Taken in my neighbourhood on a walk to the JJ.Bean for morning coffee.

Getting things together for this years Culture Crawl I have been sorting though the vast back catalog that is my photo drive I have been collecting a large number of snow photos it would seem.

These are actually iPhone shots from the top of the sky chair from on of the few times i hit the slopes last winter. I just feel like talking about snow.

Some more photos from our trek up a snowy mountain.

We were attacked by these birds a lot. We did manage to get some awesome Go-Pro video of them eating food from our hands, but they are really aggressive from people feeding them.

The best part about starting the year in a snowy wonderland is that less then 3 days later I was sitting with ice cold beer on a beach in the Dominican Republic, But that is a different story all together…

So it has been a crazy busy year and we are only 16 days in.

The very first day of the new year found me slowly climbing a mountain with my snowboard with Coaxial & Paul. I say slowly because I have spent the last 8 months sitting on my fat ass & I was feeling under the weather. So climbing a mountain was a bit much. We climbed up and spent the night in tents up near the first warming hut on Garibaldi Mountain.

Coaxial with a snowboard backpack

Some of the awesome views along the trail.

This was the hole that we set our tents up in.

Snowshoes!!!

Wonderful sunsets

Loads of fun even though it was super cold over night, I would do it again in a heart beat, only next time I wouldn’t pack so much stuff (for example the warming hut had a built in stove so I didn’t need to haul one up) and next time I would not go up feeling under the weather. However, it was a great way to start the new year!

I say this now because i like snow, it is swell

Over the last weekend me & 50 people climbed aboard a bus & meandered on over mountains and though valleys to Big White Ski Resort near Kelowna. Shouts out to Vancityallie for setting this all up :) It was a good trek and with the exception of Vancityallie and her Boy (Whom I only met briefly at their party) I really knew no one else that was going. Its kinda fun to just say yes & hop on a bus with 50 other strangers and drive into the mountains.

Being that this was only the third time I have hit the snow this year I was a little apprehensive about firing off onto a bigger unknown mountain alone, however the awesome snow (especially in comparison to local mountains) made it all ok :)

I took the new 5D Mark II with me as well. While a nice lightweight camera I am often apprehensive about taking prosumer cameras though the rigors that I tend to take my pro bodies though. Experience has taught me that they are simply not to be trusted like my canon 1D mark II for example. If there is a nasty dirty wet place to take a photo you can bet its the camera taking it. The 5D was fine all nuzzled up in my backpack and the cold didn’t instantly kill the batteries like the original 5D’s do.

Being that I brought this camera/video camera I shot a tonne of video. Anything hand held was nearly unusable due to camera shake but my new small manfroto tripod was stellar to stick into my backpack.

You may have figured this about me by now, but yup I like snow.

So I love Seeing this

New Snow (Over Night):3cm
New Snow (Last 24 hrs):18cm
New Snow (7 days):41cm
Total Snow Fall (Season):51cm
Alpine Snow Conditions:N/A
Snow Depth (Mid Mtn.):45cm

And I also Love seeing this!

Or This

or this

I know that it has been for ever since I have really blogged anything but I have been busy and junk. I could go off and discuss all the awesome things that I been up to these past few weeks but I wont because the list gets longer and more daunting with each passing day.  Suffice it to say that It has been a bunch of good times that none of you will get to hear about :)

So I am wiping that slate clean and simply moving forward as though I have been diligently blogging away about the fun and exciting life of this Jerk, and trust me it has been swell.

I decided this year that I wasn’t going to kill myself with inhumane amounts of work. A plan that is failing miserably thus far but I am going to continue pushing forward with it anyway. Part of this pushing forward is to do other things, you know things that are not work related at all. Like camping, hiking, biking, jamming and insert some other activity that is me not sitting on my fat ass in front of computers for multiple hours a day like some fat, undeservingly narcissistic, mouth breathing world of warcraft addict that I am sadly starting to resemble. We had a weekend free, but being that I am insanely busy, I asked Coaxial if he could find us something fun to do. The only guidelines I provided were it had to involve some sort of camping and I demanded some sort of strenuous activity. I am slowly learning to delegate things and not feel that all tasks need to be done by me and only me so I happily deferred to the far superior camping/adventure planing skills of coaxial. He sent us some simple directions and some GPS co-ordinates and after a crazy busy day we packed up and followed these directions up past Squamish to camp. Strike guideline one of the list!

As for guideline two the strenuous activity, this was “hey lets climb cypress mountain and look at some snow and possibly a glacier!” I like both snow and glaciers so after a hearty breakfast off we went!

The hike goes something like this, drive as far as you can on a logging road and then park, cross a creek (river) and then go up, straight up the mountain. After an hour or so trying to find a safe creek (river) crossing we did just that.

The climb is 900 vertical meters or something up from the logging road and almost all of it was covered in stupidly deep snow. We had no problem standing on the top though with a few exceptions :)

Just so we could explain how steep it really was :)

I may have ruined my legs for ever! :)

That night we played with fireworks

We made a lot of eggs :)

Drove a great many places

We even managed to mire the xterra in many feet of wet snow :)

All in all an awesome weekend was had by all!! June 20th is our next camping adventure I think.