With COVID, we’ve been missing out on a lot of things that we like to do. Most notably has been travel of course, but it’s also been almost three years since we’ve been skiing! It’s hard to imagine, and this weekend Justine and I got back out on the slopes, taking a trip up to Whistler for the day. It was a strange day, with a mixture of conditions, but it was great to get back out!

A first day out on the slopes! It was nice, even if it wasn’t an ideal day.

The conditions on the hill were strange - in the morning it was raining lightly almost all the way to the top. But the snow on the groomed runs was actually pretty good. And in places, the snow was almost like spring skiing - the snow was that soft. When we were skiing Harmony, there was a full on blizzard at the top and the visibility was so bad you could barely see 20’ in front of you. But it was cleared up less than a quarter of the way down mountain. And at the end of the day, as we got to the bottom the moguls were huge and the snow was definitely spring-like. It was a weird day.

Despite the fact that it was a Sunday, the lines were almost non-existent! The slopes were wide open, and on many lifts, we were able to ski on and have the chair to ourselves. That makes skiing so much nicer.

We got up the Creekside Gondola pretty much first thing in the morning. It was warm and actually raining a bit, so the start wasn’t great.

On the way up Harmony, you could see the cool ice waterfall.

As the weather was poor, it was a day to stick to groomed runs. The snow was not bad on the groomed runs, and as it was a very quiet day, there was lots of room to ski.

We started out with some groomed runs on the Emerald Chair, before heading over to Harmony for the bulk of the day.

The sign at the top of the Peak Chair made it very clear what the conditions were like.

The blowing wind made for some very cool patterns on the rocks at the top of Peak.

As we do almost every time we’re at Whistler, we did Peak to Creek as our last run of the day.

Once we got off the very top of the mountain, the snow storm cleared up and we had nice views down and across the valley.

Justine checking out the view.

A pretty typical run for the day - almost no one on the slopes!

A great view down to the lake.

Peak to Creek just about killed us. The bottom half of the mountain was all moguls, and the snow was so soft that my legs were dying by the time we got to the bottom. We definitely should have downloaded. But it was a great day and we got lots of runs in, and most of them were pretty good.

After our day of skiing we stopped at Whistler Brewing for a drink and some nachos before heading home and calling it a day.