Tag: snowboard

We’re just back from 2 weeks in Canada snowboarding in 4 British Columbia resorts (Fernie, Kimberley, Panorama and a bonus day trip to Kicking Horse). Unfortunately, whilst the UK has been having lots of snow (including just about enough to snowboard on in Ashdown Forest) most of the resorts we were at were desperately in need of the white stuff. Fortunately the bases were pretty good, and the grooming guys were working hard to make the best of it. We had a great time, and I can only imagine how good Fernie and Panorama must be when there is powder about.

I’ve added another snowboarding blog to my read list – The Funky Drummer is a GoneBoarding guy who is working and boarding in Japan at the moment. It’s a fun read, both for information on life and snowboarding in Japan.

We spent our New Year in Morzine, getting in some great snowboarding at Avoriaz.

I found Highland-Instinct today through GoneBoarding. A great site reporting on the snow conditions and ski resorts in Scotland. Shame that the SkiClub historical snow reports aren’t more favourable. Still, it might be worth a trip up if it looks like a good season this year and it would save another trip to Milton Keynes Xscape.

I’ve been reading through the World Snowboarding Guide 2004 (online here) to track down some likely looking places for snowboarding trips next year. Whilst looking for a piste map I came across SkiMaps.com which has a good collection of maps. I’m planning to use it to help me work out a) how many drag lifts/t-bars I’m going to have to negotiate to get around the mountain and b) how many easy/intermediate runs there are.

And whilst talking about winter holidays, I noticed that there is an interesting article over at Guardian Winter Sports about how to package your trip online which looks to have some interesting links. I picked up a copy of The Independent at the weekend and their ski section had a couple of links to tailor-made trip organisers – Ski Independence, Ski Safari and Momentum Ski – all of which look pretty useful for road trips.

The Boarder had a useful link the other day – it’s a page showing all European School Holidays. This should come in useful for booking the next snowboarding adventures.

We were at Milton Keynes with Paul to put a couple more hours of snowboarding under our belts. There are photos.

I’ve just seen an article on TheBoarder about a charity event happening at Castleford Xscape snow dome in June. It involves dressing up in a gorilla costume and snowboarding/skiing with the intention of completing 100 miles in an hour between all the participants. The snowboarding bit doesn’t seem so bad, but managing to get on the poma lift dressed as a gorilla sounds hard. Good luck to all those who take part.

We were in Castleford on Friday at the Xscape for some snowboarding, which was just great and, what with it being only an hour from Jane’s parents, I’m pretty sure we’ll be back there. Anyway… afterwards in Starbucks I had an innocent brand soft drink and the blurb on the side caught my eye:

The deepest well in Europe is 800 metres down. We know this because it’s where we get our spring water from. Apparently it’s very dark down there. We haven’t descended all the way because we’re a bit scared, but we found some monkeys who have hats with torches on them a bit like the ones miners wear. They take their buckets down to get the spring water, but they only do a 3 day week because they have a pretty strong union. Once we’ve got the water we mix in the fruit and some natural beet sugar, and the result is the nice refreshing drink you are now holding. We wanted to call them Monkey Water, but the market research came back looking bad, so please allow us to introduce Juicy Water. Hope you like it.

Surreal. Wonderful.