Skiing in July has begun!

We made it!

It seems like years ago that we packed away our skis and snowboard thinking about skiing in the traditionally summer months of July and August, and now here we are, doing it! Our last stop before returning home!

It's pretty weird, skiing here when everyone at home is talking about installing air conditioners and rolling brownouts because of a Stampede heat-wave, but oh well, it'll be a super fun season!

Sadly our first day out here at Treble Cone (just 30ish minutes from Wanaka where we're living for the next month) was plagued with rain over the last day or so. There was still some fresh snow on the top but it was degrading quickly and we had to stop and wipe off rain spittle on our goggles every 5 minutes... Oh well, #firstworldproblems, right?

We've got Seasons Passes, which at Treble Cone means we have a picture-less RFID-enabled plastic card we keep in our jacket... As we approach the chairlift line, there's a gate and scanner there that scans the RFID chip, seems to display our information and pictures on the liftie's iPad, and the gate opens. Ridiculously high tech, but now there's just one liftie there, probably doing a better job than normal at checking lift passes. :)

Another thing is that out-of-bounds and less ideal runs don't seem to be labeled as such at all. I took a couple exploratory turns and got either lost (and rock climbed out), or ended up in a hill of little bushes (gladly no rocky bits though yet!)... Gotta be more careful about where I'm going in the future.

Anyways, should be a fun season! We're here until August 12th, hopefully we get some blower days!

Jax and I, happy to be on-piste for our first run! :D

Jacqui posing for the camera. Some neat almost-double-inversion-layer-cloud-action going on in the back ground.

Me in my brand-new-before-leaving-Calgary snow gear! Sadly a little ill-fitting now, but oh well, still look good, right?! Love the weird clouds again.

This was originally a shot of the scenery, but check it out... Red Triangle! This is new this season and fits between Blue Sqaure and Black Diamond. Why? Marketing! People complained there were too many black diamond runs on Treble Cone, so they relabeled the easier blacks. lol.

A Kea! The super smart/curious mountain parrot. We wondered when/if we'd see one of these (we saw one earlier w/ friends at Rainbow Springs). Sure enough we found 2 of them stalking the parking lot. Looking for cars to tear apart? ;)

After our snowriding, I got back and took a left-out Dexter for a run by the lake. Super pretty! I'm going to enjoy my runs here for sure. There was also a neat little walk by the lake w/ bricks depicting the human history from 0ish to now. I didn't notice for a while what the blocks were (I'm running, yo!), so we'll have to check them out later... Probably will hit a blog post about Wanaka experience in the future. :) Stay tuned!