CODY SHIMIZU

A look into my life, a journal to look back on, a blog for others to see.

FINALLY! I’ve been talking about it all year long about wanting to go split boarding finally with the winter here I was constantly checking the University of Alberta Outdoors Club emails and Alpine Club of Canada Edmonton Section for introductory trips for noobs like myself and I finally managed to find one! The ACC Edmonton was going to have a volunteer led trip organized by Jason and Steve. I found out about it when I was sitting in one of my lectures and I sent an email right away expressing interest. Also managed to convince my good friend Tagger to come along with me as well.

As the date closed I scrambled around to organize rentals, etc but thankfully most of the trip was already organized by Steve and Jason. Unfortunately, Jason had apparently injured himself so he ended up not being able to come but Steve still took over the trip for us.

Friday evening Tagger, Bianca (another awesome snowboarder), and I left Edmonton after work, with the traffic it ended up being around 7pm by the time we hit QE2 southbound. We rolled into the HI Lake Louise by close to mid night, the hostel is absolutely beautiful by the way. Steve and Katie was already asleep so we quickly made our beds and passed out.

The next morning, we gathered during breakfast to plan out where we were going for the day. Steve gave us great insight on how to find information about the snow pack, terrain and popular ski touring spots. After looking over a map for a while we decided to go to Observation Sub Peak and Bow Summit area. Excited we quickly gathered our goods and made our way out of the hostel. After about 30min of driving we finally made it. It was exciting, looking up towards the mountains all I saw was opportunity. In the parking lot, I skinned my snowboard for the first time, a little nervous making sure I was doing it right, but the nerves were quickly washed over with the feeling of excitement.

As we started making our way out of the parking lot, I felt like an awkward penguin trying to waddle across the snow. Coming from a skating back ground I was immediately compelled to push my foot out sideways at an angle rather than a completely sagittal movement. It felt very unnatural to me, but with many more hours of skinning to go I would eventually get used to it. As we got to the meadows we did a quick run through of avalanche safety before we started heading up. In the trees we were meandering through the forest following other skin tracks, already well packed down with the lack of snow the past few weeks. Skinning uphill was surprisingly much more technical then I expected. I was thinking that I would be able to mindlessly make my way up the mountain with all of the snowboards surface area giving me grip. But unlike a snowshoe I wouldn’t have any sharp teeth to dig into the packed down snow.

It was amazing. With the sun gleaming through the trees, snow taken down from by the trees with each little breeze would sparkle around us it was magical. As we broke above the treeline we got an amazing view of bow summit. As we got above treeline the cold wind started to cool us down, as we stopped more frequently to rest our legs with the gradient getting steeper we threw on more layers. We decided we would keep climbing until a set turn around point. As we gained a shoulder just above treeline we quickly set up to transition. Immediately as I step off of my board I sunk right into the snow. Still fumbling around trying to figure out an efficient system to transition I quickly assembled my board and threw my layers on.

At the time I didn’t realize it but I had managed to put my bindings in backwards. Now you might think how that is possible, but trust me I’m just an idiot. But, don’t worry nothing was broken either, I just didn’t look at the blatantly obvious labels they have on their properly. So the entire time I was riding with my knees tilted inwards. I mean I knew I wasn’t that great at snowboarding but didn’t expect I was THAT bad. From where we were we would be traversing across for a while and dropping into a mellow gully, hopefully without too much tight trees. As we traversed we heard a few pretty good crunches of rock scraping off wax from our bases. The snow was a bit on the hard side for sure but it was AMAZING! Got in a few good turns before having a pretty good bail. Once we got into the gully unfortunately the terrain was a few levels above my level with some tight tree sections I barely made it through in one piece.

To top off the day we were greeted with an incredible sunset as we came out to the meadows again. We drove back towards lake Louise as Tagger and I cooked up our butter chicken and a shit ton of rice. It was amazing. I could not wait until the next day.

As we quickly packed up our bags and threw everything into the car we rolled into Bow Summit parking lot greeted with cars spilling out to the highways. It was insane how many people there were out that day, I almost felt like I was in an resort. But as we skinned up we were slowly spread out from most other groups. Occasionally passing by a few other people but otherwise we were mostly alone. Thankfully today the terrain in the woods were really mellow and well packed, which made for a relatively speedy ascent but made some sections a little slick for us. When you’re backcountry skiing falling uphill is a very real thing. Once we popped up above the tree line we were greeted with a nice steep pitch where people were traversing up.

Compared to yesterday we hadn’t seen any terrain that was this steep, the trail was quite narrow with my lower ski always on the verge of sliding out. At least we got some good practice on kick turns. For our first run we didn’t go too high but high enough to find some untouched snow. Although the surface was a bit hard from sitting there exposed to the elements for weeks It was still refreshing. Also the board felt amazing with the bindings finally facing the right direction. Getting a few good turns in we decided to traverse across to find the gully leading to the upper parking lot. We came up to a slightly flat section where surprisingly I quickly started sinking in the powder losing almost all of my speed, I think I’m going to have a lot to learn about snowboarding in fresh powder vs well-groomed runs. We stopped at a little shoulder looking over Peyto lake. It was absolutely jaw dropping.

After a quick photo shoot we made our way down a neat little gully to the upper parking lot where we transitioned back to ski mode and went down the road (its closed in the winter so its all covered in snow) without our skins on, it felt weird to be skiing in snowboard boots but kinda fun, surprisingly I didn’t mind it. Where we found another skin track we put our skins back on and started heading back up.

We ended up at the same place as last time so we decided to go a little higher on the steep slope in front of us to get a few more quality turns in. It was AWESOME. The snow there was really nice and with the steepness I was able to keep my speed. Got a few QUALITY turns in. On the next section I got a bit confident trying to weave through these small trees and I totally caught an edge and had a good yard sale. We found some good turns and made it back down to the parking lot to wrap up our amazing weekend in the mountains. On the way home we all stopped at a Thai restaurant in Calgary which was actually really really good. Now finals are coming up for my university courses and all I can think about is going split boarding again!!