Seymour? Skiing?

So we thought we’d give Seymour a run, on Saturday Nov 18. Why Seymour?  Well it’s close; you don’t spend half a day driving. The lifts weren’t operating, so it wouldn’t be crowded. Both Kevin and I were suffering from the cold/flu that most VOC’ers had, so we weren’t into very high output activities. Edward didn’t seem to be sick at all.

 

Getting gear in the Clubroom was interesting. Kevin got tele skis for himself and Edward, I used my AT gear because I am too dumb to tele. We picked over a lot of Club gear looking for the two perfect pairs of skis, with boots, of course. We finally settled for a pair of skis that didn’t have anything wrong with them, plus another pair with green tape, saying “binding needs to be screwed down” or something like that. We took the gear home leaving four brown bills as deposit. We omitted the avalanche gear as we figured that sharks and hot springs would likely be more of a problem than avalanches.

 

Planning to arrive at or before 09:00 is the thing to do for Seymour, even though the lifts were not running and parking was abundant. There was a crazy number of cars parked at the cafeteria; perhaps people attending a “how to work for Mt Seymour” presentation. We planned to park near the toilets as is our custom, but the fog was so opaque that we got lost in the parking lot for a while. It was snowing a bit. There were two monster machines in the parking lot, moving snow around or possibly chasing each other. With the fog we figured to get out of the parking lot asap to avoid getting run over by the monsters.

 

So finally we got our clothes selected and got onto the skis. Sharks (rocks that stick up) weren’t very abundant. We saw a couple of hot springs (where there was no snow, just a small piece of naked gravel) perhaps due to hot water welling up, or maybe not. Kevin ran into a shrubbery. The weather was totally opaque, about the worst I’ve ever seen. Soon it got even more opaque, but it stopped snowing. We had decided that Brockton was an easy objective, but around where the upper chair starts up we got totally lost, that is we didn’t recognize any terrain and decided that it was time to follow our tracks down. When you can see only two metres you don’t want to go very fast. The snow was quite deep but it wasn’t powder. It might have been cottage cheese. We encountered lots of snow-filled ditches on the way down, and both Edward and Kevin executed a special type of turn where you jump up in the air and come down facing the opposite direction. Eventually we got back to the car, put away the toys, and went home. Got back home around noon, with enough time to write a trip report.

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