Yet another reason to love living in the Okanagan.

Powder skiing. There’s five decent ski hills within easy day trip distance; Silver Star, Big White, Apex, Crystal, and Baldy. I usually ski Apex, as my family has a place there, but with the ability to hit any of the hills as the conditions permit I thought I’d check out Baldy last week.

The main thing with Baldy isn’t the amount of snow it gets (it’s on the edge of a desert). It’s not the quality of the snow (did I mention it’s on the edge of a desert? What snow it gets is good and dry). It’s not the terrain (pretty mellow and flat, although with beautifully spaced trees for glade skiing). Nope, the thing with Baldy is that it’s closed from Monday to Wednesday every week. So Thursdays can be pretty good. This week they had 18cm over the three days, then a nice and fat 20cm dump at -10C on Thursday morning.

That was 38cm fresh untracked for us to play in.

I was supposed to be going with a friend from vancouver who showed up unexpectedly the other day, but predictably he got stuck at work and couldn’t get out. I did manage to hook up with our friends Gary and Stash, but they are ust learning to play in the snow and I didn’t bother taking any embarasing pics of them. Well, to be more accurate, it was a powder day and you know what that does to friendships.

Instead I just hit the lift and immediately hooked up with all the core South Okanagan powder hounds that converged for the event. We even managed to do a “hike” (about two minutes) for some bonus vertical but with thigh deep coverage over the whole mountain there wasn’t much point in this exercise.

Our local guide from Oliver was throwing us into the stashes every single run. Here he is in some of the windblown at the top (it was deeper in the trees, but I wasn’t gonna get any shots in there. Too busy rippin’ it….).

Here’s a good one of Wendell’s helmet and left hand. He just stuck a small cliff and is just cutting Niki off in the background.

This would be the aftermath of that encounter.

This would be Wade(?) slipping over to heelside on the same run.

And this is another Apex girly (didn’t catch the name) with that signature Apex style of quiet domination on the slopes.

A quick lunch at the bar had me in the longest lineup of the day. There was effectively none at the lift. It took me about 2 minutes to get a beer inside though.

Check that report…..

The skies cleared for the afternoon laps.

This is really good coverage for January up here. This sign is at about 7000′.

Last run, and some great light as we head off for one more. It was still deep right to 3:30 PM. That nice lit up snowfield in the background is where most of the pics are from.