Spontaneous inspirations of Stephen Connick

Eagle Pass Heli Touring – Canuck Splitfest 2013 from Stephen Connick on Vimeo.

The day we had all been waiting for has arrived.. Jerrett, Kyle, Jamie and I met up with Scott Newsome and our guide Trevor Gavura at the Powder Springs Hotel in Revelstoke to grab some breakfast and coffee before we were off to the Hanger. I hadn’t seen Scott since he taught me my AST1 course quite a few years ago, it was good to catch up with him and see how stoked he is on his heli operation.

 

It was puking snow that morning, as it often is in Reve..

 

If anyone has picked up the Winter 2013 copy of Kronicle Magazine, most of this crew is represented in there somewhere. Trevor wrote the article on Sorcerer Lodge, Kyle’s got an interview on the next page and Scotty is the pictured rider for a Trapper Snowboards ad. Its really a testament to how small and strong the Splitboard community is.

 

We were making a bit of history that morning as our group was the first ever Heli-Assist Ski Tour group for Eagle Pass! And I think there’s no better way it could have gone down, with a group of passionate splitboarders representing Canada and the North West United States.

One we signed our waivers and had some breakfast we headed out to Selkirk Hanger and dropped a car at our planned exit area for the Heli Tour. We only got a drop out, toured around Eagle Pass tenure for the day and then rode a 5000+ vertical foot powder run back down to the car (with some headlamp assisted bushwacking at the end).

The snow was falling most of the day and we had incredible over the head choker.. the last run of the day was the longest and the deepest, it was hard to see our smiles at times because we were whiteroomed most of the way down. By then my GoPro had died but the memories are vivid enough, it was an incredible end to a good day with friends in some awesome terrain.

This has been my first full season riding my Down The Middle custom splitboard and I gotta say, I love this board. Over the duration of the weekend we rode everything from deep blower pow to open alpine and windblasted crust. The Rossignol Experience responds amazingly well in all conditions so a huge thanks and shout out to Brian Pattee at Down the Middle Custom Splitboards for building me this sweet sweet ride. If you are in the market for a board, don’t just settle for off the shelf, there’s lots of options out there these days.

 

So all in all it was a great weekend, great snow, great stability, great friends. All made possible by the efforts of one passionate splitboarder Mr. Wade Galloway. If you want to learn more about the event and the Canadian Avalanche Foundation that it supports please check out the Canuck Splitfest facebook page or the Canuck Splitfest website.

Had a lazy start this morning with Kyle and Jerrett before heading to Rogers Pass, I guess we can partially blame are late start on Kyle‘s new-found obsession with Tim Hortons mediocre coffee products! We decided to try and avoid the crowds from Splitfest and went after MacDonald. This was everyone’s first time in the Macdonald permit area of the pass so we parked at Hermit and skinned along the highway trying to find a way across the creek so we could start gaining some vertical. After a few failed attempts we found what should have been the obvious way across (tree bridge) and as we hoped we had the entire place to ourselves. We started heading up, with nothing significant to tell for the first couple of thousand feet and then we started seeing the snowpack change which made skinning interesting.

Rogers Pass hasn’t had any new snow for the last couple of weeks and it looks like the North aspects on MacDonald got hammered by wind. Eventually we had to forgo the skinning and take turns kicking steps up the wind crust hoping that conditions would improve as we neared the bottom of our couloir objectives for the day. To make a long story short the condition of the snow surface did not improve, we switched over early and rode out! We did however get some great pow turns in through the lower elevation gulley features on MacDonald so the efforts of the day weren’t completely lost. Great zone, we will be back when stability and snow line up again!

The raffle tonight did not disappoint either, one guy won 3 splitboards.. thats like $4000 in hardware. He ended up giving 2 away – Super class act. I won a Jones 18L Backpack. After the day on MacDonald I was hoping for a set of Mr Chomps!

Everyone who was showing a video or presenting pictures had to learn Windows 8 with hundreds of eyes watching eagerly, I don’t think anyone in attendance will be jumping on the Windows 8 bandwagon any time soon.. lol .. My roommate for the weekend Kyle Miller gave a great slideshow presentation despite all the technical difficulties he pulled it together and captured the audiences attention telling his story of overcoming adversity and accomplishing his goals; every time you tell this guy he can’t do something. He will do it. Period. This mentality comes in handy when you are sick of breaking trail and want Kyle to sweat it out, just tell him he can’t!

Here’s some other pics from Day 2 of Splitfest

Tomorrow morning we’re headed out with Eagle Pass for a Helicopter drop in the Monashees and some touring in a new zone. Super excited and heading to bed.

Drove down to Canuck Splitfest today, waved to last years venue (Glacier Park Lodge) as I drove by. Its strange being “in Revelstoke” but I think its out of town enough that it will still have the same social aspect of the other events. Tonight I caught up with some friends I made last year and checked out some of the Hardware from Trapper, Venture and Prior.

It’s that time of year again! If you have not done so already make sure you register.

We went for a quick tour in Kananaskis last weekend, I drove down to Calgary after the Oilers game on Friday night and made it to Brendan’s place around 3AM. We woke up and met the rest of the group in Canmore where we had a quick stop for coffee and bagels.

 

I was the only splitboarder in the party and the rest of the group was made up of skiers and one other snowboarder using a small pair of approach skis for the climbing portion. I think I had him sold on the concept of a splitboard by the end of the day.

We headed south on Spray trail and pulled off at the access to Hero Knob, I’m not exactly sure what to call the area we toured into other than it is in between Hero Knob and Black Prince.

The trail breaking was fairly light as the trail that leads into this area is fairly level and the elevation gain is gradual. It was snowing rather heavily (3-4CM/HR) so there was more snow to deal with as the day progressed, YAY! The new snow that was falling was very light and unconsolidated sitting on top of a fairly solid  slab, we still took precautions on the climb and chose our terrain carefully as there was the unlikely potential of stepping down to the burried facets and depth hoar. My primary thought of the day was the slopes above and around us loading with all the fresh snow that was falling and although we didn’t witness any recent slide activity there was some increased sluffing and overloading happening on some features in the area.

The turns were way better than expected, I almost didn’t go on this trip how terrible would that have felt to have missed out on a great day of extremely light rocky mountain powder.

So after work on Thursday I left Edmonton at 6:30PM attempting to get as close to Rogers Pass as possible, I ended up making good time and rolled into Mary’s Motel in Golden around 11:30 that night. As always Mary’s didn’t disappoint as my go-to destination for cheap, reliable accommodation  in Golden.

I managed to snag about 5 Hours of sleep before waking up and heading for Rogers Pass. After about 45 minutes of driving I came across a pretty bad accident between two Semi’s and the one officer on scene told me to “Go when I didn’t see headlights” shortly after I managed to squeeze between the gap that was left between the trailers of the two rigs.

Not surprisingly this caused the highway to be shutdown shortly after and my touring partner for day 1 was stuck on the other side of the pass in Revelstoke. With no shortage of splitboarders on hand I checked into my Hotel Room and went to the info centre in hopes of finding some like-minded touring partners. After a few minutes I hooked up with three splitboarders from south of the 49th (Wyoming, Montana and Colorado). The previous day the only permit area that was open was Grizzly Shoulder, however today it was the opposite with all the permit areas open except for Grizzly. I was a bit concerned about the snow conditions further down the valley due to the warm temps and rain that hit lower elevations so we decided to grab permits for Cheops and Cheops North.

The first tour of splitfest brought us up Cheops and ultimately dropping down Cheops North into what is known as the Hourglass. We reached the top of our intended line and switched over quickly as other groups were starting to pile up at the top of our intended line, we wanted fresh tracks and we also didn’t want anyone setting snow loose over our heads. Once we dropped in the snow was fantastic, the rain crust was nowhere to be found and we were getting face shot after face shot of powder right down into the Hour Glass to the side of Connaught Creek.

After we reconvened creek side we decided to head to the other side of Connaught Creek (via snowbridge) and up the shoulder of Ursus Minor for some steep and deep tree skiing. We took turns breaking trail on the first lap and enjoyed a much easier, faster second lap shortly after.

Unfortunately due to the epic quality and quantity of snow I don’t have any action shots, in fact I don’t have any other pictures from the rest of that day.. must have been lost in the moment.

Once back at the Hotel I realized how awesome the view from the room was, looking up toward the trailhead for Connaught Creek.

We filled the evening with Beer, Movies and Food.

The room I had booked at the Hotel had 2 beds so I split the room with another splitboarder from Edmonton. This was Jason’s first time splitboarding and on Day 2 I took him up Cheops and ultimately over to the highway aspect to ride Cheops Glades. We met up with two other riders at the top of the climb and decided we would descend the route together.

The top portion of the descent was pretty dense with trees and made for some interesting but still fun riding, I had a general idea of where I wanted to go but I wasn’t 100% confident we were headed in the right direction. We headed left into some denser trees and some fun pillow lines until all of a sudden we broke through into a wide open glade that no one else had been in since the new snowfall! We regrouped and descended all the way back down to the summer trail that runs beside the trans canada highway. After a quick tour we were back at the info centre parking lot. If I venture into Cheops Glades again in the future, I think I would put the skins back on at the bottom of the Glades and yo-yo it a few times, the bushwhacking at the top and bottom of the run just isn’t worth all the climbing.

Once again, no action shots.

I ended up making a few more laps on Cheops North and the Hourglass before calling it a day.

On Saturday night we were treated to presentations from Greg Hill , Kyle Miller and a few others. And ended the night with a raffle to raise money for the Canadian Avalanche Foundation. I honestly only entered the raffle to support the CAF and didn’t have any aspirations of winning anything.. little did I know what was in store! I would end up winning an Arctyrex Atom LT Hoodie and a custom splitboard from Down the Middle Custom Splitboards.

It was really a great experience to be surrounded by so many people that share the same passion for touring, I feel really fortunate to have been able to spend this time in Rogers Pass and I can’t wait to go back.

 

 

When I was in Fernie Braden planted the seed that I should go to Canuck Splitfest this year, I made up my mind earlier this week and I’m making some last minute arrangements to make sure it happens.

These also arrived today!

 

I was originally getting this message after playing for 2-3 Hours or “Battlefield 3 is not responding” even a hard lock every now and then. I believe the biggest fix to the issues I was experiencing was a combination of updating the BIOS which I hadn’t done in a couple years as well as using EVGA Precision to increase the fan speeds on my GPU. I cover off some other possible solutions lower in this post.

So the most anticipated first person shooter in many years has also become the biggest headache I’ve had in many years. The problems with a game of this magnitude are expected, however as usual EA has done an extremely poor job of communicating issues or even admitting that they are having issues for that matter. It’s not for a lack of resources either, EA has had plenty of time to promote the growing international sales of Battlefield 3 in markets such as Russia, meanwhile those of us that already purchased it get to enjoy random lag on servers and the occasional unexplainable crash or even a kick from a server (if you are lucky enough to get connected to one).

Nonetheless when you do actually get to play a map the game is everything we wanted it to be and more, so we will continue to persevere and connect to servers in the hopes of having some memorable Frags.

Obviously most of the issues with servers and BattleLog are out of your control but here are a few things you can try if you continue to have issues with the game crashing/freezing.

Common Fixes - Battlefield 3′s Frostbite 2 engine pushes computers to their limits, here are some possible fixes if your computer can’t take the heat.

• Update your BIOS to the latest version – This can increase stability when your system is under load by ensuring things like your CPU voltages and RAM timings are set correctly.
• Update all drivers – Most people know to update their graphics drivers from NVIDIA or ATI but other drivers can cause stability issues as well, ensure you are running the latest audio/network and motherboard drivers on your system to improve performance and reduce crashes.
• Monitor your temperatures – Since Battlefield 3 requires everything it can get out of a modern computer you need to ensure your CPU and GPU temperatures aren’t climbing to dangerous levels. Most GPU manufacturers  supply utilities for monitoring your card and adjusting fan speeds, I use EVGA Precision on my GTX285 and it works wonders.  You can also use a utility like Real Temp to monitor your temperatures while you game http://www.techpowerup.com/realtemp/ some of these utilities provide a OSD so you can overlay your temps on top of BF3 or do as I do and put them on a second monitor. The general rule of thumb is to not let your temps exceed 80C the lower the better. If you can manually adjust the fan speeds on your case/cpu/gpu turning the fan speeds up to 80-100% will help ensure you don’t overheat.
• Reduce the clockspeeds on your GPU – If after monitoring your temperatures and adjusting fan speeds you continue to have issues this may be a viable option to increase the stability of your system. Many graphics cards ship pre-overclocked from manufacturers, this does not mean that the  card can run at 100% for extended periods without having issues so reducing the clockspeed of your GPU (even by as little as 5-10Mhz) can make a big difference when it comes to temperatures and stability.
• Clean your computer – It is always a good practice to clean the dust out of heatsinks to ensure they are operating at their maximum efficiency so pick up a can of compressed air and clean your computer!
• Re-Apply Thermal Paste – If you have followed all the steps above and you continue to have temperature issues you may need to re-apply thermal paste, make sure you use a quality thermal paste like Arctic Silver and only use a small amount for maximum cooling efficiency.
• Re-Install Windows -If the above steps provide you with no relief then re-installing Windows might be the solution, I have heard reports from multiple people that were having issues with BF3 crashing to desktop or simply not running at all that had to re-install Windows. This may be something you want to consider, especially if it has been quite some time since you last performed a re-install.
• Update Punkbuster – Lots of BF3 players have been getting kicked from servers the last couple of days, if this has happened to you try updating your PunkBuster manually by going here.

If you have any other suggestions for improving the BF3 playing experience please feel free to share your comments.

Now that summer is over I have been getting back into gaming, our clan CLS just had their 10th anniversary LAN Party in Calgary and played a ton of Quake 3 and Rocket Arena. I recorded over 300 Demos and will be putting together a movie in the coming weeks.

In the meantime check out the COD Black Ops Video I made back in November 2010. Make sure you watch it in full screen 1080p for maximum enjoyment!

 

 

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to attend a Horse clinic put on by Jackie Johnson at Still Meadows Ranch East of where I live. My friend Kim had played host for the event and took care of organizing the weekends activities; she called upon me to be the Photographer. I haven’t really had the opportunity to photograph Horses in the past, aside from one or two frames out at the Ukrainian Village. I happily accepted the offer on short notice and spent the next couple of days out at the event snapping lots of Happy Horses and their owners.

The first day at the event was a bit intimidating the Horses were unfamiliar and so was the dim lighting. It didn’t take long before I began to learn the ropes and realized Flash was not an option for 90% of the shots I would be taking so that had to go, then I found through trial and error that any of the auto settings on the camera were a no go. So I switched over to manual and put on the nifty fifty lens (50mm) and began tweaking my aperture and shutter speeds to get the right amount of light in. The next thing I had to combat in this environment was the reflection of the light from the windows off the inside of my UV filter, so off came my shade and UV filter just bare glass for the next couple of days.

Day two proved to be much better, the storm had blown by outside and the sun was shining which meant more light inside the barn. The difference would be barely noticeable to the human eye but to my DSLR it allowed two, three, even four times the shutter speed which made my life a lot easier. I primarily toggled the ISO between 800 and 1600 over the span of the weekend depending on how much dust, steam and condensation I wanted to pick up in the shots. Overall I am pleased with the results although I won’t admit any time soon how many frames did not make the final cut. I would love to apprentice under a more experienced photographer in these new scenarios, especially someone with a more exotic lens collection I simply gravitate to the 50 for so much of my indoor shooting due to its speed.

This is the most I have blogged in a really long time and it’s not for a lack of excitement in my life, I have been really active and busy this year. Anyways I’m off to bed, it’s my birthday tomorrow.