OnSno.com

Day 1 at Silver Star started at 8am. We woke up after a terrible night’s sleep – the bed was 3 pieces of foam – and slowly made our way downstairs in aches and pains. The lifts opened at 8:30am, so we wanted to try and be out nice and early to make the most of the day, even after such a poor night before. Breakfast was as was becoming normal – toast, cereal etc – and was rather uneventful. The weather looked fantastic, but unfortunately both Pip and I forgot to grab the camera, and so we have no evidence of this.

First stop of the day was to pick up lift tickets – we managed 1 adult, 1 student and 2 youths… not a bad effort. We hit the slopes not long after, heading first-up for one of the new lifts (since we had last been here), the Silver Woods Express. Unfortunately Ed’s run-sense led us to a nice blue run – more like a black run actually – steep, moguls, thick powder… wasn’t fun first run of the day (after having a day off the day before). We eventually got to the base, and caught the lift back up – we made sure we weren’t going to do another run like that early in the day.

We decided to make the most of the nice weather and attempted to cover as much of the mountain as possible – so that we could get our bearings, assuming the weather would turn bad as it did every other day at Kicking Horse. From the Silver Woods, we headed for the Comet (6-pack) Express to take us up to the Summit of the mountain. We headed straight for the back side of the mountain, however, as the queue at the base of this lift was shocking – it was Sunday, and this was the bottleneck of the mountain, but we weren’t coming back here today.

From the top of the Comet Express, we darted around the back of the mountain the long way – ‘Elderado’, the longest run on the mountain (8km) – and skied down to the base of the Powder Gulch Express, servicing the back of the mountain. We skied a number of runs here, before heading back to the Village for lunch.

Lunch was different today – at Bugaboos Bakery – having true bakery-style food. Both Pip and I had sausage rolls, while Nat had a Beef Pie, and Ed and Tess made similar choices. The meals were enjoyed greatly, as this was very different to the style of foods we had eaten this far on the journey. While the food was nice, due to the large volume of people inside the bakery, we had to eat outside – outside in the cold… It probably would have been smart to order a hot chocolate instead of a Coke – purely for the purpose of keeping warm – but we all survived and were glad to be moving again once we had finished eating.

After lunch we explored the rest of the mountain but made slow progress back to the house. I had to enrol in Uni classes at 2:30pm, so we called it an early day – well, most of us did – only Ed continued to ski until they wouldn’t let him anymore. After doing as many classes as was possible, we hit the shops in search of souvenirs and presents. Everyone but Ed (who was now too tired to walk) ventured across the hill to the village – only to find that most shops were closing, or were preparing to close… I guess Sunday night isn’t a busy time for them up here.

Shopping didn’t last overly long, and we then made our slow return back up the hill to the house (after working out whether or not it would be more worthwhile to wait for a shuttle bus or just walk). Spaghetti Bolognese was the order of the day, and this kept everyone more than happy. Following dinner, a customary CSI marathon was in order, and we watched a number of episodes before taking some time to get in touch with Kimberly, and catch up on news from back home.

Ed and I rearranged the bedding after this, and we managed to obtain a real mattress from one of the bunk beds that wasn’t being used and replaced our foam pieces with this. We hoped that this would allow us to get a more normal night’s sleep, and hopefully wake up in the morning not feeling like we had come off second-best in a fight.

We decided to put this to the test not long after, and everybody settled down for the night. Now that we were aware of the hot-spots on the mountain, we were all looking forward to getting back to those locations when the crowds disappeared tomorrow, and just hoped that the weather held off as it had during the day.

Keep your mouses poised to catch the latest news!