Last weekend (9th-11th) was the annual work ski trip, and this year we went to Big White. That's in the interior of BC, about 50km from Kelowna and close to the Okanagan valley; that's the place we went wine-tasting last year.
There were around 40 people on this year's trip, a substantial increase from last year. As usual the journey on the bus was gruelling - 7.5 hours there and 6.5 back. We got there around 11pm on Friday evening. We were tired, but still squeezed in a little beer before bed ;)
Big White apparently has the nickname "Big White-Out" because its location is often locked in low cloud, making visibility poor. We were lucky on the Saturday to get sunshine and blue skies for several hours. Steph went off skiing with Lauren and Woody who were also on the trip. I tried to get myself onto an organized snowshoe tour, but they couldn't find the guide who was doing it. Great. By 12.30pm I'd still heard nothing, so I thought I'd give up on it and snowshoe by myself.
At Big White, you snowshoe on the cross-country ski trails in the Nordic area. With starting late, I only got an hour and a half on the trails before they closed for the day. A lot of the trails I walked initially were kind of dull - rather like a road through a forest that was covered in snow. Towards the end of my walk though, I discovered a 0.5k cross-country ski trail that was double black diamond difficulty. This was much better - narrow and with plenty of gradient. I really started to enjoy it at that point, and vowed to find more of those trails the next day.
After the snow fun, we had apres-ski put on by the tour company, and then hot-tubbed for a while. The hotel this year was fine but not as luxurious as last year, and the single hot tub was super-crowded, but we squeezed in somehow. Later we went out for some food at a nice restaurant called The Copper Kettle - recommended if you ever go to Big White; it was the best place to eat that we found.
There was more skiing and boarding on Sunday, and I got out early and went straight for the good trails on my snowshoes. The weather was grey and it snowed gently most of the time. I did a good 5km in total over about 2 hours or so, of which about 2.5km was on the hard but fun trails. The last trail I walked called "The Juice Is Loose" was the toughest by far. It climbed steeply up a hillside for about 0.75km and the snow was really deep; it was pretty much like breaking a fresh trail. My shoes would sink a good 20 or 30cm with each step. Heavy going! At some points it got quite hard to follow the trail - it was marked by orange tags on the trees which was fortunate because there was little sign of any other footprints. The only tracks I did see looked like paw prints, but there were no shoe prints accompanying them so maybe it was a wolf? Eeeek. Needless to say, that motivated me to keep going at a reasonable pace :)
All in all, it was a great weekend. A long way to go, but worth it I think as we both had a great time. Now that we have worked at Radical for a while, we know more people which made the whole weekend a little more sociable. I think we preferred Sun Peaks from last year on balance though - maybe they will go back there next year. I've uploaded a few photos of my snowshoeing to Flickr - find them here. I'll try to get together some more photos of other stuff.
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