Our Christmas Tree

Yip it is now officially Christmas because we have a real Christmas tree! Jess and I found it from a location undisclosed under the cover of darkness... It didn't take long to secure it with recycling bottles and decorate it with wrapping paper :) Our flatemates already had some lights for it so we are all set. Santa has to come visit us now!

Kootenay National Park

All thats left to tell is the drive home.. once again very picturesque! We saw a couple of deer and lots of trees and mountains. We were only a couple of hours from home so the Rockies weren't far away

Breakfast in the pool

So we had a great time laxing under the stars and next to the river (and snow but thats just a given these days) in a natural pool of awesome, clear, hot water. Not bad huh? It wasn't even too bad getting out and freezing our buttocks off (our hair was already frozen hard in the air). We stayed the night (not nearly as cold as the night before) and jumped in first thing for breaky too!

Hot Springs - Whiteswan Lake

Awesome!! After following my hand drawn map for a couple of hours in the dark we stumbled upon the best hot pools ever -I must add we had some great local knowledge to help us along.. Anyway there are three pools, the top one is 41 degrees at the warmest point, the next 39 degrees and the one closer to the river a lot cooler (I can't forget the river temp either - must have been pretty close to zero).

Northern Lights Wolves

We followed some signs to check out a wolf pack, too bad they were behind a fence - apparently (same old story) wolves are way more afraid of humans than we are of them.. The place we were visiting is all about education - we learned a whole lot about wolves and how important they are (also, the same old story). All four of them howled for us as well which was awesome to hear, of course we had to start them off by howling ourselves...

After staying in the van over night (which by the way was colder than any fridge I've heard of - inside temp -10 deg c), the next day Whitewall was opened for the public for the first time this season. Was epic riding! Dropping a metre or three off the cornice to approx 3 foot of fresh powder and down one of many untouched gullies was an awesome feeling.. to bad it wasn't as clear as this picture - it was real cold, cloudy and windy up the top of the chair but luckily we could see the edge of the cornice... just :)

Kicking Horse ( Golden BC)

For our first little road trip in the van we went to kicking horse mountian resort. Its only about 1.5 hours from the lake so we got there early enough to be absolutely buggered at the end of the day. There was a whole bowl of powder that had been skiied only one day so we had a lot of fun and much of the tree skiing was untouched too - Jesse even found himself in a creek at one point! The gondola is really long at kicking horse - for the whole day we only did five runs..

Looking west at the Rockies

Yip, yet another picturesque shot in the sun with mountains, trees and snow... i'll get sick of taking shots one day, but don't think i'll get sick of enjoying the view!

World Cup Castle

The world cup race guys and girls have been and gone - we now have the rest of the hill back :) They left us the ice castle tho - its pretty cool :P

Fooseball Party

We have a fooseball table at our flat (how lucky are we, it came with the house!!) and we had a tournament the other night. Was lots of fun, it was a teams dress up so we made it to the Banff dollar store to find some sort of costumes - Of course Jess found some cap guns....

A view of the ski hill

This photo is from the top of Larch Chairlift. You can see the ridge in the background which is most of the terrain here at the Lake - Everything thing you see is in the boundary. Backside (on the right of the picture) is where the best stuff is - lots of fun and just under the chair on the left you can see the Ptarmigan Chutes where the other photo is taken...

More shreding the pow..

Behind Matt (fellow patroller believe it or not) and I are the Ptarmigan Chutes. Awesome terrain on an absolutely beautiful day at Lake Louise. Soo much fun!!

What a bargain!!

Yay! This is our van - it goes awesome (even has cruise control) and is really tidy. We also have a bed for the back now so are off on road trips - first one coming up on sunday for three days to Kicking horse... good times in the powder!

Take a peek out our office window..

This is us at the end of a days work at the top of Summit poma with Mount Richardson in the Background.

Banff to Lake Louise - the back road home

We made our way to Calgary to buy a van on our days off and we actually succeeded! Its not the easiest thing to do - try to buy a used car in a city with no wheels yourself - kind of a catch 22 - anyway we now have a van (photo coming soon). On our way home we took the scenic route from Banff to Lake Louise and came across a whole lot of Elk right by the road. Much to Jesse's distress we could only shoot photos of them... not bad though aye!