Late Night Discoveries

After dinner last night, we had not planned anything special. I had to run out to grab something I forgot to bring (and we forgot to buy), and found the streets not unexpectedly busy at 8:30 PM. So we opted to do our favourite Italian thing and go out for a wander in the streets, a "passagiata", so to speak.

We found lots of folks out and about. We wandered kind of aimlessly and found some pretty, and the occasional unique, buildings...

A bit of false perspective

... then ran across the pretty Arenas de Barcelona.

Apparently, it's actually now a shopping centre

It was here we sort-of found crowds.  This fronts a big traffic circle called the Place D'Espanya, and on the big spaces surrounding the Place, there were about 5,000 people. Vendors selling junk. A break-dancing street performance.

Doin their thing

Actually quite good

We hadn't realized what we stumbled into until we turned the corner onto Avinguda de La Reina Maria Cristina -- a street lined with lit fountains.

Both sides of the street have these 

Lots of folks

At the end of the street was the Font Magica de Montjuic, built in 1929 and Barcelona's answer to the Bellagio Fountains (okay, Barcelona's came first bu 80 years, but it's a reference you Las Vegas types will understand). Dancing to music and lit up by 4,500 lights, they go off on Friday & Saturday nights at this time of year from 9 PM till 10:30 PM.

Above the Font Magica is the Place de las Cascades, a huge set of waterfalls (all lit up) leading to the Palau National, a neo-classical palace that houses the Museum of Catalunyan art.

Huge fountains under the stairs 

The uppermost fountain

And from the top, you have sweeping views back down to the Place d'Espanya from high above the Font Magica.

And you also get some pretty sweeping city views, from which we could see a well lit church that also seemed to have something funky going on. I think it's Tibidabo.

Glowing on the hillside

It was completely accidental that we stumbled onto this, and cool, too, given that it only goes off two days a week.

To Barcelona via Victoria

Well, after my usual winter hiatus to write my ski bog over at Powderwatch.com, we're back with our annual May getaway, this year to Barcelona.

As has seem to become the case, we had "another" trip we had to do first. We quit skiing April 17th, then had to run to Victoria for a weekend for a 75th birthday celebration of a dear friend of Karen's that she has known for 40 years. 

We left Saturday, April 30th, driving 11.5 hrs to Vancouver, and overnighting with my little sister (whom I have not seen in about 8 years). While it was kinda ugly, raining and almost snowing when we left home, it was basically blue sky once we hit Golden, and stayed that way for the next 4 days. Aside from a wild goose chase caused by someone mucking with GasBuddy's gas prices, the drive was uneventful -- until we hit Vancouver, when our GPS took us to a bridge that had closed the previous day for repairs, leaving us very confused for a short while.

After overnighting with my sis, we had a very early start on Sunday to catch the ferry to Vancouver Island. When I lived on the island, I always liked the ferry ride itself, but the process or catching the ferry was never fun.

The Deltaport Coal Terminal from the ferry 

An osprey flew by 

A dramatic shot of the funnel 

Another ferry sails by 

Ships passing in the Active Passage 

A whale watching boat, out watching... 

...seals 

The classic view of the islands 

The south tip of Saltspring Island. I used to tidepool there 

A sailboat motors with Mt. Baker in the background. Do sailboats ever sail?

W had almost 2 hrs to kill before the party, so went to Island View Beach, home of a lot of people walking dogs on a Sunday afternoon -- and the odd bird.

The beach 

A great blue heron 

A solo kayaker 

My heron in flight 

A crab. It was dead, but still cute 

My heron alights

It was then time to hit the party itself.

Karen on the left in red, the guest of honour behind her in green

It was a great, if short, party, and we were glad we went to help Val celebrate.

The next morning, it was time to reverse the process and drive home. We caught the 11 AM ferry back to the mainland again.

The little ferry heads to Saltspring 

More islands 

Two ferries in the Active Passage 

Chasing each other down 

Two sailboats motor out of the chop in the Active Passage and into the straight 

Racing another ferry in to the terminal

I drove from Victoria to Calgary in one day a long time ago; I don't recommend it. It's 12 hrs of driving plus a 90 min ferry ride plus the ferry queue. So we opted to stop over at a friends place in Kelowna, splitting the drive into 2 days. We took an "interesting" route to avoid the terrible traffic in the Fraser Valley, driving direct through farmland from White Rock to Abbotsford paralleling the US Border about 5 miles north of it. Slow, but pretty, and only ~5 min longer than had we taken the highway.

Mt. Baker, even closer

We once again blasted over the Coquihalla at the blistering speed limit of 120 km/hr, where everything happens very fast.

Approaching the summit. Cool rock slabs.

We found it interesting that the Coquihalla Connector from Merritt to Peachland was the "high" point of the trip, topping out at over 1,700 m ASL (higher than the Roger's Pass's 1,330 m, or the Kicking Horse Pass's 1,627 m). At one point, we could make out Big White some 80 km distant.

I've been there...

We intercepted a friend in Kelowna for a beer, then crashed at "home" with take out Chinese food.

Tuesday, we did the 8 hr drive from Kelowna home. Aside from 3 people trying to kill me with their cars, it wasn't eventful.

We saw LOTS of wildlife on Day 1 of our 4 days on the road, including multiple deer, sheep, eagles and other critters, and sadly, a dead black bear that had been hit by a vehicle in Mt. Revelstoke National Park. The rest -- not so much.

So we arrived home Tuesday late  and tired after 4 days on the road, our house sitters arrived on Wednesday, and we left for Barcelona early Thursday morning. It was a pretty uneventful flight over, though due to loud chatty people sitting in front of us on the Toronto-Barcelona run, got little sleep.

On arrival in BCN, I picked up a sim card for my phone, buying 20 min of calling, unlimited texts and 1 Gb of data for €10  You can't get that deal at home. We bought a T10 card for €10, then took the train from the airport to the Sants station, then the metro to our apartment (2 rides off the 10 ride card). We dumped our bags, but could not stay because the apartment had not yet been cleaned from the last folks who stayed here. We went out and grabbed a fantastic lunch...

The restaurant, just opened for lunch at 1 PM

Just one of 3 courses

...then sauntered the neighbourhood a bit...

Around the corner 

About a block away

...bought a few groceries, wine and beer, and finally was able to come home and unpack, then to sit looking out our window at this, the view for the next 34 days.

Looking up the street

Looking down the street

Tomorrow, the plan is to go to one of the main markets here and get additional groceries. We have 2 small grocery stores and 4 small vegetable markets within 5 min of our apartment, but we want to stock up at the larger market.
Oh, and we're going to nap, too, having been awake about 28 straight hours so far.

FYI: Wine & beer is mind-bogglingly cheap here. Beer is €0.35 - €0.55 per can in a grocery story. Wine can be had for €0.85 a bottle, with lots and lots and lots of wine available for around €2.50, and the REALLY good stuff I buy at home for $17 available at €4.50. My liquor bill just dropped dramatically.

Final thoughts on Sun Peaks

As I mention in my last post, it's been 31 years since I was last at Sun Peaks. Here's what the trail map looked like then (seriously).

It's changed a bit.

I thought the best way to organize this was by simply looking at the good and the bad separately.

What Makes Sun Peaks Excellent:

• The place is big. Huge. It's now the 2nd largest ski area in Canada, behind Whistler-Blackcomb and ahead of Lake Louise and Revelstoke. That means LOTS of runs and LOTS of terrain (through see below for a substantial qualifier to this).
• The food is great. Four lunches and one dinner out, and we could not decide which was the best. We ate at Bottoms, 5Fourty, Voyageur Bistro, Tod Mountain Cafe and the Cahilty Creek Grill. I was very impressed by the food quality and service no matter where we went (though I heard the chain Mexican place is poor, which is not unexpected).
• The runs are long. The Burfield chair has 880 m vertical, over 200m more than Goat's Eye. The Sunburst chair has 590 m of vertical, similar to Goat's Eye. The Sundance chair has 475 m, Morrissey has 400 m. The slopes just generally are not as steep as Sunshine, so the runs tend to be feel long even when the vertical is not long. They have runs called 5 Mile and 7 Mile.
• They have multiple aspects to their mountain faces. They have pitches that face north, south, east and west. As we learned this week, that's really helpful when the sun intensity rises and aspect protects snow quality.
• In creating the Morrissey runs, they left tree islands all over the place, including in the middle of the runs, though always making the gaps between the islands wide enough to drive cats between them. This makes for REALLY interesting skiing. 
• They have a very impressive nordic facility and system. If I still cross country skied, I'd consider coming here just to do that.
• Their tube park is a slalom course, unlike most arrow straight parks like Big White or Norquay.

Why Sun Peaks Sucks:

• Their trail map is nonsensical. They squash all 3 mountains on one piece of paper, with substantial distortion of places like West Bowl, Gills, the Lone Fir area of Sundance and others. They need arrows on the map to show which way runs go. There are glades marked that just aren't skiable (Runaway Lane, Cruiser, Blazer, a bunch on the Elevation chair). Runs are in the wrong place (Gill's traverse, Gill's hike are neither marked on the hill nor shown correctly on the map). Far too often, following the map, we ended up below places we needed to be above. The same map is used all over the mountain. They really need to splurge on re-drawing their 3 mountains onto 3 more accurate maps.
• On hill signage is hit and miss, some good, some bad. I found run signs in strange places (showing the Father Tom's access) but not telling me how to get to Homesteader (a main green) from the top of Sundance.
• The place is FULL of flats. We lost track of the number of times we were skating or double polling. Flats are all over. Snowboarders would hate so much of this hill. Still, you work with the terrain you have, so the flats aren't their fault. But Sunshine customers complain about flats all the time; this is MUCH worse than Sunshine.
• Morrissey is a great portion of the terrain but hopelessly isolated. One of those flats is the only access to Morrissey (a minimum 100 m skate across a golf hole).
• The creek that runs through the centre of the resort necessitates taking skis off to walk ~200 m to cross it, isolating Morrissey further.
• Not that it bothered me much, but of the 127 runs, only 12 -- 10% -- are green. A good portion of the greens are flat roads. And this hill LOVES roads. If you're not at least a fair skier on blue runs, stay away from here.
• They have 3 ultra slow creaky old chairs that access a significant portion of their terrain. The Burfield chair is a painfully slow 23 minute ride. Aside from having been upgraded to a quad, I'm not sure that chair has changed in 31 years. And when they upgraded it to a quad -- in 1998 -- they halved the number of chairs, so capacity didn't increase.
• Like Big White, they have a lift (in this case, the West Bowl T-Bar) that only operates on weekends. This pisses me off as much here as it does at Big White. If you're not going to have your facilities open, the lift ticket prices should be lowered while they're not open. I'm paying for your whole mountain, not just a part of it.
• The Sun Peaks village is a big "meh" and cannot hold a candle to actual ski in-ski out villages like Big White or Silver Star. For instance:
• There are a LOT of properties that advertise "ski in-ski out" that are neither (there are also a LOT of properties that simply cannot be accessed on skis and necessitate driving, especially in the Burfield area, which is stupid). Ours (the Crystal Forest) was a 300 m walk to the nearest run out, 250 m from the nearest run in. Several in the East Village area are really isolated.
• The village was designed for real estate, not skiing. Big White's village has the ski through accesses, accessible to a snow-cat, going to and from EVERY place you can stay; Sun Peaks has major access routes too narrow to groom, and they weave uphill and down. They have a road underpass that requires you to ski up on the other side.
• There is no signage telling you how to access places to stay in the village from the trails, so you have to just "know" how to get in to your particular place.
• There is no signage once in the village to tell you what is in what direction. The only signs simply say "Valley Trail", a paved, snow-covered -- but not skiable -- footpath.
• The core of the village is a barren, empty, sterile place, designed to look like a Tyrollean village for some reason (what's wrong with our own architecture?). The "shopping" is poor. The selection minimal -- unless you're looking to rent ski equipment, which you can do at 3 shops and the main day lodge, too. It doesn't help that several of the eating establishments (PowderHounds, The Steakhouse, Morrissey's Public House) are only open in the evenings, killing pedestrian traffic around them.

The dead "village" at 5:20 PM

• The village lacks a "centre" focal/meeting point like Big White's expansive day lodge.
• Here's a good one: you can't throw out garbage before 10 AM or ofter 4:30 PM. Our condo had instructions to take our trash to the (poorly marked) waste transfer station at the Burfield Chair base on departure and not leave it in the condo. Except the station is surrounded by electrified barbed wire (to keep out bears and other critters) and opens at 10 AM -- and we left at 9:30 AM. There are NO garbage cans (bear proof or otherwise) in the village at all. We should thank a nice guy named Eric in maintenance who took our garbage so we could leave. 
• The Sun Guide program is heavily promoted. We took a tour called the "Around The World Tour". We got in 4 runs in 2.5 hrs. My guests would shoot me if we only got in 4 runs in that time. And it wasn't because we were skiing slow.

I guess you can tell I wasn't that impressed. I loved Morrissey, and there were a bunch of runs off Elevation that were fun. I'd like to try the Lone Pine glade area in actual winter conditions -- but I don't think I'll ever get the chance. Sun Peaks just cannot hold a candle to Big White as a destination resort, a conclusion I came to 31 years ago, and holds as true today as it did then. I probably won't be back anytime soon.

Sun Peaks, not Big White

After skiing at Big White every year since 1997, we switched and are at Sun Peaks this year.

I know Big White like the back of my hand; in fact, I authored an article on how to ski Big White for Powder Magazine's 1999 guide to the 50 Top Ski Resorts in North America.

The cover

No idea who Andy Dappen is

An ironic coincidence: The article merged what I wrote about Big White with what Andy wrote about Sun Peaks.

I could probably Snow Host at Big White. Sun Peaks? Not so much. I skied here once in 1984. That was a pretty cool and significant trip. I was young and single, living near Edmonton, and had vacation I had no idea what to do with. So I decided to take a 2 week road trip and ski all over western Canada, checking out ski resorts. I would spend a day skiing at a resort, then at the end of the day, drive to the next one. I hit (in order):

• Marmot
• Lake Louise
• Sunshine
• Norquay
• Panorama
• Whitetooth, the hill that became Kicking Horse (very much different today than then)
• Powder Springs, the hill that became Revelstoke (very much different today than then)
• Sun Peaks
• Silver Star
• Big White
• Apex
• Red Mountain
• Whitewater
• Schweitzer
• Fernie

It was that trip that caused me to fall in love with Big White as a ski-in, ski out, stay on the hill destination resort. I have few memories of Sun Peaks, on the other hand. I remember a creaky old chair that took a LONG time to get to the top of the mountain, and not much else.

I've skied at Big White 125 days since I started keeping records in 1996; I've done 426 days at Sunshine in the same window, and the next area I have frequented is... Norquay, where I have skied all of 10 days. I've skied 617 days at 24 different resorts since 1996, and only 66 have been at somewhere other than Sunshine or Big White. 

I'm here for 4 days. I'll tell you what I think about the place after I'm done.