For the last twenty four years of my life my birthday has
been celebrated in the warm weather and sunshine of beautiful British Columbia;
sometimes it was beers on a lake with family and friends, sometimes it was at
one of my favorite restaurants overlooking the Pacific Ocean and White Rock
beach. And although these are some of my most fantastic memories I was never
able to combine my birthday with my favorite activity in the world… sliding
down a snow covered hill with a plank of finely engineered wood strapped firmly
to my feet. This was the case until
yesterday when I got to fulfill my dream and although in was in the middle of
windy snowstorm we got an almost perfect run down an open face with some fresh
beautiful powder to spray everywhere. Snowboarding for me is where I feel the
most free and cut loose of the heavy blanket of regular life. But it also
really gives me the time to reflect on the journey I have taken so far and how
lucky I am to be where I am right now. It was another perfect birthday and it
was all topped off with some great dinner and a few drinks with some of the
great people I have the privilege to call my friends.
It has
been a little while since I last wrote a post for this blog and let me be clear
it wasn’t due to a lack of trying. I have about five different write ups that I
started to write but never got the time to finish or fell asleep trying, if you’re
reading this then I have finally succeeded. Since opening the mountain I have been
working almost every day, in fact I am only just having my fifth day off as I
am writing this. When I took this job at The Remarkables I had never worked in
a mass output kitchen. I had been used to 300 or 400 people days but serving
around 1000-2000 people is a whole new world. The respect I have gained for how
well operations like Whistler Blackcomb, which can get up to 13000 patrons, run
is immense. I think this is the first job I have had in my laundry list of jobs
that every second of my day is filled with something that needs doing. Of course
this was a little due to being slightly under staffed and working with a
kitchen that was still going through its brand new faults. But as of Sunday the
busy times are over and the fact that we got through it and continued to
provide a top notch service made us all a little more appreciative of our achievement.
It also made you really take use of all of your day off. My second day off it had
just snowed a foot the night before and with a little power outage in the
morning lots of people had decided to either go home or head up to our sister
mountain Coronet Peak but I decided I would stick it out and wait for the power
to get back on and head up to Remarkables and man was it ever worth it. I was
on third chair up the mountain and proceed to throw the snowboard onto the back
pack and take a half an hour hike to the top of a little bowl between two peaks
and paint a beautiful ‘S’ in it that managed to stay untouched all day long. It
is the little things like this that make working the next 11 days straight with
very little downtime all worth it. For now though I think it’s time end this
post as my stomach is starting to sound like jabba the hut.
