticketed up, it was only a 45 minute wait to grab a ride in the gondola. For some reason they had neither of their base chairs running. So the only way up was in the gondola. It's a very poor setup, but luckily the terrain and snow was amazing.

I didn't even take a camera as I wanted to test out the new camcorder/helmet cam setup. Overall I was fairly impressed with it and I'm sure the next few times will yield better results. The first person helmet cam perspective grows old pretty quick, so shooting more third person is my goal for next time out.

I've put together about 4 minutes of video. Nothing fancy at all - just trimmed out the junk, clipped the audio, inserted some tunes and it runs in chronological order.



Sunday night I went to see the new Warren Miller movie - Off the Grid. I'm not a big fan of their stuff, but the hype around here was the fact that they'd come to Castle last spring to film. Supposedly they liked it so much, they produced a 12 minute promo called the Secret Castle. I had high hopes. I should have known better.

From what I can figure out, Travel Alberta spent some money to bribe them into coming. Pretty normal, I'm sure most resorts do the same. The crew showed up, the weather tanked and the story goes that the pros went home. So they called on some local riders. I think the film crew probably went home too. Anyhow, there was some inbounds footage - pretty weak stuff, small airs, lame powder riding shots (it was late season), then the big hype was the first decent of Haig Mountain (which is where the new chair goes - but nowhere near the top where this was filmed from) Anyhow, they finally drop these 3 skiers and 1 boarder off on the top of Haig. They hype it up, 45 degree pitch, cliff bands, etc. etc. First guy down drops a 10-15 footer at the first cliff band, then finds a path to ride through the 2nd band, then that's it. One of the skiers drops a 30 to 40 footer at the bottom of the run, blows the landing, and they hype it up as being a 60 footer or something. Cue up some night footage with them doing freestyle tricks over a burning fire and it's a wrap?

I stuck around and watched the actual movie - the Secret Castle doesn't even seem like it was shot/edited by the Warren Miller folks as it had a whole different feel to it. Must have been a paid placement thing? The actual movie has 0% Castle content. It did have some good footage from Kicking Horse, Chatter Creek, Chugach Powder and Points North Heli though.