27th January, 2003

So it rained yesterday, and has been really warm (like +5 at the bottom of the hill). This basically meant the snow turned to mush on the whole mountain, and has refrozen as nasty hard-packed ice. It'll take a couple of decent dumps of snow to sort it out, so we might have had the best riding of the holiday already. We went to check out the park today, and whilst it was also pretty hard, it wasn't too icy, so we played around on some of the rails for a while. This is Mike Hinshelwood 50-50'ing a rail - as you can see the sun came out and so filming conditions were perfect. Ivy took her skis and shot some follow-cam shots, including a long one of us going down the run at the end of the day. Our experiments with the "helmet cam" - my camera wedged underneath a goggle strap - didn't really work very well. We have hilarious outtakes footage once more, however...

25th January, 2003

It's been totally amazing for the past couple of days, with fresh powder and snow all day. We found some cracking tree runs just off the top of the Bear chair (if you're in Fernie, left off the chair then hard left to find the trees) and have shot some jump footage in what we're calling the "powder field". Nader arrived last night from Hawaii, and so we all went out and got hideously drunk. I think we had about four shooters in the last bar we went to (pretty waitress, what can you do?) and then stumbled home behaving badly. There's a small, snow covered park complete with band-stand on they way - this is a shot of how it looked to me last night, and inset are some grabs from me jumping over the edge of it (seemed like a good idea at the time). Nader warned me there wasn't any snow for my landing, but I insisted there was plenty and happily bounded over the fence anyway. Ouch.

19th January, 2003

Three days off, first day back... Cue big wipeout on a green run. Full-on cartwheel over the nose of my board. Anyhoo, we built a kicker near the house and did some jumps on snowboards and the snow deck. This is Colin, on Mike's snowboard, wearing his snowdeck hat, performing a switch backside 180. Well in fact I'm not sure which trick he's trying but it sounded impressive, right? He's not on his own board, so the switch part is true. Oh, and I bought some new bindings (the bit that attaches your boots onto the board). The existing ones are a bit cheap and crappy, but I got some Burton P1-HD's to replace them. The difference is amazing - they're really comfy and ultra sexy looking. Sweet.