It’s been a bit quiet on the blog in the last week as I have been hard at work.  Winter is in full force here in British Columbia and that means i’m busy every day with one thing or another.  Last weekend I headed north to the remote township of Bralorne.  Bralorne is an old gold mining town high up in the mountains north of Whistler. At this time of year the best way to get there is with a snowmobile and a 2 hour sled up the Hurley pass from Pemberton meadows.  In the middle of the winter the area has some phenomenal skiing but right now it’s not quite deep enough.  I haven’t spent a lot of time up there before so this was an exploratory mission to get a feeling for the place and start to learn some of surrounding mountains.  I have a love/hate relationship with snowmobiles.  They allow you to access incredible terrain, but they are expensive and incredibly unreliable.  On the first day of the trip a buddy of mine had a problem that was to plague us for the rest of the trip.  Eventually his sled broke down completely at the top of Green Mountain and whilst towing him out in the dark ( it was also about -15 celcius) his foot got stuck in the foot-well as he got bucked from his sled tearing the ligaments in his knee….. not so cool.  Eventually we got him back to Bralorne on the front of another sled, and back to civilization in Whistler the following day.

Back at home in Whistler I got a call from Jeff Thomas or Poorboyz. He was just getting into town with Tim Durtchi to go sledding for a few days.  The following day was far to stormy to sled so we headed up Whistler Blackcomb with Brandon Kelly and Tim.  The snow was DEEP but the weather was stormy so we headed into the trees and hiked around for a few hours.  Next day the weather wasn’t much better but we decided to head up Rainbow mountain on our sleds for a few tree laps to find some pillows.  Snow was great, bit heavy but Tim got a couple of cool shots.  Brandon’s sled broke down in the parking lot so unfortunately he didn’t make it up (remember what I was saying about snowmobiles?).  The following day we headed back up to the same area, temperatures had gone up though and throughout the day the snow got heavier and heavier.  We spent a couple of hours building a jump but by the time it was finished, the snow on the in-run was so wet and sticky that there wasn’t enough speed to hit it.  We were all soaked to the skin and freezing cold from water blowing off the nearby trees so we called it a day.  And that’s where i’m at !  A day off the mountains to catch up on some office work.  Hopefully next week brings a bit more sunshine!

A couple of quick photography related thoughts:

• My insurance company got me another Canon S90 after mine was stolen in Mexico. I LOVE this thing, there’s a couple of snaps in the gallery below.  Something i have noticed though, when shooting in RAW, the embedded JPEG that is displayed on the screen has a heavy noise reduction applied to it.  ISO performance is great, but the on screen JPEG tricked me into thinking it was slightly better than it actually was.
• The last few stormy days in Whistler I have been shooting with the Canon 7d.  The weather sealing on this camera is clearly very very good, I have drenched this camera all day long covered in rain and snow with nothing covering it and it still keeps ticking.  It’s nice to know I don’t have to baby this thing too much.
• It wasn’t really possible to take a laptop to Bralorne so I took my Colorspace UDMA with me for photo backup duty.  Despite temperatures getting down to -15 Celsius is worked just fine!