Spring Skiing Panorama

Today we spent most of the day skiing at Panorama near Invermere. We've been staying in Fairmont Hot Springs for a few nights again, to kick our spring ski tour off.

On Saturday we did a short walk to Bugaboo Falls, which was pretty cool. We had some trouble finding the actual path to the falls, because of the deepish snow, and it was a bit icy and slippery in places. The falls themselves were still half frozen and very pretty. We didn't want to get too close to the edge and slip over on some mud or snow though, so the photos are a bit ho hum.

The falls

Looking down to the river

Taking a break

Anyway, back to the skiing. So we were going to get there for about 10am, but we were feeling pretty lazy and only got there at about 11:30am. Which is probably a good thing since the hill was pretty hard until after we had lunch. And it's not that much fun to snowboard on hard snow.

After lunch though we had a pretty fun afternoon. Panorama is mostly groomed runs, and it doesn't get as much snow as some of the other hills that are known for powder. Which means it was actually better than Fernie would have been in these spring conditions. Mainly because Fernie doesn't have any nice, long blue groomed runs, that are easy to get to. The main thing Panorama is lacking is nice, open tree runs. A lot of their trees have very dense underbrush, which prevents you from just popping out into the trees for a bit.

Brandon convinced me to try superman toeside turns. It went OK, but he wasn't sure how he finishes them, so I mostly finished mine with a belly flop into the snow. A superman turn is when you lean right over and skim the snow with your hand or forearm while facing the hill with the toe side of your board in. Brandon's got his looking pretty nice now. 

The friends that we're staying with were very disappointed for us that we didn't get to see the awesome view from the very top because of cloud today. But we're not that worried, it was a free day on our Lake Louise plus ski card, so you got to be happy with that!

Tomorrow we leave for Red Mountain, and we'll be staying in Trail. It's south-West of here, and quite close to the US border. Unfortunately because I had a tooth pulled and we need to get back to the Fernie area for the 6th to get my stitches out, we won't have time to ski Sunpeaks. But we gotta leave some for next year, as Brandon would say!