An Awesome Day in Portillo

I haven't been feeling the best for the last couple days so finally yesterday I saw the doctor who is  here with the American Team. He diagnosed me with Strep Throat and put me on antibiotics. Today I woke up feeling like a new person! The team had the day off skiing and it turned out to be an incredible sunny spring day! 

First stop this morning

Went for a lake walk with Sarah

 Silken Rauhala and I discovered that the super nice owner of the hotel has kayaks that he is more than willing to lend us! Since it has been such a warm snowless spring Laguna del Inca the lake isn't frozen

The view from the other side is stunning! The cold water is the brightest shade of blue

Magical Spring

I only ever get one month a year that is totally free of training to do whatever, whenever. This year my spring consisted of some of the most amazing memories that I got to share with my oldest sister Kyra!

  I decided to go to visit her in San Diego, booking the tickets a day before I left, as a present to myself. I spent my birthday with her for the first time in six years. She made it the most special 10 day celebration one could only dream of. Cirque de Soliel, pancake breakfasts, sailing on a J80 to a seal colony, disk golf, Sea World, surfing, farmers markets, amazing sunsets and a camping trip to Joshua Tree National Park are just some of the highlights of my fantastic trip!

The amazing Joshua tree that look like aliens

Birthday breakfast 

Later that spring after a quick ski camp in Whistler I caught my first greyhound to Bellingham, where I stayed for a couple days with my friend Juliana Burgo at the Cuddle House before we headed to the Gorge. In the days I was in Bellingham I fell in love! Not only is it a cozy beautiful ocean side town but Juliana's friends welcomed me willingly into their gang called "The Rumpus Crew", a group of people who also live to have fun. 

This next big adventure was my first music festival at the Gorge in Washington. I’m now completely hooked and feel totally at home at festivals. Everyone you meet is happy and genuinely wants to be your friend. The energy of thousands of people enjoying the same thing is completely contagious and exhilarating! Kyra met up with The Rumpus Crew and me and we headed to The Sasquatch Music  Festival.

Tree hammock by the ocean... who wouldn't fall in love with Bellingham?

Ben Howard!!!!

Not a bad place to listen to Metric

So happy to get to share this experience with Kyra 

   

           

From an Albertan Summer to a Chilean Spring

When I walk up to a ticket counter wheeling two trollies with my 7 pairs of skis, 2 pairs of ski boots, massive duffle bag, and carry-on I always get death glares from flight attendants, and I got the same disbelieving reaction from the lady behind this desk that I usually do. “This is ALL yours?!?”

It was a long flight from Toronto to Santiago and all my new teammates were thrilled to witness how “gifted” of a sleeper I am. Apparently I slept right through breakfast but they still gave me a tray of food that ended up getting confiscated when, in my comatose state, I squashed the tray into the seat in front of me with my knees. I only woke up to the bump of the plane touching down in Chile!

Everyone loaded their stuff into a huge cargo van that was waiting for us and we set off for the mountains in a big greyhound bus, stopping along the way to pick up last minute supplies. Sarah Elliot and I tried to play a game where we said the Spanish name for anything we saw… it didn’t last very long!

The landscape on the drive out of the city reminds me a lot of the desert outside San Diego- small bushes and cactuses. Except here and there were small farms with fields being worked by hand in front the huge looming mountains where we were headed! I’m really happy I don’t feel carsick because the crazy narrow switchbacks were taken pretty fast for a big bus, especially when there are semis coming just as fast in the opposite direction. After a while you could start to feel the pressure on your lungs, as the air gets thinner climbing up to our final destination of 9,500 feet.

Looking back on the road we just traveled

Portillo is a 4 star resort nestled by a lake on the border of Argentina. Compared to the last time I was here 3 years ago, the lack of snow was shocking. The intense Downhill track I was hoping to spend most of my time on has been reduced to a mellow 10 gate course. The snow doesn’t extend to the bottom of the second chair so we have to either skidoo or take a van back up. Our team was hoping to train for three weeks, but the Men’s team has already shortened their camp a week and the Women’s team is exploring our options of trying to go to a ski hill further south.

The first cold morning

We are not staying right in the hotel but have our own little hut called the Octagon. The BC Ski Team is on the first floor and the whole American Men’s Team is on the second. It has been really fun having them around, they are all such phenomenal skiers. I feel like I improve just by watching them! Yesterday I was biking in the gym watching World Cup Winning Runs and as I was watching Bode Miller win Beaver Creek, he walked into the gym. I was slightly embarrassed until he stopped to watch and started commentating about the hills and the skiing.

My hangout for the next two weeks

My ankle is hardly noticeable anymore and isn’t bothering me when I ski. I’m thankful because I would be really regretting having to cancel my West Coast Trail trip if it wasn’t any better. Even though there is limited snow and I won’t get the speed training planned, this camp, however long it is, will still be beneficial, working on much needed technical aspects of skiing.

It is weird to think that I left the Rockies only four days ago and am now skiing in the Andes! 

 Sunset from my Grandma's house the night I left

What an amazing beautiful world!!!

All Good in the Hood

Ski racing demands you to be flexible with your schedule because it can change at anytime. Weather, snow conditions, equipment, fatigue or injury can completely alter the plan. The original idea for August was to do two dryland camps, one in Whistler and the other in Fernie with a week between training at home. A last minute change found me back down at Mt. Hood with the BC Ski Team for a nine-day camp instead of at the gym in Whistler.

This time we were staying right in Government Camp, a five minute drive from the hill, at the same complex as both the Ontario and Alberta provincial teams!!! I hadn’t seen some of the skiers for four months and I didn’t think I was going to be able to see them again until November. It was fantastic to see everyone and so much fun that we were all staying close.

We could no longer ski to the bottom of the first chair but there was still snow!!!!

The third day on snow I was doing a GS course and straddled a panel. My right ski caught on the base of the gate as I fell and twisted my leg around.  I took my first toboggan ride off the glacier and found out I had displaced a small bone, my fibula, in my ankle (sounds worse than it is!). Another, very annoying plan changer, but hey, I’m flexible! I ended up being on the ice and elevate program for the rest of the camp. The solitude while everyone was out skiing was useful because it a) forced me to start my Athabasca University Introduction to Psychology course b) gave me the time to start this blog and c) made me that much more excited to hangout with my friends!

All the provinces got together to do fun activities like slacklining over the pool, watching the meteor shower and roasting marshmallows around a bonfire. Our last night we celebrated Randa Teschner’s birthday with homemade cake and another fire where Randa, Morgan Megarry, and Logan Thackray played ukuleles to entertain the crowd.

It was really hard for me to say bye to Randa, Morgan, Nat Knowles, Tianda Carroll, Andy Trow, and Charlie Mcconville who are all going to school in the US this year to ski NCAA. Being flexible about schedule changes is much easier for me than being flexible about when I will get to see my best friends again. I’m really happy I ended up getting to go back to Hood and had over a week with friends, even though I wasn’t able to ski for half the camp.

This should be the last I see of the Oregon volcano until next summer… though you never know! The plan at the moment is to still go to Fernie mid-month for a dryland camp and then I’m booked to be on the West Coast Trail the 1^st of September. Hopefully my ankle heals up fast because I was also planning to hike Mt. Cleveland (the highest mountain in Waterton and Glacier National Parks) while I’m back in the Pincher Creek area!

The BC Men's Team made an amazing video of them at Hood! Check it out http://vimeo.com/47373854

Back on the Quest for Snow

         On June 31^st I packed up my little Matrix and hit the road like most people on Canada Day long weekend. But, instead of the name of some campsite or lakeside town, I had typed “Mt. Hood” into Google Maps before I left. I picked up one of my new teammates Hallie MacLachlan in Fernie and we had an awesome 11 hour drive getting to know each other.

        This was my seventh trip to Hood over the past couple summers but the first one I ever got to spend staying down in Hood River and driving the hour to and from the mountain everyday. The BC Ski Team planned a 20 day camp where we would ski from 7am-12pm, enabling us to have lots of time for dryland and recovery in the afternoons. It had been under two months since I had skied last (in Whistler) but it felt amazing to strap on to my boards again at a place where the lifties know me by name. On a nice day Mt. Hood is stunning! You have an awesome view of the Cascade Volcanic Arc and often stay well above the clouds.

            It took a day or two to get used to being a veteran after being a rookie on the Canadian Team all last season. The girls at the camp were really fun and up for adventures. Soon we became somewhat of locals in Hood River; learning where to find the local farmers’ markets and You Pick fruit farms. We also checked out the free bands at coffee shops and all the fun community events. The town became easy to navigate on my road bike and I started seeing people I recognized from the gym or grocery store.

   

           

   


                               Highlight of my trip was when my family from La Grande, OR came to visit! My aunt Debby, uncle Bob and cousin Robyn came up on a Friday night before one of our days off and treated me to dinner, a hot tub and a stay at an amazing house overlooking the Columbia River! The next day Robyn and I both finally took our maiden sail on windsurfers. We got to the “hook”, which was going to be our landlocked learning area, but were postponed due to lightning…! Within the first ten minutes of finally getting out on the water we were so in love with our new-found sport that we starting scheming a co-owned cousin windsurfing company based in Waterton Lakes National Park!

The camp ended with a huge lightning storm and torrential downpour on the last night. The storm was impressive enough that all the girls sacrificed precious sleep to stay up and watch it. We made a big pot of tea and alternated between running through the rain and sipping tea, watching the lightning crack through the night sky. Hallie and I got a head start the next morning because we weren’t able to ski like we planned. We ended up catching up to the storm in Washington and following it all the way back to Fernie where the whole town had lost power.

Epic way to end an awesome camp! Oh how I love adventures!

How many day a year can one ski?!?

I've started keeping a skiing log to not only write down what I'm working on and to be able to look back on what has made me fast in the past but to also record how many days I actually ski in a year. This is the first year that I've been really interested in my count and diligent about keeping track. I started my count start of last August when I was in New Zealand with the National Team. It has officially been a year. My number of days that I have strapped on my skis and DONE AT LEAST ONE RUN is 167. That doesn't include days off or travel days that is strictly days SKIING on snow. Liking math I calculated that I SKI 45.6% of my year! Goal for next year: get 15 more day to make it 50% of my year!