Whistler Ski Trip

10 January 2019

Whistler Adventures

Reaching Whistler

Our trip to Whistler in British Columbia, Canada was done over the 2nd weekend in January 2019. We got lucky that everyone who could come had both PTO and school holidays at a time when tickets weren’t so expensive as it was right after the pricey winter break vacation for most people. Our group was a massive conglomeration of folks who went to UT Austin and knew each other through various cliques.

The plan for me personally was to leave Thursday evening, after working from home, and then drive north from Seattle to the Airbnb that we had right next to the slopes. Due to the government shutdown, I was pretty paranoid that the security check lines would be pretty long, but luckily they were actually pretty short. After arriving in Seattle airport, Darshan sent me the address to go to, but it seems like Seattle has quite a confusing address system where 1501 8 S. Avenue is vastly different from 1501 8 Avenue. Uber seems to not be able to differentiate these addresses, and thus when I copy-pasted it I got taken to the wrong address initially, though my driver was kind enough to take me to the proper location.

Our car had Darshan, Eric, Karthik, and I, with Darshan as the solo driver. We got really lucky that Naren wasn’t the driver for our car, but more on that on the way back. With the wrong address, by the time I met with them, I was starving and the Facebook bars that Eric had brought on the trip really came clutch. Around an hour into the trip, cruising whilst playing Rap Caviar, we stopped by a Subway to grab dinner. Soon enough we hit the border patrol, where the fact that we had an upgraded hatchback made life really convenient for me since I could grab my backpack from the trunk to get some additional documents. In Canada after roughly 2 hours of driving, we noticed some changes that I’ve clearly forgotten since the last time I was there. I didn’t realize that Canada followed the metric system over the mileage system for everything, which got us into an interesting discussion about the intuitive nature of the American system and the ease of conversion between metrics of the metric system. The road that we took to get to Whistler is supposed to be one of the most scenic routes on the planet, though we were unable to get a single view of the sights since the sun had already set. On the Sea-To-Sky highway (I genuinely thought it was Cetus highway the first time someone said it to me), we started to get our first glimpses of snow on the side of the road. At one point, we got stuck behind some salting/snow clearing machines on the road, who we were worried that we’d be stuck behind on the rest of our journey north. Soon enough, we’d arrived at the location of our Airbnbs though we weren’t sure of which one to go to since the supergroup had booked 3 Airbnbs. Even though we left the latest, we somehow managed to arrive the earliest at Whistler and the others also seemed to have poor connectivity and thus couldn’t send us the proper documents and addresses. With the URLs on Darshan’s phone without any data, we had to do some verbal copy-paste to get it on a phone so that we got the addresses and the documents. After parking, we tried entering our Airbnb, only to find that the code worked but the door simply refused to open. After we got onto a phone call with the owner of the Airbnb, who explained extremely verbosely that the cold may have caused the locking mechanism to get stuck, we shoved the door open to find ourselves in our home for the next 3 nights.

We had a problem with the sleeping arrangement though. While there was a queen bed in the bedroom, a smaller than full-sized futon didn’t seem like it’d be able to accommodate multiple people in the living room. This is when Darshan pulled off some godly climbing skills to climb into the loft without a ladder so that we could get the sketchy mattress from the loft so that Eric could sleep on it. By this point, we were already up really late and as usual, I’d wake up far earlier than normal, so I took the earliest wake up time to get ready.

First Day Greens

Somehow, everyone managed to get ready from our apartment pretty quickly and we soon arrived at our ski rental place to pick up the skis. We planned to be there by opening at 8 am, which was definitely a stretch considering how tired and sleep deprived our car was. The rental place was next to the ultimate savior of our trip, Tim Hortons, the Canadian equivalent of Dunkin Donuts where they had the best bagels. Getting our gear took a fair bit of time, especially once the slower members of our group lumbered into the store and got outfitted. Since our Airbnb was, in fact, closer to the gondolas than the rental place, we drove back to the Airbnbs, suited up there, and then lugged our gear to the gondolas. Once again, our car group waited for the slow movers to arrive (I’m noticing a trend here). Once everyone got their ticket situations sorted out, we were ready to hit up the gondolas. Whistler’s lift ticket system was different from Colorado, where they scanned a badge on your jacket since they provided an RFID card that we placed inside our jackets. Naturally, this upgrade came at a hefty price to our e-wallets.

After getting onto the gondolas with assistance from the super helpful staff, we took the extended gondola ride up Whistler Mountain on the Creekside Gondola to reach a mid-station. Now, for some geographical background. The Whistler-Blackcomb ski area is comprised of 2 main peaks: Whistler and Blackcomb. However, what makes this complicated is that there are 4 main gondolas one can take from the base of the mountain to go to various places on the mountain. The problem was that our group was predominantly at the never-skied-before to beginner level with only 2 experts, and the Creekside gondola that we took did not have bunny slopes or a beginner area that the newbies could try out. Instead, the Creekside gondola drops you off at a point where you have to get on an expressway, a thin fairly flat slope that sometimes has cliffs on one side and is generally traveled on at an absurd speed by most people. To go back down was an even harder route since there were only Blues and Black Diamond routes available. In fact, the very first slope itself looked absurdly daunting at first. It was at this moment, we knew that we’d messed up.

What we maybe should have done, if we’d had more cash, was to book Airbnb’s at Whistler base instead of Creekside so that the beginners could directly take lessons or at-least try the bunny slopes. We soon realized that even that wouldn’t have worked since the sheer difficulty increase from the bunnies to the Greens on both mountains was ridiculous. The Greens on Whistler, honestly, were like the one Blue that I did in Colorado. The very first slope that we did was Marmot. The first part itself was incredibly daunting where Sumanth, Naren, Darshan, and Sachin all fell in the very deep and powdery snow. I completely overshot the slope and got stuck in a bit of the fluff, but was able to escape luckily. I think this instance really shattered our confidence about doing a lot the first day. I found the rest of Marmot far more doable, but I think the others found the entire course really traumatic as they didn’t want to go on it later on. Karthik absolutely smashed skiing for what was basically his first time skiing.

At the end of Marmot, our larger group split since Sumanth, Karthik, Eric, Naren, and I thought we’d be able to do Burnt Stew trail, only to realize it was closed. We headed down along Sidewinder and Upper Olympic to reach the mid station. We spent some time getting lunch and just meeting with people here. Since the price of a grilled cheese sandwich was 13 CAD, I realized that I needed to find alternate lunch options to sustain the calories burnt during skiing. In terms of the actual skiing, I was actually really confident that first day, I think I only fell doing ‘new’ techniques that didn’t work out at all on flat sections. With my confidence, I was rearing to do Blues, but I’m really glad that the saner members of the group talked me down and we continued to do Greens.

Post lunch, we (Sumanth, Karthik, Eric, Sachin, and I) headed to do Pony Trail and Bear cub to get to the Creekside gondola. The first part of Pony Trail was pretty intimidating, but by taking wide turns we were able to navigate it fine and got on to the Bear Cub portion of the trail. This is when the disaster struck. Sachin had fallen behind all of us, and some instructor was with him. As I was the closest to him, I slowly chugged my way up the slope to him and he assured us that he was going to get on the sled and get pulled down the mountain. It clearly wasn’t trivial, but there was nothing we could do at that point, so the rest of us attempted to continue and hopefully meet with him at the bottom.

Since I had climbed in the snow with my ski boots, all the snow packed on to the boots prevented me from putting my boots into the skis. I’m really perplexed as to how ski boots aren’t created to be snow repellent or at least have some coating to ensure that snow and ice don’t just cling on to the metal portion of the boot. The amount of energy expended when getting the skis on after a fall is far more than the energy taken whilst skiing itself. I eventually had to drag my skis down to where Sumanth was so that he could use his poles to scrape the ice on my boots before we headed off again. The rest of Bear Cub had incredible views off of cliff faces facing the snow-capped mountains. The whole day had been snowing with the clouds completely covering the sun, but at around this time the sun finally graced us and shone its light on the mountains to give us some amazing views. The gondolas at this time close at 3 pm when going up, but we thought that they close both ways at 3 pm, and headed down the Creekside gondola to go back to base and make sure that Sachin was okay.

Day 2: Blue Death

After another questionable night of sleep, we got ready to go to Tim Hortons for some breakfast. Since we were told that Blackcomb Mountain had some good Greens and was easier than Whistler, we wanted to do that mountain. To do that, we had to take the Creekside gondola up, take the expressway, take lower Olympic down to Whistler base to just get started at the base of Blackcomb mountain, took Excalibur up, and then took the Green Line down. This Green line was quite an easy route, but it was thin and streamlined. There was a significant increase in people since it was the weekend, that made going through the small passages with whiz kids zooming by you extremely daunting. By the time, we’d taken our first Green down Blackcomb, it was already time for lunch. After a solid bagel and a lot of much-needed water, we headed up the mountain again.

For this run, we wanted to go right to the top of Blackcomb Mountain. The peak was called 7th heaven, for which I have absolutely no clue why it’s called that other than the absurdly scenic views that for me, personally, never got boring throughout our trip. To get there, we had to take a super fast and narrow expressway to get on a ski lift. The number of people on the route just made me really nervous since to gain control in skiing, you have to swerve from left to right. So, if someones on your right and you’re going right and they’re going left, well, it’s a disaster! Even when my friends were beside me, I’d tend to just slow down and let them pass just since I really didn’t want to get caught up in any sort of clash. While I definitely had really good control, I just simply wasn’t comfortable going at such pace. I feel like this was because I don’t drive on highways and in India, I only went at far more reasonable speeds on the scooter. The lift to go to 7th heaven had a huge line, but to keep us all entertained all these tiny birds started perching on the heads and poles of the skiers. Eventually, we made it to the top of the mountain and were greeted with the view from the top of the mountain.

The way down the Green slope was fairly trivial, though I did fall just doing some dumb moves on turns that were completely unnecessary. By this point, my back was still completely destroying me as it had been the whole time skiing. I’m not sure why it happened the whole time I was skiing, but whenever I was parallel skiing I think I had far too much pressure being exerted on my lower back relative to my legs. I think this was why my legs weren’t paining so bad in the evenings relative to what I remember from Colorado. I tried adjusting by using my legs more instead of transferring my weight completely to the other foot, but then my technique would suffer. Due to this deficiency, I’d have to take far more breaks than normal and also prevented me from going for longer stretches at a time.

Springboard to Hell

Eventually, we made it down the 7th heaven Green that was filled with switchbacks. At the Peak to Peak gondola, we had to make a decision whether to continue doing Greens or to try a Blue. Karthik, Sumanth, and I made the decision to try the Blue, whilst Rohit, Naren, Evonne, Eric, and Alex went down the Green. We literally started the slope and it was instantly like “Oh my god what have I got myself into”. Just writing this portion is making my heart race remembering the sheer unexpected steepness of that first slope. With no other option, Karthik and I inched down the slope far too carefully. There weren’t many moguls, but due to some reason I fell on my left and was facing away from the mountain whilst trying to make a turn.

The main thoughts going through my head during just sliding down off a mountain was a) try not to get hurt, b) how the hell do I stop?. I was sliding down with my right shoulder in the snow with my skis above me in a bent position with my knees. I tried rotating myself to stop myself from falling by using the edges of the skis, but that just completely failed. I then tried to use my right elbow to try and stop myself, but that failed the first two times. During all of this, one of my poles had flown off my hand somewhere far above me. Finally, using my elbow stopped myself from sliding face first down the mountain haha. Miraculously, I wasn’t hurt a single bit. An Australian angel came to give me my pole and made sure I was okay. This was definitely by far the closest I’ve come to near death experience.

After this, my confidence in my skiing was naturally shot. It didn’t help me that my back was killing me the whole way and I needed an excessive number of breaks. At some point, we saw a sign with Greens to the left of the Springboard slope and started heading towards it, only to realize that it was on the other side of a small bunch of trees and a roped off area. During this, all I wanted to do was get off this Blue and get back on to a Green so I could just rest after a really long day. But, it wasn’t to be as Sumanth and Karthik understandably didn’t want to go through the cordoned off area and the area we were stuck in had some really deep powdered snow. But, to get back to the proper part of Springboard, they had to walk up a height of around 20ft. Sumanth tried it a bit, but I quickly realized that it was crazy to try and go up, and instead just skied through the super powdery snow to get back to the normal portion. They decided to climb up, and then took a nice water break -.-. By then in just that short distance, Karthik’s boots had acquired so much snow and ice that he wasn’t able to get his skis on. Removing the snow and getting back took at least 10 minutes and I know just how tiring that must have been after the hike in the deep snow.

We continued on down the slope, with me having to take more and more breaks. It got so tiring for me that I didn’t even want to know how much more there was when I asked Sumanth. Truly was reduced to a tired kid at that point. By the time we came to a sign with a Green, I was so relieved. But, by god was the Blackcomb mountain not done with me. I didn’t realize this at the time in my tired, delirious state, but at this point, I could have taken a gondola down. Instead, I got persuaded into continuing down the Green line to the base of Whistler Village. This turned out to be just as challenging as the earlier portion as everyone was starting to go down as the lifts and gondolas had stopped going up, so everyone had to come back down. This gondola was also above the fog line, so going down this would mean going through a Green with an absurd number of people beside you while being unable to see anyone. I somehow did make it down safely without falling, but with a back screaming of pain and torture.

Coming out of the fog area and finishing the Green was one of the most satisfying but terrifying moments. Thanks to the godly powers of google maps, we were able to figure out that the group that we split from at the top of Springboard were still behind us and were quickly approaching our location. We waited for them to arrive and then had to figure out how to get to Creekside Village from Whistler base. If any of our car drivers were in Creekside, then this wouldn’t have been a problem, but Naren and Rohit were with us, and Darshan had gone all the way to Blackcomb base.

Day 3

For Day 3, I woke up pretty early and was trying to leave fairly early. Sumanth and Naren, as usual, didn’t wait for me to get ready, but as no one else was close to getting ready I tried catching up to them right as they were in line for the gondola. But, since I was alone the single line moves far quicker, so I was able to go before them. We took the Big Red express lift and got started on the ego bowl to begin. The fear from the previous day’s fall was still playing on my mind and I was being really cautious. My back also was in the same state that it had been. After we aced the ego bowl, we went back and did Marmot to conquer our demons. Without the initial struggle to Marmot bothering us, the rest of the trail was also surprisingly easy.

After Burnt Stew Trail, we stopped at Mid-Olympic station to wait for Alex to meet with Sumanth so that they could do some Blues. But, what ended up happening was that Alex accidentally taking Manoj’s skis up, and so we had to wait for him to come back down, before we could head over to Blackcomb. We skied on Lower Olympic to then take the Excalibur gondola up.

Finally on Blackcomb, we (Naren and I) planned to head to the Jersey Cream Express, and while there was a supposed Green to get there, we couldn’t find the Green down to go there because of a lack of signs. However, the Blue that was there to go down turned out to be completely reasonable and I actually enjoyed going down the bit of buzz cut. We took the chair to get to the station where the Peak 2 Peak gondola was and took the Green route Easy Out, which according to someone was the hardest Green. That was a fine slope, and so we went back up and tried Wishbone.

My back was still hurting throughout this whole time, and my confidence was still shot from the fall the previous day, but I was ready to do Wishbone. The first part of Wishbone was absolutely terrifying because of all people and kids just whizzing by. But, I was getting back into the groove of parallel skiing and trying to reduce my back strain. We finished the whole of Wishbone fine and we ended up at the Jersey Cream / Crystal Glacier Chair lift. At that point, I was really tired and we wanted to go on the Peak 2 Peak and head back. We decided to do one more big Blue and attempted to do Cruiser, but bailed early, luckily, and got onto Honeycomb and ended up on Cruiser at the end. During this whole time, I didn’t fall down because of how careful I was, but I definitely was going far slower than I was going pre-fall.

By the time we got back on Whistler, it was already late in the afternoon and getting close to the closing time of the gondolas. Naren and I decided to do one more Blue going down, and potentially extending that into going the whole way down. We wanted to take Little Red Run into both Upper and Lower Franz’s, but the terrible signs on Whistler Mountain hit us with a low blow. We headed down on some slopes at a decent pace, but then at some point, it seemed like we’d completely missed the Little Red Run route and arrived at the entrance of what seemed like a small gully like entrance. We saw some people just whiz into it like nobody’s business, and so we took the plunge in. Just as quickly, we were surrounded by the icy slopes and fairly high moguls that made navigating the route fairly hard. Manoj did not have a good time navigating some of the parts, and I was just inching myself through the portion whilst allowing people to fly by. At some point, I thought I was going too fast so pulled sharply into the wall sides and rose so high along the halfpipe-esque walls that I was worried either my skis would snap or I’d get hurt. At some point on the side, I saw with my blurry eyes (I don’t wear my glasses whilst skiing) that there was a danger sign saying “Don’t fall into the creek!”, right next to us on the right. By that time, we’d quickly realized that we were way out of our league and this was not a Blue. Eventually, we managed to inch our way out of the creekside (haha) and get on a nice flat portion. After asking one person who didn’t whiz by us and didn’t scare us half to death, we realized we’d been on some free form unmarked trail. So, we can say that we’ve completed free skiing????

We had to pick up some speed before we were able to start Upper Franz, but when we got there looking over that lip to see the mountains and the sheer slope with the moguls made my stomach drop like a rock. My back was still in a fair amount of pain, and going slowly down the slope was not doing it any good as I was having to exert a lot of pressure trying to stop in time and making sure I wasn’t gaining speed. As it was near closing time, the barrage of skiers started to also increase, that made the experience more harrowing. I would attempt to go down only when there weren’t people going down, but I still nearly got hit. Upper Franz was also my first time dealing with moguls. Admittedly, they were quite large and avoidable, but with the previous days fall playing on my mind the unexpected bumps while going didn’t do my back any favors. I kept slowly continuing and meeting up with Naren at the bottom without falling finally improved my confidence though my back was in sheer agony by that point. I knew that there was absolutely no way I could do another Blue, especially considering Alex had told us that the route down was quite hard. We headed toward the Creekside gondola through the ski tunnel where we met up with Daniel briefly, before we called it a day. I was slightly disappointed to have to finish the day with a lackluster attempt of the Upper Franz, but overall I thought I had done really well to do the number of Blues that I did considering the previous days scares. Naren and I headed down the gondola, appreciating the view from Whistler Mountain one last time, whilst I was so glad that we hadn’t continued down the Blue that looked so long and hard from the gondola.

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After we reached the bottom, we had to go to Whistler village in a car to collect Sachin’s equipment from the lost and found. As we were going there the route back had one of the longest blockages I’ve seen and stretched for close to a few kms of just unmoving traffic. We also had to pick up Rohit, Evonne, Rainier, and Naomie. The sheer amount of traffic and lack of traffic meant that it wasn’t really feasible for me to get out of the car and get the equipment whilst Manoj waited, so we got Rainier and Naomie to collect the equipment. Our challenge was just being able to stop for a bit near them. With the traffic situation, it was impossible to do that, and Manoj decided to just overtake a massive line of traffic before taking a left and then parking in a handicap parking spot before we were finally able to meet with them. They luckily had some food whilst we were dying of hunger in the car, and so we were able to sate our hunger a bit. We had to reach the rental place by the time they were closing at 6, and Google was telling us we’d reach there at 5:57 pm with the level of traffic. Manoj honked and managed to avoid the bulk of the traffic when it finally cleared near Creekside village. The rental place was luckily still open and accepted all our rental gear without any issues. Finally, we were able to head back, shower, and freshen up.

Then began the great chat poll over where we would go for food. We all wanted to make sure that we had food at the same place, but some meat lovers wanted ramen and pushed for that. However, the veggie bois retaliated by finding that the veggie options were some of the worst I’ve seen with kale noodles, rape blossom (yes, it’s actually an ingredient shockingly), and mushroom broth. We managed to pull off a coup and get everyone to go to an Indian restaurant instead. However, a fire was happening in a building close to our Airbnb’s and so only one car was able to successfully pull out, so we fitted 15 people in two trips to the restaurant. There, I was overruled by my veggie brethren who decided that not one, not two, but three paneer dishes were needed. We came back and relaxed at Rohit’s Airbnb, where we actually had the cops knocking on our door much to Shallom’s enjoyment.

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Day 4 - Back to Seattle

All that was left for the trip was the frantic cleanup of the Airbnb, getting one last Tim Hortons, and then we started the long journey back to Seattle on the scenic Sea-To-Sky highway. Whimsical Manoj decided to rear his head in the parking scene at Tim Hortons and then at the gas station before we were finally able to start. Many scenic vista points later, we decided to stop halting due to our growling stomachs and managed to cover some solid distance before coming close to Vancouver. Vancouver’s entrance from the north was completely masked by a lot of fog but made driving over the Lion’s Gate a real experience. Vancouver itself looked like an awesome city to go and explore in the future with a bustling downtown right by the water, though our lunch location was in Richmond since everyone was quite scared about our cars being broken into over lunch. Eric and Evonne were in charge of finding food, and we ended up in some office complex in the middle of nowhere. Till this date, they still blame the other for finding the location and no one knows whose fault it was. I was just too hungry to care what was on my plate and needed the food in me before we started driving back to the US. We completed the border crossing fine and were in fact at the front when Manoj and Rohit pulled some sneaky maneuvers and got us to wait on the assumption that we’d go along some scenic route instead of the main route. But, since it was already late and quite foggy we never did that and they told us this after they’d crossed us lol. It wasn’t clear what the plan was at this point, but we wanted to meet with CK for food, so eventually after a lot of broken phone calls and trolling we ended up at CK’s place.

We had a problem with the sleeping arrangement though. While there was a queen bed in the bedroom, a smaller than full-sized futon didn’t seem like it’d be able to accommodate multiple people in the living room. This is when Darshan pulled off some godly climbing skills to climb into the loft without a ladder so that we could get the sketchy mattress from the loft so that Eric could sleep on it. By this point, we were already up really late and as usual, I’d wake up far earlier than normal, so I took the earliest wake up time to get ready. </div> </div>

Solid conversation, pizza, and some random boba trip to Seattle later, everyone bar Rainier and I left CK’s place. We had super early flights to catch back to the Bay Area and really needed the sleep as it was already close to midnight. I woke up groggily and got ready quickly to catch our cab back to the bay. I did manage to catch up on some zzzz’s before landing. I was hoping to catch a meeting at 10 am, but the traffic on the 92 bridge from Oakland to my home was so bad that it was impossible for me to make it.

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Overall, the trip to Whistler was an amazing time filled with near-death experiences to meeting new friends and seeing old ones all whilst getting overwhelmed by the scenic majesty of Whistler and Blackcomb. I managed to do more Blues and got much more confident about my controlled skiing ability, though I have to do something to strengthen my back or at least change my technique. The trip reaffirmed how much I enjoyed the thrill and challenge of the sport, and I’m really looking forward to going skiing again. Who knows, maybe once I’m able to do Black Diamonds I may end up in Whistler for another trip :).