Last night in Banff - 55 Days on snow! WOO

Thursday the 22nd of March 2012 marks my 55th day snowboarding in Canada and my last day here!

I was certain that the snow gods had blessed me and given me an incredible show off.

Wake up to it snowing nicely out side and made my way to Lake Louise. The snowing started around 6am and continued till about 2:30pm, The visibility wasnt great but it meant fresh powder pretty much every run and this was fantastic!

Just before my last run for the day and going back to the bus the sky opened up and it turned blue. As i said the snow gods blessed my last day.
Fresh powder (14cm fell throughout the day) and blue skies for my last snowboard run in canada.

So much fun.

Hitting the large park at Lake Louise and doing some rails and boxes and some of the tight tree runs it was occuring to me how much my boarding has improved over the last 4 months. This made me happy as its a considerable improvement and i cant wait to get back on the snow!


On the bus back i get into town and look out to a familiar site, Here is a beautiful mountain view i will be missing.
Half engulfed by a snow cloud it looked fantastic.

For my last night i had a fire pit in the back yard and cooked a BBQ for my close friends.
Spent an hour shoveling snow and cutting through the 8cm thick ice layer that was covering the ground.

Lots of work but i got there in the end!

Built a fire, almost had it started with newspaper then it wasnt going so grabbed some fuel and chucked it on. Now we are cooking :)
BBQ turned out awesome and we all had some great food

My awesome fire!

At the end of the night a couple friends helped me clean up and sort out my baggage, All packed up and ready to go ato 12:30am. Head off to bed as my last night and get up ready to go.

I am now sitting in Calgary airport waiting for my flight (Which the announcement just said they have overbooked the flight and are asking volunteers to give up their seat haha.) so i will shortly be on my way to Salt Lake City, with a tender 4 hour stop over and then another 2 hour flight to Los Angeles where i will be spending 24 hours.

Planning to get out to hollywood and do a few bits and pieces.

Only 2 short days till i touch back down in australia. What an incredible 4 months off this has been, i wouldnt change a moment of it for the world.

The people i have met and the adventures i have gone on, places i have seen and activities i have done. Just incredible!
I definately have grown substantially during this time

Surprise farewell and other things

Since my last blog post i have been doing lots of partying and saying goodbye to my friends/family here.

Friday night i had arranged for a group of friends to goto the Casino out of town for a $26 steak and lobster buffet!
This was great, i really "ate all i could"
5 plates then a desert plate and i couldnt move... Felt like i was food drunk! Was pretty bad. haha, But great fun


Saturday night my "family" here threw me a surprise party! It was one of the first surprise parties i have had and i really appreciated it.

I had no idea what was going on as i had been told that i was reserved for this night and Raquel wouldnt tell me why or what i was doing... Walked over to their place at the time and walk in the door to have them all jump out, Also this was on the same day as st Paddy's so lots of green things.
They had cooked up some really good homemade meatballs and then had another surprise for me too!!!

They had a cake made of my race car!!!

I made it into a convertible :P haha

Later on Raquel and Adam had prepared a game of pass the parcel, It was like a drinking version of the game. So it had silly rules and silly items and things like "Leon's drink bitch for the night" hahaha
Was awesome. Had such a good time. There was 1 that was like "what you like about Leon" and everyone went around and made a comment. I was really blown away by the whole night, Made me so much sadder to leave :(

Ended up drinking till 5:30am :P haha

Next morning went to the Sunday brunch at the banff park lodge. THis was awesome! Huge brunch buffet.
Meats, seafood, breakfast stuff, desert bar, omlette bar etc etc.

Stuffed myself again! The food was really nice here.

Sunday my friend from Edmonton had driven down here to come out with me.

We went out for dinner to Grizzle's house, Which is a fondue restaurant in town here.

My friend from Edmonton Hanibal, and Corine

Raquel and I, Getting into the cheese fondue first course!

Crazy ass meats (we got the exotic and hunter option menus.
So there was elk, bison, venison, wild boar, crocodial, shark, frogs legs, ostrich, kangaroo.

 We went for the Hot rock for the main course instead of boiling oil :P

Getting ready to try a frogs leg - This is for you Franck!!!

Didnt end up being to bad.

mmm chocolate fondue!!!

So i had been telling Hanibal about the hot springs i had gone to in BC, and we randomly ended up getting a crew together and going for the 2.5hr drive there for the night! (Sure beats the club i tell you that!)

So we trek on out, Hannibal, Raquel, Theresa and I at about 11pm. Stop for some gas, some snacks and some drinks and on the way.

Had an awesome time and there was some people from Calgary there (so they had about an hour extra drive on us)
We get back in the car and it ends up being 5:30am.. lol And drive back home.

I get home and walk through the door just after 8am, Jump in the shower and get ready to goto lake louise with my friend Adam.
Little power nap while on the way then on for a day of snowboarding after about 30mins sleep hahaha.

The weather was fantastic though!

Hiked up a bit to get some fresh tracks!

I was having some micro sleeps on the lifts back up the hill... Was kinda bad. But i made it till just after 3 when we headed on home.

I slept for 11 hours straight last night haha.

Its going to be really sad to leave this place but it has been an incredible 3 and a half months

SNow mobiles and natural hot springs

So i made the most of the heliboarding trip and got a couple things done while i was there.

Ended up staying in Panorama for 4 days.

The night after Heliboarding i learnt of a natural hot spring that was about 40mins from where we were.
Decided to check it out.

A long drive and then about 20km down a windy dirt/icy road (that was pretty fun!) which lead to a narrower and narrower path until it was a single lane dirt road that wound around the side of a mountain with a cliff on the other side of you to eventually open up to a car park.

Parked the little mazda beast, by now it was about 9:30.
 Timing could not have been better as this night was actually a full moon night and also cloudless skies.

Walk down the path covered in snow and ice and you can hear the rushing stream down below. Surrounded by trees and nature.

Get to the bottom and there is a bunch of rock formations and steam drifting up.
There is about 3 defined hot pools in the rocks around the place. These are situated next to an ice cold stream that it touches onto.
The top pool is about 45 degrees and down from that where it mixes with the ice water its a little cooler.

How incredible, the smell of sulphur, the snow surrounding the place, the tall trees reaching up to the moon, the river banks that stretch up high and a full moon over head.
It was majestical, incredible how in -5 degree temps there can be a natural occurance of hot water for our leisure.

Cant see a whole lot, but use your imagination for the scenery. Would have loved to have a camera with me that could pick it up as i could see it.
My friend Raquel and i ended up staying there for about 3 hours just roasting and with a couple of drinks. There was a few others there but it was very surreal.

The next day i found that my silver necklace had turned this really cool kinda titanium like colour, WOO Looks sweet!

Snowmobiling
On the saturday i had booked in to go on the snowmobiling Powder X tour.
This is the tour they do designed for people who have been snowmobiling and to go to more advanced terrain and deep powder.

Enrout to location

Our guide Johnny, He was really cool. Let me have a go of his higher powered skidoo too!

My baby for the day :)

This is an Arctic Cat M6, 600cc, 2 stroke 120HP, only weighs 230kg :D Oh boy did it haul ass!!!

Cabin up the mountain that we can have snacks and lunch in

Deep powder

bbq lunch!

Some of the places we went to, the powder was waist deep. If you got stuck in the depth or stepped off the sled you would just sink right down. it was incredible! The weather wasnt the best so we didnt get to up up a hill climb onto the glacier but this was still fantastic!

My gopro footage didnt turn out very well so not really any video for this unfortunately. Only a short one that i will put up a bit later.
what an awesome day! it almost stacked up with heliboarding.

Invermere and Radium
These towns are situated just out of panorama. Stayed at Radium the first couple nights.

This was the view from the room

There was a kooky house down the straight from some crazy guy who does wood carving. He has a hot tub on the roof made from an old Gondola.
He also has goats that walk the odd walkways around his house that he built. Some awesome wood carvings though.

In Invermere, there was this cool moose made out of old welded together metals and stuff

I made a pizza on the BBQ 1 night and it turned out amazing (of course :P )

Big chair at the bottom of Panorama ski hill

Well its just clicked over midnight and i should get some sleep for snowboarding tomorrow.

Yesterday was my last working day so its 10 days straight snowboarding and doing anything i want before i sadly leave this place and say bye to all the incredible friends i have met here.

Heliboarding!!!

Driving into Panorama from Banff (about a 2 hour drive) up the mountain through a nice little mountain village (kinda like thredbo).

Arrive at the RK Heliski lodge. Spotted my Chariot for the day. 2 Helicopters sitting outside

What a perfect day to pic. 1.3m of snow over the last few days and it is a beautiful blue bird day!!!

My ride of the day was the Bell 212 chopper. Seats 12 and is good to go!
Rock into the nice lodge and sign the waiver and get into the included buffet breakfast.

Meet our guide (Nate) and he goes through using the avalanch transcievers and some saftey aspects.
Load up into the chopper and get ready to go.

Wow! The chopper starts up, nice and loud and lots of vibrations, Faster and faster till we lift off.

The Adventure Begins

Flying up   over some mountain peaks and seeing the amazing surrounding mountain ranges, The guide picks the spot and our Pilot (Derrick) nestles the chopper on the top of a peak at one of their designated landing spots. Out of the chopper into the "heli huddle" waiting for Nate to unload and the chopper to take off. What an experience already. Looking around and we are at around 9900ft up. Fresh snow surrounding and no tracks... yet :P

Strap on in and down for our first run.

Holy crap, this is amazing, untouched powder everywhere and just amazing to board on. Its like floating on a cloud and its effortless!
We stop down the mountain a bit and the guides go down and dig into the snow to check the avalanch conditions.

All seemed to be good.
Continue down the mountain to meet the helicopter down the bottom and onto run 2.

We ended up doing 3 runs on this glacier and then 2 runs in some tree runs. I ended up paying for an extra run at the end of the day and it was totally worth it!

I got this one for you Dad, In the pilot's seat :)

What a fantastic day and definately something i will do again! Probably a week long one.

The thing i found interesting was, that with all the powder it wasnt very intensive on the body so i wasnt really worn out at all.

We covered roughly 16000 vertical feet during the day!

Here is a clip i put together from the footage of the day :)