Concerts and Films

A bit of a recap from the past month or so. I went and saw a Chris Cornell solo concert which was pretty sweet. I had seen em once before in NZ and although the concert was pretty similar it was still amazing. Got another Chris Cornell shirt so I'm slowly building up a collection of band shirts again here. I also went and saw Ed Kowalchk solo which was OK. It was pretty clear he was in a different league to Chris though. Just not as good on guitar or at singing! I was also pretty stoked to get a ticket to see Pearl Jam. I had tried to get tickets when they went on sale but all the GA tickets had sold out. Then I thought I would check Craigslist one week out from the concert and some guys wife couldn't make it and he was selling the ticket. When I had a yarn to him at the gig he said I was the first person to get in touch about 10min after he posted the ad. After that he had dozens of people get in touch offering him beer and dinner and stuff! I was pretty lucky! The concert itself was incredible. They played for just over three hours! It was awesome to be about a 2 min walk from home after it finished!

I also went to see some pretty inspiring adventure movies at the Banff film festival. I thoroughly recommend going to check out the festival if it ever makes it close to you. The common theme amongst all the films seemed to be that the people in them were doing exactly what wanted to be doing. I went with Matt, Lieke and Dave from my running group and we went and had dinner afterwards and talked about how we weren't out being as awesome as all the people in the films we just saw. Note to self: buy snow shoes!

Other notable events were going to check out a new pub in town call "The Craft Beer Market". Its a massive warehouse thing that has been converted into a pub/restaurant. They have over 100 beers on tap. Needless to say I have spent far too much money there already and it has only been open a couple of weeks. I also attended the staff party at work. It was a pretty swanky affair at the Canada Convention Center. Lots of shenanigans ensued.

Visa Extension

Goddamn border people.

So at the end of November it was going to be a year since I arrived in Canada. Which is kinda weird in itself, but more importantly it meant my working holiday visa was about to expire. Even though I had signed and agreed that I would not be able to renew my visa the HR people at work assured me that I could. She said I just needed to take a bunch of stuff to the border and they would renew it.

So that was my mission for Wednesday night. I left it till about 8pm so that it wasn't so busy. When I got to the border there was still a 40min wait to get to the states! Ridiculous! Luckily I was only going to the Canadian border people. Or so I thought.

When I got out of my car and was walking to the building a guy accosted me and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was here to get my visa re-newed and he told me I needed to go to the states and get a "flagpole". I said "excuse me? Did you say I need a flagpole? and he gave me a look as if I was a complete idiot and said "yes a flag pole". I have found that I find border people some of the most abrasive people on earth and it was difficult to bite my tongue not to say "that makes no bloody sense, why the hell is it called a flagpole?" but you just have to smile and nod and pretend that they are the most important people on the planet instead. He said I could drive or walk to the U.S. So dumb. As I said before, it was a 40 min wait to drive across, so I opted to walk across in the rain. What a waste of time! it was about 400m or so! There wasn't even a path for most of it so I was just walking on wet soft grass. When I got to the U.S. border I waited in line for about 30min. Then when I finally got processed it took even longer to process me than when I traveled into the U.S.! The guy trying to help me was pretty young (and a dick, but that does without saying) and kept going into the back room. I suspect he didn't know what the hell he was doing. I finally got a piece of paper with "flagpole" hand written on it (I'm not even lying!) and walked back to Canada. I didn't have to wait too long in line but I did have to wait for 30min or so while the border woman (also a dick) processed my extension. At this juncture I would like to know: why the hell does it take so long to process this stuff? Its not rocket science! Surely they could just set the system up with a screen with all the fields that they need to fill out and then submit the application. It seems like a pretty serious thing, but why does it take so damn long?!

So the woman finally came back and told me that she shouldn't be giving me an extension because my job letter of offer is so old. She said that it was good that I printed out a couple of pay stubs but I needed a current letter of offer from my employer. What the hell is up with that shit??!! There is no such thing as is a "current job offer"!!! You either have a job or not. Stupid bitch. She told me she only gave me a 1 year extension instead of 2 because of this and I would most likely have to re new my visa again before I get permanent residency. I knew that I would probably get my PR in less than 12 months so I wasn't to worried but then she started launching into how I would need to bring in a "current letter of offer" and I would need to get a new PR acceptance letter (which is apparently bullshit according to the immigration experts). I just smiled and nodded and she seemed somewhat annoyed that I wasn't getting annoyed by all this! Want I wanted to say: Whatevs bitch, I'm going home. I hope I never see you again. What I actually said: Thank you, Goodbye.

Got home about 11pm. What a wasted of time.

Moving and BCMC

1/2/3 November 2013

So I knew this was gonna happen and I did try to avoid the worst of it but still....

So I was all set to move apartments on the 2nd of November and then a couple weeks out some people from work decided that the 1st would be a good night for "team building" in town. I could see the moving day being very rough. So during the week I did my best to organised myself to minimise any thinking and physical activity so I packed up all my things into bags/boxes and chucked a couple of things in my car.

So Friday night was pretty good. We went to Yaletown Brewery and had a few, then hit up a couple of other places. I was a fairly good boy though and gorged on pizza whenever I saw it and tried to drink heaps of water during the night. Later on the others decided a strip club was a good idea. A few of us didn't think that sounded that crash hot so we went to another place and played pool and drank more beer. After that I txt my new flatmate to see if she was still out. Turned out she was still drinking at a pub so I went along to say giday and pick up my keys. I had another couple of beers there with some neighbors to be and then tried to head home. Goddamn busses. Goddamn bloody busses. I got to the stop just as the bus was leaving. Which meant that it was another half an hour or something to the next bus. Finally home about 3am.

Up again at 8am. I was still fully clothed and all the lights were on in the house. I was extremely tired but I had luckily avoided the worst of the hangover symptoms. But it was still pretty rough packing all my shit in my car and talking to my landlord. I still had a bit of cleaning to do when he turned up but he was pretty chill about it so not to many worries. I was pretty stoked to fit everything I own in my car, which also felt pretty weird. Made it to the new place and only spent about 15min finding my parking space. Went out for breakfast/lunch with my new flatmate and then moved some stuff in. Unfortunately I cannot adequately articulate how rough the day was on here.

On Sunday I had a good sleep in, which was made better by daylight saving finishing. I think I slept for around 10 hours or something. Woke up to a pretty cracker day too and a sweet view from my new place:

Then Miranda picked me up and we went out to do the BCMC trail up Grouse. I tried to go as fast as possible but got a bit lost at the top. I ended up doing about 1 hour 10 min but I think I could have snuck under an hour if it wasn't for the detour. We carried on up the track for another half hour or so and run into some snow for some cool photos:

 We were gonna eat up at the place up the top but we decided we were too hungry and it would probably cost more arms and legs than we were willing to part with so we went down to North Van for a delicious Burger and Ceasar at the Village taphouse.

Gig, Hike and Halloween

Just a couple of quick things.

Went to see Chris Cornell solo acoustic gig again. It was a bit weird to being seeing a very similar concert again to when I went to see him in the Michael Fowler Center in NZ. But this time it was only $60 instead of $260 it would have been including flights and stuff in NZ. Concert was awesome as expected. It was pretty good to catch up with Brice again who I hadn't seen for a fair while. I also got a sweet long sleeve Chris Cornell shirt.

I went for a wander up Eagle Bluffs one weekend with Sy Yunn and Miranda and took a couple of photos:

Halloween also happened at one stage. People dressed up at work and everything! There weren't too many in my office but I saw plenty of people around the business park complex in full gear! Pretty hilarious. I also went and had dinner with a friend on the Saturday night on Commercial Drive. We were sitting in the window and it was pretty cool to watch everyone walking past in their getup. I didn't attend any partys but I have decided I need to track down a Kiwi bird costume. Would be awesome.

The Lions

18/19/20 October 2013

For some reason our Friday after work beers had got fairly out of hand the past few evenings and now 10pm seemed a respectable time to be leaving work. After that more people were having a few beers in town so I decided to go down there. Needless to say it was a pretty late night. At some point I found my way home and remember thinking "I need to set my alarm so that I get up in time to start drinking again"

On Saturday I had bought a ticket to go to a craft beer awards festival thing. I dragged myself out of bed at the crack of noon to get along there. The event was pretty awesome. Lots of different craft breweries around to taste lots of craft beer. It took a while to get back on the horse (should I say maggot?) after my 8th taster or so I was doing OK though. I mainly drank porters which I have decided I have definitely been neglecting. I especially enjoyed the "Sap Sucker" maple porter from Fernie brewing company. We hung around for the awards and then went to St Augustines for dinner. At some stage I suddenly got pretty knackered and we decided to call it a night. I was dreading another late night but I was stoked to find it was only about 9pm! I was into bed by 10pm which was good because I had a big Sunday ahead.

On Sunday I had jacked up a mission to get up the Lions with Brandon and a mate of his. I was pretty stoked because The Lions are a stand out feature of the Vancouver skyline and I had had my eye on them for a while. I was concerned I wasn't going to get a chance this summer but luckily we had another patch of good weather. I was also stoked because my company was fairly fit so we were able to tackle the more ambitious route to the Lions that went from Cypress Mountain and followed the Howe Sound Crest trail. The quickest and easiest way to climb them is from Lions Bay but apparently that is a pretty boring trail compared to the one we intended on taking.

I was up at 7:30 to finish packing and Brandon came round about 8. We picked up Brandons mate, Tim, on the way out of town. Tim was an old highschool friend of Brandons and they hadn't seen each other for about 5 years. Vancouver was enveloped in some pretty dense fog but I was confident we would get above it. As we drove up Cypress it thinned out and by the time we got to the car park we were above it. We got on the trail at about 9:30am and set of at a cracker pace. We got up to st Marks Summit at about 10:30am and got some awesome views of Howe Sound:

Then we realised why the trail was regarded as being quite challenging. We descended a hell of a long way and then had to climb up to the first peak of Mt Unnecessary, which was aptly named if you were just trying to get the The Lions. We got another couple of cool views of Howe Sound though:

The we went down again! Then another climb up to the second peak of Mt Unnecessary! From there we got a sweet view of our ultimate goal:

As you can see they are a pretty prominent feature. The we had to go down again before we could start the final ascent to the base of The Lions. For the rest of the trip our topic of conversation frequently involved discussing the climb to the actual summit of the West Lion. Brandon had been there before but did not attempt the sketchy scramble. We had all heard it was a pretty scary climb so we were a little apprehensive. When we got to the base our concerns were not alleviated at all by being able to see the face. We talked to a couple of guys that were just coming down from it and they said it was OK. One guy that seemed to know what he was doing said "just make slow and deliberate moves and you should be fine". Real comforting. We decided to go for it and were immediately greeted by a dodgy frayed rope to get down a 5m cliff. This bit was quite challenging but we were told it was one of the hardest bits too. Up higher it didn't really get harder but just got way more exposed. There was really only one other bit that I found challenging where I had to take a big step up on a slopey face with poor foot placement. My crappy trail shoes with massive holes in the sides of them (photographic evidence below) were too soft to place properly but I eventually made it over the step.

The rest of the climb was OK but it was super exposed. Just don't fall was definitely the aim of the game, below is a shot of the kind of terrain we were traversing. If you look closely you can see a pink rope on the left, somehow we got from where I took the photo to that rope!

We summited at about 2pm and when we got to the top it was all worth it. Just incredible. Here is a Panorama of looking North:

In the photo above you can see the East Lion and to the right beyond the fogged in Valley is where you would see Vancouver. It was such an incredible day up there. We estimated it was close to 20 degrees and not a breath of wind. Obligatory summit photo with celebratory beer (Tim in the middle and Brandon on the right):

We spent quite a while on the summit and ate some food. There was a couple of other people up there but not many people were ambitious/stupid enough to climb the sketchy section. I was a bit worried about the climb down but it turned out it wasn't too bad at all. There were a couple of difficult sections again but not too bad. We hussed along the trail but we were all realising why this route was regarded as difficult. On the way home we had all the downhill and uphill again and we were getting pretty tired. We were also running pretty low on water as well so we stopped at a wee lake thing to purify some water:

As you can see the sun was getting pretty low in the sky and when we made it back to St Marks summit we got some pretty golden photos looking out at Howe Sound again:

We were benighted with about 45 min left to go but we all had headlamps and we were back on a very well maintained trail close in to Cypress Mountain so no worries there except we were pretty knackered and hungry. We got back to the car at about 8pm which meant we were on the go for about 10 hours. We were pretty tired teddies but damn hungry so we went and gorged on some delicious burgers on Commercial Drive before going our separate ways.

I climbed into bed about 10pm pretty shattered but super stoked at such an awesome day. Cheers guys!

Thanksgiving

12/10/13

So I'm not really sure what Thanksgiving is supposed to be but it worked out bloody well for me. On Saturday I went to visit Pam, Mitch and Luke out at Abbotsford. A friend of Pams, Jackie, and her son, Darnell, also came over and we had an awesome Turkey that Pam cooked. Then on Sunday I decided that I probably needed to make more room for Turkey so went for a hike up Hollyburn. That night I went to the Fishers in Port Coquitlam for more Turkey. In attendance was Brandon, Lisa, Bryn, Cody, Kylie, Pete, Renee and David. One highlight was the awesome wee cake turkey lolly pops Bryn made:

On Monday I needed to make more room for Turkey so I went for a run up Mt Seymore. I went real fast and was pretty tired when I got to the top. Pretty nice day:

On the way down I ran too fast. When I got to the car I was so tired that I forgot I had sat my 3 month old Galaxy S4 on the roof which decided that 80km/h was a good speed to jump off and try and commit suicide. Luckily I heard a clatter, also luckily I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the car behind swerve to miss something on the road. I then realised that something was my phone and quickly retrieved it (it was lying in the middle of the road and luckily another couple of cars missed it). Miraculously it still worked but had a badly cracked screen. With a bit of research I found I could order a new screen for it for $200. Yay, just throw money at problems until they go away!

For dinner I went for my third and final Thanksgiving dinner at Kattys in Lougheed. In attendance was Katty, Emma, Ben, Ann, Jono, Ahndra and Robyn. For dessert Jono had stolen his "downstairs neighbours" cheese cake which was incredible. After dinner we played a hilarious game that is a cross between pictionary and Chinese whispers. You pick a thing out of the hat and try and draw it in a book, then you pass it to the next person who tries to guess what it is, the person after that then tries to draw what the last person guessed and you do that until you get your book back. Hilarity ensues. Especially if you are like me and can't draw to save your own life. How the hell do you draw Cauliflower anyway?

So I think my first Thanksgiving weekend was pretty successful. I would love to know how many calories I ate. I also seemed to always be the last one eating but I just told everyone that I had a lot of thanksgiving dinners to make up for. Thanks so much to everyone that took me in!

Bowling and Diez Vistas

5/10/13

With the impending apartment move coming up I realised that I needed to obtain a bed. I guess one option is to move in and just sleep on my new Thermarest but as comfy as it is I don't think it is a practical long term solution.

I figured a place called "SleepCountry" should be able to help me. I was greeted by a rather slimy salesman who proceeded to get me to lie down on a bunch of beds. It was all pretty weird but you gotta try em out! He was relatively helpful and helped me narrow it down to a couple of beds. I think I will buy a memory foam guy, they seemed pretty comfy. Sleepcountry didn't have any bed frames (only box bases) and due to my new room being excessively small I thought it might be handy if I can chuck a couple of things under it. So I went to have my first IKEA experience. It was a good start with people picketing outside. Something about IKEA treating workers like crap. I can't imagine that. I think I found something that would support a mattress OK and got the hell out.

In the evening I went bowling with a few people I run with. Leike, Ryan, Matt and myself threw a few balls down an alley and managed to knock some shit over. I didn't do horrendously and managed to come 2nd in both the matches we played. The 3rd and 4th placers were pretty gutted. After bowling we met up with another couple of runners, Andy and Dave and went to have a couple of tasty brews at a place on commercial drive called St Augustines and ate a shit tonne of chips, pizza and nachos.

On Sunday it was a cracker day but I hadn't planned anything. I battled with my inner extrovert and managed to convince myself that a trail run around Diez Vistas was a good idea. Turns out it was. It was a pretty short 45min drive out to Buntzen lake. I found the trail to be marked pretty well and headed on up the hill for a bit of a 400m slog. Once I was on the ridge the running was good. Pretty rootey and rocky so made sure that I twisted my ankles about a billion times. Character building for my ankles I think. Here are the 10 Vistas (The number is in the bottom corner):

As you can see some of them should really be called "vistas" now. There definitely needs to be some logging in the area to restore some of the Vistas. The rest of the run down the lake was pretty nice and got a nice pic of Buntzen Lake:

All up it was about 15km and took me a pretty slow 2.5 hours but I blame the all the photo opportunities for the tardiness.

San Juan Island Quest

21/09/13

So this week was the infamous adventure race that had been looming for a while. Jesse and I had decided that we needed to do the 12 hour one instead of the 6 hour event because we would probably need more time to find all of the controls. I don't think our logic was quite right though.

I packed on Thursday night and made sure there was no way in hell I could forget my passport the next day. The plan was to leave at 10am, arrive at the ferry terminal in Anacortes at about midday or 1pm to book the 3:25pm ferry. I got up in the morning and packed the car and got away on time. Everything was going well until I got to the border, then it started going horribly late. I waited in the car for nearly 2 hours to get up to the border, then I was told to go inside to get processed. Unfortunately now it was midday and I think all of the border guards had gone for lunch. Just an absolutely unmotivated waste of space of a bunch of workers. I watched half a dozen of them meander around aimlessly while the line was nearly out the door. Ended up being about another 2 hour wait to get to the front of the line, at which point it was a 2min job for someone to stamp me into the country. So frustrating, but when you get to the front of the line you can't show it cos they're all "look at me and how important I am". Just an awful system.

I finally got to the ferry terminal at about 2pm, after Jesse, who left at the same time and drove from bloody Portland. It was supposed to be a 1 hour 40min drive for me according to google and a 4.5 hour drive for him! Then more bad news, we were only on the waitlist for the 3:25pm ferry. We transferred all my stuff to his car and then dicked around for a while. We missed the 3:25pm ferry and the next one was supposed to be at 6:30pm. We dicked around some more until the ferry finally came at 7:30pm. At least on the ferry we had a nice cold beer and had some live entertainment (a band was going to the island for a gig) Finally got to the island and the race headquarters at about 10pm. I wondered how far from home I was as the crow flies. Probably less than 200km and it had taken me 12 hours!

In the morning we are up bright and early to some truly atrocious weather. Just perfect to spend 12 hours out in! At the morning briefing we learnt that there was 60-80km/h gusts on the ocean where the kayak leg was supposed to be. For obvious reasons they decided to cancel the ocean kayaking and told us they would try and formulate a plan for the kayak leg on a nearby lake.

The race started at 7am. The start was pretty hilarious as there was a line across the field and all you had to do was have your bike on it somewhere. As there was no set route (just a number of checkpoints that we had to clip) half of the field were facing one way and the other half facing the other way. When the start gun went everyone took off in different directions. It must have looked pretty funny (I am standing in front of the tree in the middle):

Also note Jesses tent, We were the only ones stupid enough to camp!

Early on Jesse and I made a couple of stupid navigational mistakes but didn't have too many problems over all. The bike leg was pretty gruelling at times and we had to walk our bikes up some pretty steep hills. This of course made for some pretty awesome downhill bits. One notable control was in the middle of an amazing piece of downhill. I nearly shat myself because I randomly decided to stop and wait for Jesse halfway down and then happened to look up and saw a cave. I remembered the clue was something about being in the dark so we run up to it and sure enough:

So lucky we didn't miss it as I was having so much fun riding downhill that I totally forgot we were supposed to be picking up controls. It would have been pretty demoralising to get to the bottom and then have to climb back up half to go back for the control. Other than that the only other notable experience (apart from getting absolutely covered with mud) was coming around a corner at full speed and seeing a tree across the trail. I must have been right on the braking limit as when I stopped a couple of centimetres short of it I could smell melting brake pads and there was smoke coming from my discs!

We finished the bike leg in 4 hours and headed out on the run leg. We made some interesting navigational decisions that were probably a bit silly in hindsight. We thought it would be quicker to dump our bags in a couple of places and go out and back to pick up a couple of controls instead of picking a route past them. This included one brutal 300m climb up to a tower on the top of a hill. Up the tower out of the trees we couldn't believe how wet and wild the weather for the race was.

We finished the run leg in 5 hours and managed to get back just in time to be the last ones out on the water on the kayak leg. Again, just awful weather to be out in a kayak. We lost almost all visibility at one stage as it was raining so hard on the lake that the splashed were bouncing up and creating about as much water coming up as was coming down. We got around the kayak leg an about an hour and were presented with the bucket of water logic problem. For two engineers we failed pretty hard at figuring it out. Poor Jesse was freezing but finally got the answer and they let us go. The final leg involved carrying the kayak back up the hill about 400m to the headquarters which almost killed us.

We were greeted with delicious burgers and beers but we were so knackered that we could barely hold a conversation with anyone! One random co-incidence was that Jesse recognised a girl from the hike we did up to Goat Pass hut in NZ last year! Ridiculously small world moment!

Needless to say we hit the hay pretty hard and slept well that night. The next day we packed up and made it back to Anacortes no worries. We had a delicious breakfast at a wee diner thing there and went our separate ways. I was pleasantly surprised that I made it back through the Canadian border in about 10min so only took a couple hours to get home. I realised that my clothes were so damn dirty that I probably had to wash them twice. I opted for the bathtub pre-wash instead of paying $1:75 twice, I'm such a cheap bastard!

Somehow I found the strength to head out to Poco (Port Coquitlam) for dinner with the Fishers and made a fantasy hockey team draft. I figured I had as much chance as anyone else! Joan cooked us delicious dinner and dessert and sent me home with some tasty brownie

Crashed into bed pretty hard on Sunday night and assessed the damage. Pretty sore left hip for some reason, creaky Achilles tendon and a sore right knee. Gotta be good for ya right? Was some pretty good type 2 fun for the weekend.

Found out the next day we came 4th out of 12 teams and were the last team to actually finish! Standings here: http://sanjuanislandquest.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74&Itemid=97 notice that 5th and 6th place got in from the run leg before us but chose not to go out on the kayak leg! Softies!

Also check out the sweet video they made: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=611983583887&set=vb.128213720595515&type=2&theater

Downhill Madness at Whistler

14/9/13

Good god it was entertaining

A guy from work was going to be in town for the weekend for a meeting on Monday so suggested me and another guy from work head up to the downhill bike park in Whistler. We also picked up a couple of other people. The crew was Lance, Kenyon, Ciem, Gope (don't know if I spelled those last two correctly.

During the week we talked a bit about it and I grew more apprehensive as I found out there was going to be body armor involved. Kenyon also suggested we hire bikes up there because I will probably do $150 worth of damage to my bike easily. I also knew the guys I was going with were pretty quick so I started wondering what I was getting myself into.

Of course I was hungover on Saturday morning at 7:30am which was a bad start. I picked up Kenyon and his mates and we shot through to Squamish to meet with Lance. We got to Whistler about 10:15 and looking around at all the dudes in their full armor and giant bikes wasn't really helping. It was cool to finally be in Whistler but it was fairly overcast so couldn't see to much of the mountains. I went and hired my bike and signed all of the waivers to make sure if I killed myself it wasn't any body elses fault. I also got the damage insurance, body armor and a "top of the world" pass which all came to $238. What a ridiculous amount of money to spend for 6 hours, but look at the  There was significant faffing involved before we got up to the top of the first run with getting into all our gear, people forgetting passes and peoples passes not working properly. Bike:

We probably hit the first trail at about 11:30 or something and it was pretty terrifying. The bike felt really weird and nothing like I have ever ridden before. The first run we did was super fast, wide, flowing and jumpy. Most of the jumps were table tops though so you just went over them as fast as you wanted to. It goes without saying that my brakes got a pretty good work out down that run.

From then on they day got progressively more awesome. I started settling into the bike and started to open up the throttle a bit. It was so weird to only be going down hill without any of the grind of mountain biking I am used to. Surprisingly still a lot of work though as maneuvering the "couch" was quite a job. We did some flowing stuff and some technical stuff. I went down a bunch of stuff I'm not sure if I could do on my trail bike. Huge drops and shit. The suspension just had so much travel that all you had to do is point it down the cliff, put your ass on the back wheel over the back of the seat and hang on as it nose dived into the ground.

For lunch we grabbed a burger as I complained about my sore index fingers from hanging on to the brakes. Then we decided to do top of the world. It was absolutely nuts. I think Whistler is at about 400m and we caught chair lifts and gondolas up to 2100m. Unfortunately it was pretty clagged in so we didn't have much of a view but we went over some pretty icy sections and steep rocks. When we got up and got our bikes off it was freezing and low visibility and all of us questioned what the hell we were doing up at 2100m with mountain bikes. We set off down the track and my fingers went numb. It was strange braking because I couldn't feel the brake lever so I had to go on instinct on how much to squeeze. Despite the cold and the pain in my index finger muscles it was a pretty awesome trail. We were probably descending for a good 40min or so!

When we got down to the main part of the park Kenyon and Ciem decided to boost it down to see if they could get one more run in. Unfortunately that was a bad move. Lance and I came around a corner and over a jump to find Ciem lying in the ditch. He couldn't move and was in quite a bit of pain so we called the rescue squad who came and bound him up real good with suspicions of fracture pelvis or back and took him away. Not good. We coasted to the bottom in a pretty sombre manner. It didn't help that braking was now pretty excruciating. Brakes on or off was fine but transitioning between the two made it feel like the tendons in my arm were raking past barbed wire.

Lance Gope and I went to the pub for dinner and a couple of beers to await news of Ciem. Turned out he had fractured two vertebrae but if they drugged him up he could come back to Vancouver that night. So we picked him up and got out of Whistler about 8:30pm. Poor bastard had a hell of a time getting to the car but at least he was up on his feet. After dropping everyone off I got home about 11pm and hit the hay hard. I am writing this the day after and my whole body feels pretty beaten up. Stiff shoulders, back fore arms and even legs (which is weird due to the lack of pedaling but I guess I was pretty much standing up on the pedals all day). All up I think it was around a $300 but it was worth it I reckon. Just a shit tonne of fun and I think I got about a million times better at mountain biking over the day. Probably won't get to do it again this season but I'm definitely keen to get back there next summer. Now I just have to learn to ski so I can see Whistler in the Winter.

Golden Ears

13/9/13

So Brandon and I had been meaning to go on a hike for pretty much all of summer and it was getting near the end of summer so we actioned the plan. Brandon suggested golden ears and I wasn't in a position to argue his decision. Talking during the week he was keen to leave Vancouver about 4pm or so and hike into Alder Flats to camp on Friday night to give us a full day to attack the summit on Saturday. I told him I couldn't get away from work until about 5pm and it was about an hours drive. I also had to get home and chuck stuff in my car and suggested we probably couldn't get on the trail until 7pm but that should be OK. He suggested we just camped at the big provincial campground at the trail head instead of Alder Flat but I told him that sounded no where near as hardcore as hiking in the dark. So after some faffing (including hunting for a fry pan at his place to cook our steak in, we could only find a cast iron one but we thought that we would get a few mission points for carrying it in) we finally got on the trail at 8pm. We had hilariously heavy packs due to all the meat and beer we had. We had about 15min of daylight and then  it was pretty dark. Luckily I had something that resembled the sun strapped to my head so we weren't short of light. We surprised Brandon with our speed and made it to Evans Creek in about half the time he was expected. Unfortunately then we crossed into "Brandons confusion zone" (BCZ). This was a forest section that appeared to be well marked but was pretty deceptive. Brandon had made a couple of wrong turns in there before in the daylight so needless to say we had a bit of trouble in the dark. We took two wrong turns and also managed to actually walk round in a circle. It was the weirdest feeling arriving at a place we had been before while thinking we were travelling in a straight line. It really didn't make any sense because we were following flagging tape the whole time! We finally got to the camp site and set up the tent around 10pm (at a guess, neither of us brought any sort of time keeping device). We cooked up our delicious steak dinner and drank pumpkin ale before hitting the hay.

Didn't get eaten by bears. Horrah.

In the morning we got up a little after sunrise (we think, again, not sure) and cooked up our bacon and mashed spud for breakfast. We were in pretty dense cloud so were a bit concerned we were in for a bit of a rubbish weather day. While we were cooking our breakfast a bunch of other hikers passed us heading up to the peak. Once we were on the trail and started climbing we got out of the cloud pretty quick and happened upon a pretty cracker day. Had some good views of "Robbie Reid" and "Judge Howay" which are hilarious names for mountains. Apparently Robbie and the Judge were good guys and good mates back in the day.

We made really good time on the trail and passed nearly all of the other parties on the trail. We charged on up to the emergency shelter for some pretty cracker views:

After a quick break at the shelter we bagan the final push up to the summit. It was a bit of a slog and we were getting pretty damn thirsty so we were glad to come across a snow melt stream. Somewhere along the way we decided that the beaten path was a bit easy and decided to climb up some dodgy rocks. I went a different way to Brandon and made it to the top of the knob thing pretty easily but once I was at the top I went round and found Brandon was pretty stuck. He had climbed up a wee gut thing and right into the base of a dense shrub guy. Once he chucked his pack up to me he made it up OK though.

We summited about 1pm (according to some other dudes that came up just after us). The last little bit was pretty cool as the view was kinda obscured until you are standing right on the summit. It was pretty hilarious to sit up there and listen to everyone say "holy shit" when they had climbed the last little bit. We at our lunch and took it all in:

We then opened our celebratory summit beers and got someone to take a pic:

It was a pretty nice day up there so we spent quite a bit of time dicking around on the summit and then headed down across some cool bits of perma-ice:

The descent was pretty quick and uneventful. We got back to Alder Flats no worries and packed up our campsite and hiked out. We didn't have any problems in BCZ on the way out. Took one photo of one of the bridges on the trail, I don't think it would be up to DOC standard:

Great day on the mountain. Awesome to get a sweet hike in while the weather was still holding up. Cheers to mountain guide Brandon!

The Chief

24/8/13

On the Saturday I went with a friend (Charlene) and her niece to check out Alouette lake. Charlene had busted her her ankle real bad and had a moon boot on so she was pretty stoked to get out of the house. We failed pretty bad at finding the lake. We managed to find a womens prison, a dirt bike track and a timber yard place. We bailed on the lake and headed back out to the main road to hunt for a new picnic spot. We managed to stumble upon a place called Cliff Falls which turned out to be pretty awesome. Charlene hobbled down to the picnic area ok and we ate delicious brownies. We then went for a wander and found the falls. There wasn't really any cliffs but the creek kinda followed a an old lava flow thing which made for a couple of cool photos:

On Sunday a few people from work were going up the Chief so I decided to tag along. I also took Charlenes niece as well. I didn't really know what I was getting into. When we got to the trail head it dawned on me that as she was only 16 I was kinda responsible for a semi-child thing. I discovered that she didn't really know her own fitness to well. I asked if she was fit enough to hit all three peaks and she said yes. Then after walking for about 10min she was absolutely gassed and tells me sometimes she has problems with her lungs. I gave her a puff of my inhaler and that seemed to sort her out but she certainly wasn't capable of of doing three peaks! We made up to second peak with no worries though and took a couple of pics.

Then we decided that there was enough hours in the day to head over to third peak which I was pretty stoked about because I hadn't been there before. On the way there was some pretty cool cliffs and drop offs. All up it was a pretty long day for an unfit 16 year old but we all went and burgers for dinner and freaked Charlene out at all the shinanigans her niece got up to when she was left alone in my supervision.

Pitt Lake

31/8/13

For Labour weekend we decided for a spot of kayaking on Pitt Lake. Keen parties were Brandon Fisher, his Dad Jim Fisher and Mike Carrunthers (Brandons uncle). We all met at Mikes about 9am and I was a little hungover as usual on a Saturday morning so we stopped and got a feed of maccas on the way to Grant Narrows. After packing all our shit into the kayaks we headed off. We found it was pretty low tide so there was a bit of a sand bar in our way:

While we were skirting the bar we found a wee inlet so we headed up it. All was well for about 20min or so except for paddling against quite a strong current. Then the channel got wider and wider until it was to shallow to paddle properly. Brandon and his Dad were in a a canoe so just had to resort to pulling the canoe along:

Mike and I battled on but it was more just pushing ourselves along on than paddling. It was pretty tedious. On the other side we started up the West side of the lake. We came across some pretty cool reflection stuff on the cliffs on the way up. I got a video but that seems way to complicated to embed here. Further up we went ashore at Dark Creek for a bit of lunch and a quiet moment of reflection looking out at the lake:

We ate some dodgy un-refrigerated salmon and trail mix for lunch. Up further we pulled into Defrauder falls for the night. View of the falls when we were pulling in:

The falls were pretty awesome and after setting up our camp Brandon and I went for a sketchy climb up the rocks around the fallse. We didn't even get very far or see anything interesting. Just nearly died multiple times. Back at the camp we just dicked around for a while. Brandon set up his hammock so I lay in that for a while and got all "arthouse" on my camera settings:

For dinner we had a magical pasta-mushrooms-sausages mixture. Unfortunately there was also some glue mixed in as the fry pan we were using started to melt. This was our camp for the night:

The next day we packed up and and ate rehydrated spud and bacon for breakfast before leaving at about 9:30am. We meandered our way up the lake until we started to get hit by some pretty nasty wind. Fortunately for us it was mostly a tail wind but it was kicking up quite a few waves. We were still aiming to make it to the head of the lake but realised that we would probably have a shit of a time paddling back into the wind and we wanted to get a fair way back down the lake to make the Sunday paddle out short. We decided to turn around when we could see the mouth of the upper Pitt River:

We stopped at Vickers for some cheese and Jagersausage. When we got back on the water the wind had calmed down a bit so we had a fairly nice time paddling back along the East side of the lake until we got to our destination: Osprey Creek (North). After setting up our tents we set about trying to rig the hammock. This might sound trival but we probably spent a good couple of hours on the project. We had one good tree and just had to try various configurations of driftwood to make the second support. One failed system saw Jim break one of the supports and drop a couple of inches to the ground. For dinner we ate some dehydrated food that Mike had sitting in his garage for about 8 years. We figured it couldn't really have gone bad though! That night at dusk I spent some time taking long exposure photos of the water which turned out to be pretty cool:

In the morning we got up to a fairly nice day:

We had some Beef Stroganoff stuff for breakfast and packed up our stuff for the mission back to civilization. On the way home we saw a couple of seals. When we were getting closer to the sandbar there was much discussion about whether we would try and go over it again or if we should just flag and go around. Going around was going to be a hell of a lot further though so we decided to give the sandbar another try. We were lucky to find that the water was slightly higher than it was when we went out (but not by much!!). Made it back to Grant Narrows and packed into the cars before going to hit up the pub for lunch. What a fantastic way to spend a long weekend.