Red Heather: Throwing Down the Gauntlet to Punxsutawney

Many years ago, I saw an airblown inflatable Santa riding on a sled with a snowman at Rona. I’d never seen a Christmas decoration so spectacular, so I bought it. I’m sure I wasn’t the first to have such a thing, but I hadn’t seen any installed at private residences before. I felt like an ambassador to radness.

When I got this, 1.2 m seemed ridiculously big. Now it’s just a sprout.

A few years later, the Christmas airblown inflatable landscape had gone from non-existent to extremely competitive, and my Santa and snowman were dwarfed by the inflatable armies being mustered at every other house on the street. I managed to stay with the pack on Halloween, but I was by no means in a leadership role.

My Halloween at night lawn

My Halloween lawn by day

Last Groundhog Day, I started thinking about how Groundhog Day needs someone to start an inflatable arms race. I started periodically googling for giant inflatable groundhogs. Now when I look at the news, most of the trash ads at the bottom are different companies, all accessible through Alibaba, claiming to be the maker of the same single instance of an inflatable groundhog.

Nice work, algorithm

As I slowly wrestled with the uncertainty of an indistinguishable mass of companies all taking credit for the same groundhog, I got an impassioned plea from Cassandra to help with a giant VOC introduction to backcountry skiing fiasco, with a mix of overnighters and day-trippers.

I was willing to take day-trippers or overnighters, but since there were a lot of people wanting to day-trip, I ended up scheduled for Saturday only. The snow the night before came down to 600 m, and Cassandra was worried about people ending up in the ditch, so she told people without chains to wait at the lower mountain-bike parking lot, 10 km back from where we wanted to be. This was perhaps a touch conservative.

Ferrying VOCers without chains or 4WD is always a bit of a stressful experience. It’s not the driving back and forth per se—it’s that while you’re doing the ferrying, there are groups of VOCers standing and waiting at either end, and waiting in a parking lot sucks. If it’s not raining, cold, or snowing, there are bugs. The concern for the parking lot residents is exacerbated by non-VOC cars driving at walking speed but still not letting people pass, getting stuck, doing a protracted 39-point turn, or something. This time was no different.

After getting up to the upper lot, I shooed everyone in my vehicle out and headed back to the mountain-bike lot. The boondoggle had already started. There was a car in the ditch, cars stuck in the middle of the road trying to put chains on, etc., more cars behind them waiting in the middle of the road, etc. People are often so selfish. They can’t make it uphill, so they stop right in the middle and start putting on chains, while they could just back up ten feet to get off to the side and then start putting on the chains that they should have installed at the mandatory chain-up area. After snaking around a number of incapacitated vehicles, I met a standoff between a grader and a vehicle. It was clear that the only solution here was for the vehicle to back up, so I started backing up, forcing Mirko, who was behind me, also doing vehicle ferrying, to back up as well. We got to a pull-out and waited for an eternity for the grader to come back up. Oddly enough the car initially engaged in the standoff did not precede it. On the way down, I saw the car stuck in the ditch, which is I guess one way of getting clear of the grader.

Classic Red Heather scenery (photo:Toji)

A line of vehicles had followed the grader up, and invariably they got stuck because half didn’t have chains on. When I met them, they were in the middle of the grader-cleared line, about 1.5 car-widths wide. On their right they had a half-car of unploughed snow that they could have easily backed into. On their right, there was the big furrow that the grader had ploughed up. I couldn’t let the uphill column by because they were stuck, and the uphill column was totally unwilling to back up ten feet and get out of the way, so I was obliged to ram through the furrow. Soon afterwards, I met two stuck columns, and both were unwilling to cede anything, resulting in more furrow ramming.

At the lower mountain-bike parking lot, the people were feeling abandoned and were very glad to see someone. We sardined as many as we could get into my vehicle and started heading up again, and saw Mirko and Ross heading down to get the remainder.

On the way up, I saw Tom Curran waving around at the vehicle that lost the standoff with the grader. It was a VOC vehicle. Tom was expecting me to do something sneaky to get it out of the ditch, but all I had at my disposal was the dumbly obvious, so I started telling bystanders to stop bystanding and start pushing. This initially wasn’t successful, but a car driving by stopped and started bystanding, so I told them to get out and push too, which got the vehicle out in a couple minutes.

I’d have a hell of a time getting up the nerve to ask a bunch of strangers to get my vehicle out of the ditch, but when the bystanders aren’t any less familiar with the stuck vehicle than I am, it feels different. If I’m givin’ ‘er to help a stuck stranger, then why are they standing around picking their noses?

Back at the parking lot, Cassandra told me to go up to the warming hut, so that people would have something to follow. Tra Mi, one of my initial passengers, didn’t bring skins. I was not aware of this, but Cassandra was on it, doing her best to strap something to the bottom of Tra Mi’s skis such that she could go uphill. This ultimately succeeded at destroying a pair of skin-savers but didn’t get Tra Mi up the road. Ultimately the skis were carried up in people’s backpacks, and Tra Mi had to walk.

At the hut, I observed someone who had skinned all the way up with their boots in downhill mode. This definitely provides some unnecessary extra struggling but pales in comparison to what I was told that “one of the Emmas” did: somehow made it past the warming hut with her skins on backwards. The skins had toe clips on both ends, which is a thing that some people make for twin-tip skis, which explains why no one experienced noticed her suboptimal configuration. I’m impressed to no end. For anyone that’s thinking “that’s not soooo bad,” just imagine making it all the way up with skins completely glopped up with ice. That’s terrible, but it’s only halfway. That gets you some sliding backwards and a heinous effort to push forwards, but the worst-case for being glopped up is equal friction forward and backward—only halfway backward. What one of the Emmas did was on a whole other level compared with the worst glop that any of the rest of us have endured, and it was her first time skinning to boot. I’m thoroughly impressed. She definitely wins the prize, if being backstopped by me while attempting to do something way too ambitious for a beginner is a prize she wants to win.

At the hut, I went to put on my gloves and discovered that I’d brought one of mine and one of my son’s. Both were for the right hand.

Tom and Cassandra

Getting people going skiing was as one would expect. Lots of falling over and lots of learning how to get upright again. We discovered a variety of release settings, e.g. 3.5 on the left toe, 4 on the left heel, 6 on the right toe, and 5 on the right heel. Above the hut, the summer trail is vehicle-drivable and has a pronounced ditch. Because it’s a low-snow year, the ditch wasn’t filled with snow, and it became more filled with VOCers in a variety of orientations. Below the hut, some of the streams and water holes weren’t quite filled. These were readily filled by VOCers as well. For me, it felt like we didn’t spend nearly long enough actually trying to ski and way too much time driving, but I think the new skiers were for the most part pretty well used up but happy by the end of Saturday.

Learning to kick turn (photo Elizabeth Chu)

Happy skiers (photo: Jacob Grossbard)

In the evening, we had a total of six day-trip vehicles, two up at the top, one in the middle, and three way down at the mountain-bike parking lot, so Cassandra came down with us such that she could use Tom’s overnight car to shuttle one load of people down. I took a load of people down to the mountain-bike lot and another load to the chain-up area, and I was coming down with my carload when I started getting calls that Cassandra drove into the ditch. This seemed out of character. Eleven years ago, Cassandra got my minivan stuck diagonally across a logging road, but this was because she tried to turn around instead of ramming through the difficulties. Driving an easy road like a hooligan and sliding off just isn’t something she’d do.

When we got to her, it was a truly ridiculous sight. The car was entirely in the ditch, with all four wheels on the back. The entire passenger side of the car wasn’t more than six inches from the bank, but it wasn’t touching anywhere. The side-view mirror had been non-destructively folded in, but there was no damage at all. The road was entirely benign, with no skid marks on it, absolutely no reason to be in the ditch. Cassandra recounted turning the wheel and the vehicle not turning.

Tom’s car, arranged by Cassandra (photo: Toji)

At that point, figuring out how she managed to crash was secondary to getting Tom’s car out of the ditch. The challenge, above and beyond it being pretty stuck, is that if an attempt at moving it caused it to turn, it’d crunch up one end of the vehicle. I told Cassandra that I wasn’t guaranteeing not crunching it and she wanted me to try, so I rigged it my car with the tire chains, got Cassandra to empty hers, piled eight people into mine for extra weight, and pulled.

Once the car was out, the key wouldn’t turn. Sometimes, if a vehicle is parked sideways across a hill, there’s some pressure trying to make the car steer, which leans against the steering wheel lock, binding the key. This is usually solved by tugging on the steering wheel a bit while turning the key, but in this case, pulling on the wheel until I was worried that it was going to break off wasn’t sufficient to let the key turn. I gave the wheels some yanking side to side, and it was pretty clear they weren’t going anywhere. Things now made sense. The steering mechanism had some major failure when Cassandra was driving, which caused her to drive into the ditch. Cassandra’s spinning the wheel around trying to course-correct to no effect but there not being skid marks were no longer at odds.

The car was bricked at this point. Not only was it not steerable, it wasn’t startable and couldn’t be shifted out of park because the steering wheel lock had bound the key.

I had a carload of my people. We also had a carload of day-trippers that Cassandra was driving down. We still had some skis in our car that belonged to a different car in the lower mountain-bike lot, and they were probably waiting. Cassandra was on the road beside a busted car. Tom and the rest of that carload were overnighters that were up waiting for Cassandra. Tom’s supper was in Cassandra’s pack. Total gong show.

Tom watching everyone else have supper (photo:Sahil)

I dropped the skis and Cassandra’s passengers at the lower lot, went back to Tom’s car, picked up my passengers and dropped them at Sunny Chiba’s and started trying to arrange a tow truck. They wanted vehicle make, model, year, license plate and driver’s license number. The dispatcher was dealing with a bunch of calls at the same time and was trying her best, but the situation was far from ideal. She wanted an address of GPS coordinates. Cassandra doesn’t own a cellphone, and Tom’s service was highly spotty where he was, so I couldn’t get anything.

I went back to Cassandra, emptied the contents of Tom’s car into mine and drove her up to the trailhead so she could get back to her tent and give Tom his supper. She gave me the keys to Tom’s car so that I could give them to the tow truck. The tow truck dispatch had asked me to get pictures and GPS coordinates, so I did.

Once back in cell range, I gave the information to dispatch and found out that they don’t do pick-ups on gravel at night, and that it’s a fairly universal policy for two truck companies. I asked if I could take the keys to dispatch and was informed that dispatch was in North Van, but that if I went to the yard in Squamish I’d be able to hand over the key.

The yard was by CN’s Christmas Train light celebration. I watched a parade of families with kids going by, all happy, while I stood outside the tow-truck yard and felt bad about the carload of people at Sunny Chiba’s. Would it close before I was able to hand off the keys? Another call with dispatch revealed that there was a tow-truck driver in the little house in the tow-truck yard, but he wasn’t on duty yet. Dispatch tried to call him a bunch of times, but he didn’t pick up. Dispatch said he was probably asleep because he had a late shift coming up, but the lights in the little house were definitely on. Sunny Chiba’s closed, so my passengers hid in the Shell across the parking lot.

The on-duty driver showed up at about 9:30. We talked about the car for a bit and how the front wheels were locked and it was in park. He was glad to know that, since if you pull a car with locked wheels onto a flat deck, like he had, getting it off the flat deck isn’t easy. They had a traditional tow truck as well, and that would be the one that’d do the rescue.

I got to bed about 1:00 am, pretty tired. The next morning, I stuffed the items I’d pulled out of my pack to dry back into the pack and went back up to the Red Heather parking lot, because all the people from Tom’s car were still up there, without a ride.

At the top, I discovered that while I’d shovelled my pack contents back into the pack correctly, I had left my ski boots on the boot dryer. I didn’t want to drive all the way back to New West to get my boots, nor did I want to hike up to the hut in hikers and sulk while everyone else skied. I started heading down, thinking about what to do, just as it started to rain really hard. Just before I got up to the chain-up area, I saw two snowshoers that looked like they were getting wetter than they wanted to be, so I took them up to the upper lot. As I was telling them about my plight, I realized that I was being dumb and that I could rent boots in Squamish, which was a lot closer than New Westminster.

After getting the boots, I rocketed up the trail to the hut and met up with Tom. By this point, I’d been dealing with problems I’d created for myself and other people’s problems pretty much continuously for two days, and I wanted to at least feel like I’d skied to some degree. I asked if there was anyone that wanted to go huck some cliffs. Tom assured people that I was being facetious, and I assured them that I wasn’t. Only Tom wanted to go with me, which is probably for the best. We dropped off Round Mountain to the west. I failed to find any cliffs that had a reasonable landing, but there was a fallen log going diagonally across a fairly significant hole. Getting onto the log required a drop down to a ledge with enough speed to make it up onto the log, then a quick turn to stay on top of it. I felt I’d skied something, so that was a success.

Goofing around with Tom

On the way back to Vancouver, we were discussing inflatable groundhogs. Normally Cassandra is all about avoiding frivolity and Tom is not far behind, but everyone was 100% team groundhog. The next day at work, I was discussing it with a colleague–who didn’t support my duckana–and she was also very pro-groundhog.

Duckana

I’d driven all of the road above the lower mountain-bike lot fourteen times, and some portions twenty. It’d been a long time since I’d bought anything particularly dumb. I stood in front of the gate of a tow truck yard for an hour while everyone else was going to Christmas Train. I felt that this justified a very large groundhog. I registered for Alibaba and asked for a price on a giant groundhog. I got a lot of emails from various inflatable companies that had pictures of things that weren’t groundhogs, and one company, Hangzhou Jenor Inflatable Co.,Ltd., that had a photo of the one inflatable groundhog picture in all the ads. Presumably they’d made the one that exists? They quoted a four-metre groundhog.

One of the pictures of the existing inflatable groundhog shows a sign celebrating Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney.

Since VOC members are cosmopolitan, and Groundhog Day is a northeastern part of North America thing, I should say a bit about Punxsutawney, where they take Groundhog Day very seriously. Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog, is taken from his home on Gobbler’s Knob on February 2nd, by the Inner Circle, a group of groundhog handlers wearing top hats, tuxedos, and leather gloves. If Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, it scares him, and he retreats to his burrow and continues hibernating for six more weeks. It’s of course winter if the groundhogs are hibernating, so that means six more weeks of winter. If Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t see his shadow, he starts partying and it’s springtime. Punxsutawney Phil has been doing his job since 1886. Slanderous rumours that they’ve replaced him multiple times after death owing to groundhogs not living that long are definitely false. Other towns have namesake groundhogs, and have different winter/spring transitions, but Punxsutawney’s and the rest of North America’s are scheduled by Punxsutawney Phil.

Punxsutawney Phil (photo: Chris Flook)

Anyways, I’d assumed that if I asked for a big groundhog, and the company making it had made Punxsutawney’s inflatable groundhog, then the quoted groundhog would be the same size of Punxsutawney’s, so I asked them to quote on a five-metre groundhog. It was barely any more money than the four-metre groundhog.

I almost bought it, but then I realized I was being dumb and stopped myself. People wouldn’t even notice it at night.

I asked them to requote with interior lighting, such that it glows at night. Then I ordered it. Afterwards, I discovered Hangzhou Jenor Inflatable just stole the picture from the internet, and that the maker’s of Punxsutawney’s inflatable only made it three metres tall. The original work by Hangzhou Jenor Inflatable looks pretty good, though, so I feel pretty good about my potential to set the bar for inflatable groundhogs for years to come.

How do people feel about this? Should I feel shame about hijacking my own Red Heather trip report and wasting everyone’s time talking about inflatable groundhogs? Or should I shamelessly post a Groundhog Day trip report with pictures of a five-metre groundhog rising out of my yard?