Dog Mountain

Short Version:
Music, snow, movies, popcorn.

Long Version:
The charity single "2 Minutes of Silence" has cracked Britain's Top20 chart. Given the tripe that constitutes the UK's so-called "music" scene post-1984, it's not really surprising - it's almost certainly far more listenable than anything else out there.

We found some silence of our own, pausing en route from one mountain to another across a snowy hillside. A sunny Saturday was drawing to a close, and we'd driven up Mount Seymour to the Sno-Park, where we'd lucked into a parking space right at the top end of the top parking lot. From there we wandered in past the user-pays lift-enabled trail system to the back-country snowshoe trails, strapped on our borrowed snowshoes (Janine had to help me do mine up) and set off, following the channel which had been pressed into the deep powder by other ambulators.

Walking in snowshoes is an art, and we were kind of at the crayon scribble stage to start with: I fell all the way over a couple of times and even Nene had snow caking the back of her legs where the tails of her snowshoes had flicked it up. The longer we walked the better we got, though, and by the time we'd powered past First Lake and out onto the high spur that is Dog Mountain we were getting pretty good; sliding down chutes in a more-or-less controlled manner and hiking up steep grades without slipping backwards. Much. We even had a crack at running. The snow-covered trees were spectacular in the last, golden sunlight, and we had fantastic views from Dog Mountain: West out over Horseshoe Bay, the Strait, and the Island; East towards seemingly endless chains of snow-covered mountains and towering peaks; and South past Vancouver into Amerika, where glimpses of Cascades volcanoes reminded us of Mounts Hood, and St Helens, and of all of the Black Buttes.

Then we went home and ate delicious foods before hitting the town, to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, which was playing at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre. We'd caught the festival on its Auckland stop a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it; this time around the films were less impressive, and the highlight was - somewhat surprisingly - a half-hour semi-doco about fly-fishing in Russia's remote Kamchatka region. All eight of the films that played had some great bits, but most - and particularly the foreshortened festival edits - lacked flow. Suspicion is that they'd been butchered in the edit suite. Still, watching people climb up then snowboard down sheer snow walls hundreds of metres high was pretty impressive, as were some of the rapids and waterfalls negotiated by the kayakers. Unfortunately, the mountain-biking film suffered more than most at the hands of the brevity-mandated editors, and we were left feeling more like we'd just seen some wonderful cinematography rather than an awesome mountain-biking flick. Parks Canada had an informational stand, though, and they gave us some microwave popcorn which we cooked and ate when we got home, which was kind of neat, and very definitely not something we could have done in the Reaper!