Studio711.com – Ben Martens

It’s time (or too late) for a Public Safety Announcement about deep snow safety. When I moved out to the Pacific Northwest, I learned about something called a tree well. Because of the large pine trees we have around here, snow doesn’t accumulate around the base of trees as quickly as it does on other parts of the hill. Also, normal snow gets packed down by skiers while snow around the base of a tree remains light and fluffy. What you’re left with is a black hole waiting to suck you in and kill you faster than you can ever imagine.

The typical scenario is that a skier falls on a run and slides head first underneath a tree. They fall down into the light powdery snow with their head near the trunk. The more they struggle, the more they become encased in snow and very quickly they suffocate and die.

This was driven home by the recent loss (?) of a Crystal Mountain local. He was an expert skier who didn’t show up at the bottom of a run with friends. Patrol and volunteers have been searching for him for well over a week and have not found him. It’s very likely that he fell into a tree well and won’t be found until the snow melts.

When there is any kind of deep snow, “ski and ride with a friend” is not an optional piece of guidance. Even if you’re with a friend you need to keep a close eye on each other. The last person in any group is always the most vulnerable. A tree well can kill you in a matter of minutes, faster than your friends can climb back up the hill even if they’re lucky enough to see what happened to you. The only real way to be safe is to avoid tree wells entirely. Ski in control and keep a wide berth from the trees.

For more information about tree wells, visit http://www.treewelldeepsnowsafety.com/

While we were bopping around Whistler a couple weekends ago, Jay and I pondered the history of Whistler Blackcomb. Once I got back home to my precious internet connection, I was able to educate myself. Since I love bulleted lists, I’ll present the history in that form. Feel free to read a more detailed version if you like.

• The area originally gained popularity as a fishing village around in the early 1900s.
• Whistler Mountain opened for skiing in 1966. It was originally called London Mt but was renamed for a local mountain marmot that whistles.
• Blackcomb Mountain opened separate from Whistler in 1980 and the two had quite a rivalry to provide the best terrain and most vertical feet.
• Whistler Mountain Ski Corp (owners of Whistler) merged with Intrawest (owners of Blackcomb) in 1997.

Other random facts I discovered while reading through their master plan:

• 45% of visitors to Whistler ride snowboards. That has been fairly steady since 2002. The Rocky Mountains have the lowest percentage of snowboarders (25%) in North America.
• Whistler receives about 25% more visitors than Blackcomb.
• A really busy day is about 25,000-27,000 visitors.
• There are roughly 58,705 “bed units” in the Whistler area.

This figure shows future plans for Blackcomb. Red lines are in the next phase of lifts and aqua lines are the phase after that. Most existing to me on Blackcomb are the glacier lift and Ruby Bowl.

And here is a similar figure for Whistler. Phase order is red, purple, yellow. There is quite a bit of lift replacement planned there as well as three new lifts from the based of Symphony. But the really big area is from the West Bowl down to Cheakamus Base (further down from Creekside.) That will open up a ton of new terrain.

Don’t get too excited though. Plans like this can look 20-30 years into the future and might never come to fruition for a lot of reasons. It’s fun to dream though!

I carry a GPS unit with me whenever I ski and and Whistler was no exception. I usually take the GPX files and map them with Nat Geo’s TOPO program, but I don’t have the map data for British Columbia. I stumbled across a very nice web app called uTrack. You upload your GPX file, wait a few seconds, and then you’re left with a ton of stats and a map that you can view with Google Earth.

So how did we do? A normal ski day for me is something between 15,000 and 20,000 vertical feet. Not only did we surpass 30,000 feet each day, but we unknowingly skied almost exactly the same amount each day. Over the three days we skied 93,800 vertical feet and covered 156 miles! (The mileage number includes the lifts.) We averaged 15mph on our downhill runs, and Jay topped 50mph at one point!

Each day we rode the Peak 2 Peak gondola. We skied one mountain in the morning, rode the gondola over after lunch, and spent the remainder of the day on the other mountain. I don’t think we ever planned that but it was nice to have the option and it’s an amazing ride. If you’ve never heard of that gondola, check out some of the world record stats.

And finally, here are some 3D maps of our ski route each day. Red indicates high elevation and green is the lower elevations. Whistler is on the right and Blackcomb is on the left.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, I headed up to Mt. Baker with AndyM and LorenzP. If I didn’t have people to go with, I don’t know that I could have crawled out of bed when my alarm went off at 4:30am. It’s about 3.5 hours from my house so I don’t get up there very often. However, they have the most open terrain in the area right now so that was our destination.

The forecast called for 1-2 feet of snow overnight on Thursday but that never really materialized. I was pleasantly surprised by the coverage of the runs though. I left my rock skis at home and wasn’t disappointed. We didn’t venture off the groomed runs very much though because there were still a lot of rocks, trees and stumps poking through the snow. It will take another 3-4 feet of snow to open up those areas.

We only did about 10,000 vertical feet (roughly half of a normal day for me) but my legs were burning at the end. I guess I haven’t used a lot of those muscles in a while. Thankfully nobody ended up with injuries on the first day of the season.

All in all I spent as much time on the road as I did on the hill, but it was still good to get out there and make some turns. It was also fun to ski with these guys for the first time. We all skied at roughly the same speed so hopefully we can team up again. With no wedding to plan this year, I’m looking forward to hitting the slopes a bit more than I did last year.

It’s not even Thanksgiving but it feels like winter here in Seattle. Because of the proximity of the Puget Sound, we rarely get much below 40 degrees, but highs today and tomorrow will struggle to reach 30. The TV weathermen have been building hype around snow which whips everyone into a frenzy, but anyone who looks at the maps will see that the chances are very very low for any snow to stick unless you’re in Bellingham, in the foothills, or down south.

The good news is that all this cold weather has meant snow in the mountains. The resorts are slowing coming out of hibernation. Whistler opened on Friday. Crystal opened a couple lifts on Friday as well but they are usually willing to open with very little snow. I’ve heard reports of a lot of rocks in the snow there. Mt. Baker is almost 100% open. They have quite a bit more snow up there which is usually the case. Stevens Pass needs another good dump (realistically Crystal does too) and Snoqualmie will be the last to open because of their lower elevation.

It’s fun to see the ski season spinning up! I’m hoping to get out over Thanksgiving break for some warm up runs. The skiing doesn’t get really good off the trails until we have ~5 feet on the ground so it will take a couple more good storms to get us there. Usually by Christmas you can ski anywhere you want without too much fear of destroying your gear.

Viva la Nina!