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Grouse Grind hike times and other fun stuff

This year, I kept track of every hike I made up the Grouse Grind. I think I've blogged about the grind before: its a really good hike up a local mountain in Vancouver. People call it nature's stair master and they're not kidding. My best time ever up the mountain was about 55 minutes. Sadly, I was nowhere near that time for this (shortened) season. Here's what my hike times looked like for 2009:



The graph is courtesy of Google spreadsheets (part of Google docs). I wish the graph itself was more than just an image, I wish it was dynamic. I am sure Google will make that happen one day.

In other news, I headed out skiing for the very fist time (ever) to Cypress Mountain (close to Grouse Mountain) today in the pouring rain. I have to say skiing is quite a bit different than snowboarding. The mountain was not busy on account of the weather and we had to drive through some wicked fog to get to the parking lot. I like that you can park the car, walk a bit and get on the chair lifts right away. At Grouse, you have to take the gondola up first and then the chair lifts. Anyway, I didn't get a whole lot of skiing done today because I was not too adventurous (I didn't even go up the bunny hill, I just hiked up a bit and skied down) and then they closed the mountain down early because of the lousy weather. Which meant that I got a refund on my lift ticket. That was nice. I think I will go get a lesson or two before I try skiing on my own. It looks far too easy to get hurt trying to come down snow and ice with no knowledge of how to interact with the snow. It was fun none-the-less.

I had gone up with a couple of friends and we ended up giving a couple of Czech girls a ride down the mountain. They are on a travel visa here for a year and as with many such folks, they work on the mountain and I guess they missed the last shuttle off. So the five of us, we packed into a little car and headed back down the mountain in the dense and shifting fog and safely made it home. My knees are a bit sore and I am tired overall, but I am glad that I got some skiing in and managed not to break anything. The Czech girls had interesting comments about Canada and how we weren't as friendly as we'd like to think we are. Quite an interesting bit of info if you ask me. It gives us a chance to improve I suppose. And they have an interesting life. They seem to travel around the world and live in different places and get to know the way people there live. Apparently, they are thinking of heading to Australia or New Zealand next year. Good luck to them!
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