Big white thunder

You know you're having a good day when your fall lines take you through the steeps, trees and beyond the orange string boundary line. The snow was all very safe, despite the sheer slope angles, but it's always playing in the back of your mind "Caution Avalanche Danger". As I was making a few deep turns I heard an ear splitting BOOM!!!!! "Oh Bollocks" was my first utterance, I'd forgotten that the ski patrol were doing an avalanche demonstration at 2pm (and here I was in the avi terrain). I expected to see a cloud of white concrete chasing me down the mountainside as I nervously craned a glance back up slope. Thankfully though the avalanche demo was on the mountainside on the opposite valley, so I had a front row seat.

Now, anybody familiar with the Euro resort avalanche control will be aware that all this gubbins of detonating slopes with rather sophisticated explosives to rid of avalanche danger goes on in the earlier hours of the day, before the masses reach the slopes. But Canada, being a sharing and caring nation, elects to prime the slopes just after lunch, for everyone to enjoy the spectacle of hundreds of tonnes of snow being blasted down the mountainside at two hundred miles an hour.

I was at first a sceptic, however, it was all rather impressive, and I feel that the boys with the explisives did a good job - perhaps too good, seeing as though the snow cloud from the slide carried all the way up the other side of the valley, covering me in my own little whiteout blizzrd and freaking out a hoard of people who were still on the summit on my side of the hill!

Asides from gouging a chunk out of my board all the way to the core, it was yet another pucker day at Sunshine - but what else could it be when the sky is this colour;

I was looking for a cloud for scale in the photo, but alas...

We're still trying to get Brina fit and healthy. There's some mystery bug plaguing her system and hopefully an appointment with the powers that be at the hospital on Thursday will be able to shed some light. An on another health note, the bollock cancer scans are still showing that things are remaining A.OK in 2007 (lets hope it stays that way).

Work remains to be roomfulls of screaming and shouting little children, but so long as it's paying the bills for snowboard repairs then it's OK.

I hope the start of the year is going as you all planned and that you haven't broken your resolutions just yet (I still have to make one).

May you all stay within the boundaries (just)

S&S.