It’s that time of year again – Whistler’s retailers are turning their thoughts to the summer and any remaining winter stock has got to go. Whistler might be experiencing a glut of late season powder, but nonetheless the outerwear bargains are there for the taking, especially since Easter weekend signalled the last of the big tourist weeks for the resort.

Friends visiting from the UK have taken advantage of the sales, finding some fantastic deals including:

- a ladies North Face ski jacket at about 1/3 off in the North Face store

- a Nomis shell jacket at 40% off at the Circle (who are doing that discount on nearly everything and 50% on down jackets)

- Westbeach insulated pants at $175 down from $250 at Freeriders

Get out there and snap up the good stuff before it’s gone!

Here on the blog we’ve occasionally turned our hands to video, hooking together some footage to show a little of what we’ve been up to. It’s heaps of fun putting an edit together, but always a little frustrating too. Sometimes a shot you thought would look great doesn’t do justice; sometimes the camera fogs at the crucial moment. And there always seems some kind of Humble Pie Principle at work that means that skiing looks twice as slow and half as stylish as it felt at the time.

So I have to give props to the guys at Epic Mountain Video for putting together this edit of some riders in the Whistler Blackcomb parks. They have come up with some great shots, sticking close to the riders and crossing beneath them as they jump for a neat pan shot that makes the trick look awesome against a blue sky. And if the guys look this good on film, they must be pretty damn impressive in real life.

Click on the vid to check out some pro park shooting in all its HD glory.

… is a sling and a dazed expression. Sorry the blog has ground to a halt this week, but I’m currently recovering from some fun surgery on the broken wrist I sustained in Banff last month. It’s all good, but let’s just say the painkillers don’t lend themselves to writing witty prose. My brain is mush right now.

The Hall of Fame will resume in the next couple of days, and we have some great new features in the pipeline as soon as I can string a sentence together again. Thanks for your patience, and keep watching this space…

… in London, that is.

For all our UK readers, here’s a head’s up: surf and snow label Quiksilver are doing a very limited European release of their Neon Adikt jackets, normally available only in Japan. From what we’ve seen in Whistler, Japanese snowboard clothing tends towards the flamboyant, with some of the most out there colours and prints. Labels like Gush, Soldowt and Blue Blood have some of the most forward thinking design in the industry and if it catches on in Japan it generally hits the US and Europe (in that order) soon after.

The Neon Adikt gear is… let’s call it eye-catching. The puffy shapes, glossy fabrics and jellybean colours are right in the love-it-or-loathe-it zone. Personally I think they’re fantastic, while Jez is not so keen. But with goose down filling you’re not sacrificing function for fashion – this is good quality gear as befits one of the big names in snow fashion.

If you want one, get to the Regent Street store and do it fast – there are only about 300 garments in the whole European release (various colours available), and when they’re gone, they’re gone. If you grab one, send us a pic and we’ll stick you on the front page in all your technicolour glory.

The last day of our week on the road took us out of BC and into Alberta, and the beautiful Rocky Mountains.  We hadn’t been here for a few years, and being used to the gentler Coastal mountain range, the massive peaks around Banff simply take your breath away.

There are actually three ski areas to choose from if you buy the tri-area pass – Mount Norquay, Lake Louise and our pick for the day, Sunshine Village. Whereas we’d spent all week seeking out advanced and intermediate terrain, day 7 was a chance to take the pace down and do something a little different. Someone came up with the plan of swapping gear – the skiers would snowboard for the day, and vice versa. We’d get a different perspective on the resort by seeing it through the eyes of a complete beginner, and hopefully capture some funny footage for the blooper reel. We didn’t need lessons, as we could teach each other! What could possibly go wrong?

Actually it was a really fun day. After several pretty incompetent laps of the little magic carpet, we rode the Strawberry chair to try the real thing on a – wait for it – Green Run. Oh yeah. Going back to beginner status really does adjust your reality. I’d forgotten how simple things like riding the lift are challenging for a learner – getting off the lift on a snowboard is a nightmare. You’re also suddenly aware of the slightest increase in the steepness of the pitch. Trails that would normally register only as an easy route to something more interesting, are suddenly fraught with peril. We soon discovered that snowboarding involves a whole lot of sitting down, and that just getting upright with both feet strapped to a board is no easy thing. Meanwhile the skiers were putting down some low speed snowploughs to make your instructor proud. Either I’m a kick ass teacher or our buddies are naturals.

So what did we learn? Banff has some pretty nice beginner runs back to the lodge area. Learning to snowboard is hard on the ass. Skiing is easier to begin but it takes longer before you look remotely cool doing it.  And novice boarders should always download over taking a flat road out, as I learned to my cost when a heavy fall on flat ground earned me a broken wrist and a 6 to 8 week layoff. Not good, but these things can happen in snowsports, and you have to accept that the awesome fun comes with a degree of risk. If the road trip turns out to be the last week of my season, at least it was a huge one.

Video highlights will be online soon, but I think I’ll edit out the first person footage of the wrist injury. The audio track involves some fairly anglo-saxon language.