Whistler Part II: Tackling Blackcomb Mountain

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After a day of exploring – or semi-exploring – Whistler Mountain, and another day spent zip lining through a snowstorm, I decided to take on Blackcomb Mountain, which is said to be somewhat trickier to navigate than Whistler.

At nearly 7,500 feet, Blackcomb Mountain is the higher of the two peaks. It offers more than 100 trails (as does Whistler), though roughly 30 percent of its trails are catered toward those at an advanced level; that being said, it’s still ripe with plenty of greens and easy, wide blue trails across the mountain.

Among the holiest areas of Blackcomb Mountain is 7th Heaven, the tip top and is peppered with greens, blues, and blacks leading back down toward the mid-station and onto the bottom. I jumped on the 7th Heaven Express chairlift and headed up for one of my first runs not only on Blackcomb but for the day itself atop 7th Heaven, and I shared the ride up with an American woman visiting for the weekend from Seattle.

“Oh – wow, wait, this is only your second day snowboarding in how many years? I mean, yeah, well, you should be okay!” she said as we chatted a bit about what brought us to Whistler.

Immediately I regretted my decision, and my terror-meter went from 0 to 100 real quick. Turns out that visibility levels were incredibly poor up at 7th Heaven, and it was recommended only for those at an expert level given the conditions.

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We got off the lift, and my heart started beating 100 times faster than its normal pace. I felt like I was at the free throw line in basketball and the game winning shot rested on my shoulders. There was a long, narrow but flat trail, basically an expressway, that you had to take to get to the other trails, and I didn’t like it one bit. It’s strange, because I am not in the least bit claustrophobic – I mean, I’ve gone abseiling through caves in New Zealand and have taken trains around India in the general class carriages – but certain kinds of marked, narrow spaces give me extreme anxiety. For example, I hate driving on highways, bridges, and in tunnels. (I mean really I hate driving, period.) This was like the Holland Tunnel of ski-ways.

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But I safely made it to the start of all the trails (though I did manage to knock over a skier along the way), until I realized I wasn’t so safe anymore. Let me tell you this: these trail signs were NOT clear. Squiggly arrows that went left then right then left again all pointed to the same exact trail. I couldn’t tell the blue from the black from the green, and my eyes aren’t exactly trained to read trails by their physical appearance in heavy-hung clouds. At this point, it all looked scary to me, and it all looked like I was about to really regret taking a snowboarding trip without having any type of insurance.

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I think I wound up on a blue called Zig Zag, and that is exactly what I did down the mountain: I zigged, and then I zagged very slowly from one side of the run to the other. I must have missed something, I thought to myself. The green must has to be somewhere, and I was just too nervous to see where it was.

I moved back down a level to greens on Blackcomb that were located around the Jersey Cream Express chairlift. I felt like I had just been rocked by an earthquake, and I spent the rest of the afternoon experiencing aftershocks that were making me weak and wobbly in the knees.

Now isn’t the time to test your limits, I said to myself. You’re alone without a cell phone and these mountains aren’t that crowded. Only the coyotes and bears will find you if something happens to you. Plus, you’re not insured.

You would have thought I learned my lesson that day, but guess what? I didn’t. I retreated to bed that night and looked through my camera. I was really unhappy with the very few pictures I managed to steady hands long enough to take. I needed to go back, and I needed to get some photos. It was also snowing, and it was snowing hard, and everyone kept raving about how great the skiing would be at the top of the mountains. And so, the next morning, my last morning in Whistler, I once again made the journey up to 7th Heaven, though this time the conditions were even worse than the day before.

I rode the chair with a British kid, and I made it like it was my first time heading up.

“So when I get to the top, I’ll be able to find a green quite easily?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, totally. You can’t miss it,” he responded.

You’re lying. I thought to myself. That’s a blatant lie, and I knew it was a lie because I knew the green was definitely miss-able as I had missed it the day before. I kept pushing him, asking him questions like, “but I mean like where is it exactly? No, but like where? WHERE!” to which he’d only say things like, “just go right off the lift – can’t miss it!”

“But to be honest, you’re better off taking a blue down,” he said. “The blues are nice and wide, the greens, they’re easier but they’re narrow, and you can basically vanish off the side. And it’s looking like you can’t see a bloody thing up here today, so that’s probably a situation you want to avoid.”

“Oh, yeah, no totally.”

We got off the lift, and I could not see even a meter in front of me.  It didn’t make a difference whether my eyes were open or shut that’s how bad it was; thick, heavy clouds clogged up the sky like a backed up toilet. Some people sat around waiting for it all to clear, but I wanted to get the hell down.

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I took the same blue trail down that I had the day before, and to my surprise, despite the horrible visibility, I didn’t end up twisted like a pretzel somewhere off the side of the mountain. I took a fall or two (okay like four), but ultimately, I did really well.

I tried another blue – Jersey Cream, located near the Solar Coaster Express lift as well as the Jersey Cream Express lift – and loved it. I made my way across the mountain as best as I could – taking the blues found off the Crystal Ridge Express, the Jersey Cream Express, and the Solar Coaster Express. I had been on the mountain for nearly five hours before I had to peel myself off it to catch my flight home to New York.

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In the end, I actually preferred Blackcomb Mountain to Whistler. I found it to be more fun, more adventurous, and more thrilling; however, to be fair, I never made it beyond the mid-station at Whistler up to the alpine skiing areas of the mountain like I did Blackcomb, nor did I really venture out to explore any of the blue trails.

I guess I will just have to go back next season, perhaps this time for a couple of weeks rather than four days in order to make the most appropriate and fair assessments of the mountains.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even become a ski bum.

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