ski and travel blog

Welcome to a new weekly feature on our blog – photo posts! 

Over the last few years we’ve been fortunate to have travelled to Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Switzerland, Holland, Whistler and other amazing destinations.  Most of our picturs will be ski / mountain related… but don’t be surprised if we sneak in a few other types from our adventures. 

Our first featured picture was taken from a regular shoot & click Canon 5 meg camera with all default and auto settings. This was taken shortly after dawn in Rotorua in New Zealand last summer. 

We walked through a Geyser park, met some natives (including a friendly cat), then jumped back into our rental and headed to the glow worm caves.

It’s hard to believe that summer has already come and gone and we are on the cusp of another ski season. Let’s hope the wet summer translates into a snowy Winter – and one that begins in November and stays until at least Easter! 

Sasha & I have had an active summer with plenty of golf, cycling, and ultimate Frisbee three nights a week. We are stronger, fitter, and ready to challenge ourselves this winter on the slopes.  

Our plan is to start the season early and get at least 25 days on snow before the holidays. We start in mid-October shortly after thanksgiving when we’ll be travelling to Zermatt, Switzerland for the second time for a two week training camp on the glacier. Once again we’ll be with Sandy Gardner and his myswisstrip program. 

I’ll be taking my Level 2 coach during the first week. Sasha will join me for the second week as we both focus on training for our Level 4 CSIA. 

We’re hoping that by having a more active summer we’ll find the sweet spot on our skis sooner so that we can get the most out of the short winter in Ontario. 

I’m back on Head skis this year. I’ll have three pairs in rotation – my CHIP XRC’s from last season which are great all mountain skis, a world cup race stock Head slalom ski (but with softer bindings to make them more versatile) and a longer set of Super Shape Speed for the days that I’m skiing on bigger vertical. 

Sasha will likely be back on Atomic this year (ST 12) – although she is considering a switch back to her Lange boots. 

I’ve made some minor updates to our blog that we hope you enjoy. Specifically, we’ve added a pluggin that will make grinandbarrett.ca also a  photoblog – so you’ll be seeing weekly images from our adventures posted to our site starting this week.  

We also encourage you to follow us on Twitter. Links to both our accounts can be found on the top left navigation bar. 

The countdown to snow begins… now!

(photo: Esta Evans, Phil Barrett and Sasha Gollish  at Anik & Jeff’s wedding this summer!)

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Ok – so not as cool as a storm cloud, but here is our wordle cloud for this blog:

Click on the image to see the larger version has hosted at wordle.

People come to Las Vegas for all kinds of reasons – conferences, gambling, golf, vacation, or just to experience the excessiveness that is the Las Vegas strip. 

But what about skiing?

I’ve been in Las Vegas for the last six nights and after staring at a snowy capped mountain visible from the strip all week, I decided to Google “Las Vegas skiing.”

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Here I am in Mont Ste Anne for the third time this season. 

After much contemplation over the past two weeks (and a lot of work by some of the people at the CSIA office) I have decided to register and take the level 4 exams which comprise of 9 ski and 2 teaching exams.

I flew out of Toronto early this morning to arrive in Quebec City - unfortunately my skis did not.  I was relieved to find them on the next flight, along with a friend who was also taking the exams. Ben & I hoped into a taxi and $115 later and we were on the hill with sunshine.

After meeting up with friends from Alpine (Anik and Phil McAllen), I skied for a couple of hours.  I free skied and made myself comfortable and at home on the hill.

Tomorrow exams start at 8:30am and continue for the next four days.  I’m going in with an open mind with little expectations while looking to have fun and learn something from the experience.

I’ll keep you updated over the next four days….

As our epic season comes to a close, I’ve found myself reflecting on what has been an interesting season for me.

For the first time in many years, I switched to “the dark side” as Sasha calls it and became a coach for a K1 team out of the Alpine ski club in Collingwood, Ontario. 

Having been on the instructing side for the better part of the last 15 seasons, I was looking forward to coaching kids who were inherently more focused on ski improvement and going fast.

I was also looking forward to refining and in some cases acquiring some new skills – like setting a GS and Slalom course for different training outcomes.

Overall the season was a success – but a few things surprised me about the coaching culture that I wasn’t aware of before…

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In a good year we can expect about 60cm of base at Blue Mountain in Collingwood, Ontario which usually means they can push around enough snow to have a few runs open until Easter or early April (which ever comes first).

After another 30-50cm of fresh snow pummeled southern Ontario this past weekend, we are now up to a remarkable average base of 150cm! This is actually more than double what Tremblant is reporting in Quebec!

Over the last two weekends I’ve been teaching & course conducting a Level 1 CSIA Ski instructor course at Mount St. Louis Moonstone.  This past Sunday was exam day where students were assessed one last time on both their teaching and skiing abilities to see if they had achieved the Level 1 standard.  After a few warm up runs I decided to take the class over to the Moonstone side where we found untracked runs all around us.

Needless to say we extended our warm up a few more runs.

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Now that half the planet watched the NFL’s Superbowl, check out the real superbowl! Thanks to Jason Kerr for the find!

All footage taken at Kicking Horse in Golden, B.C. If you haven’t been yet, add it to your top 3 list. The terrain featured in this quick vid are all chairlift accessible…as are over 70 other chutes!

The past week has been a great experience.

We were lucky to have not only a fun group, but a talented one too.

For the first time I really understand our new learning methodology (AICRCv) and how it applies to different skiers who are at different stages of incorporating changes into their own skiing. I’m looking forward to applying what I’ve learned to our sessions at Alpine for the balance of this season and going forward.

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Our day, and course, finished on the ‘S;’ a gnarly, steep bump run covered in fluffy snow down skiers right on the south face of the mountain.  As a group we charged down the run, all feeling super confident and charged at the end.

Again today we were guided by Emerson Brooks.  His relaxed, efficient style was even more evident today.  He kicked off our day with a top to bottom cruiser; today there was no messing around!  It was going to be a maximum vertical day.

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