Snow Valley Lodge, Fernie (BC): And so it begins...

Fernie mountain opened yesterday, and boy, what a change from our usually empty mountain! Three of the car parks were full by 8.30am and the lifts didn't open until 9am! Regrettably, we were dumb enough to forget our camera in the rush to fill the van with bodies and zoom up there for first lifts so you'll have to take our word for it!

There were queues of people at the Timber Bowl Express chair - about 100 or so gathered. By the time we'd sorted out passes and meandered over to the Elk Quad chair they had started to run it, and we queued for about...um.... three minutes in all. It's a travesty, I tells ya! ;-) And within about 9.10am, everyone had dispersed to different areas of the mountain and it was hardly busy at all. If this is what they call "Fernie Busy" then I will be a very happy bunny for the rest of the season:

Nobody cut me up
Nobody elbowed me in the lift line
Everyone grinned, smiled, waved and whooped
People actually said the words "No, I insist! Afer you!" in the queue
And the sun shone all day

So, all in all, a pretty good opening day for us!

We could still do with a bit more snow, particularly as the mountain has been scarred up this weekend and there probably isn't a stingle stash of white fluffy stuff left anywhere. It's pretty hard in the mornings - a tad icy - but when the sun shines and it softens up, it's still pretty good. We're due for a dump (of snow - stop sniggering at the back) this coming week, so fingers crossed.

We do have a few pictures to post up from last week. Jethro and some of the other keener hikers among us decided to do one last hike on Thursday - before the hoards descended - and went all the way up to Whitepass, which took them two and a half hours... (pretty good going by anyones standards).

And SVL is now the proud owner of two new Christmas trees, which we chopped down ourselves (shhh! Don't tell anyone!) I'm jesting. Apparently it's OK to cut down a tree if it's underneath a power line so that's what we did.

Our first guests for the season arrived today, so we're going to show them around town tonight and play a few games of pool, have some dinner, introduce them to the local wildlife, that sort of thing. And tomorrow brings another day of snowboarding... it's a hard life.

Taken from the top of Whitepass