Spontaneous inspirations of Stephen Connick

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

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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.