I headed to the Nelson area a few days early to take care of a few things and get warmed up for the Valhalla weekend - before I could even arrive, I found myself on the side of the Salmo-Creston pass with a blown tranny. No cell coverage and after flagging down a good samaritan, I waited an hour or so in ever colder temperatures for Blair and the tow truck. The sled deck (and sled) complicated the tow and it was another 90 minutes before we were on our way.


The next day, I found myself outside the Bank of Montreal in Nelson with some "free" money in my hands. I had to sign something, so I can't tell you why, but if you've been here in the past or know how the google cache works (it seems archive.org never got around to archiving this site), there's a good chance you'll know that the money wasn't really "free". Cash in hand, I went and filled up by pack with those backcountry essentials, first aid kit, snow saw, snow kit, thermometer, etc. etc.


On Thursday, we woke up to COLD temperatures, but decided to go to Red anyway. No new snow in almost a week and I thought there'd still be some good stuff in the trees. Damn locals were pretty thorough and left us just about nothing, so we started exploring. I love this mountain more and more each time I go. We found some really nice chutes, some with mandatory air exits or entries, but with the lack of fresh, we didn't ride many of them.


After a couple chutes, we scoped another line and headed down it. Remember those thorough locals? When everything else is tracked out, and suddenly you're riding fresh... something's up! A couple turns later and the fresh went from great, to crusty junk on rock. This was followed shortly by even less snow and more rock, most of it vertical. We picked our way down, the best we could, but eventually both Blair and I faced mandatory air exits. I had about 20 feet down with about 10-15 out needed to an unknown landing. Blair faced a more vertical drop, but closer to 30 or 40 feet. Any other day (ie. not before a cat trip with friends that we'd looked forward to for quite a while) and I'm sure we both would have done it. Neither of us wanted a blown knee or something stupid, so we turned around and climbed. It proved to be quite the challenge due to the lack of snow. As luck would have it, I found a rope tied to a tree, used it to pull myself up, then helped Blair up and over. A few minutes later and we were on the traverse that the locals use.


That was enough for one day of riding, off to the chalet to warm up, then I took a drive by "my" condo that I've had my eye on for a while. Still for sale and looking much nicer with all the snow on it compared to the summer time look the last time I'd seen it. Real estate seems slow - lots of the same listings for quite a few months now. Might be time to throw out the lowball sooner or later....


On the way back to Blair's, I stopped at the transmission shop. $2400 later and they were almost done - truck was out on the road test, so we had some time to kill in Trail. On the way up, we'd noticed a covered staircase (they're all over Trail) that looked very familiar as it's been in numerous snowboarding videos. We climbed up it to check the access - super easy from a fence, then walked down and back up again with boards. The snow in Trail was pretty crusty, so we didn't get the big powder sprays like in the videos, but it was still a pretty interesting ride. There'll be video once I finish editing the Valhalla footage, so check back soon


Here's a teaser from day one at Valhalla too - more photos and video coming soon once I sort through all of it. Peter and I had just traded boards and I was riding his Prior swallow tail - we were "buddied" up despite the fact that it was a mostly open face - typically at cat/heli you only pair up in tighter trees for treewell dangers. We were dropped off above a cat road and warned to keep the speed low due to the 3 to 4 foot drop to the cat road. I dropped in, made a few turns, got used to Peter's board and found a small rock to air off, landed it, made a turn or two, then, um, what, that was pretty disorientating.

Guide called it a size 1.5 - only about a 30cm crown, but fairly wide as you can see from the pic. Caused by a slight convex rollover onto unsupported slope (the cat road) That same cat road also absorbed a lot of the momentum and kept it from progressing past the cat road. After all that, my tree buddy Peter was still pretty clueless as to what went down. He later told me, yeah, I was riding down, then it went all hardpack and the cat road was covered up - no drop... great, thanks Peter!


I'd been running the helmet cam on every run and this is what the avalanche looked like from my perspective