Week two in Fernie's 3 week instructor course

NONSTOP's ski instructor courses and snowboard camps over New Year never fail to be an amazing time, on and off the hill. After two weeks of nonstop skiing and celebrating, we're lucky to get one of the guys to sit down for long enough to write a blog. Here's Tom van den Berg entry, thankfully written just before last weekend's massive dump in Fernie... I'm sure we won't hear from them again until they've worked their way through every nook and cranny of Fernie's powder bowls!

Hello everybody...

Let’s begin with the New Year’s Eve Party. We were supposed to dress up as someone, whose name started with the same letter as our own name. Some of us had some great costumes. Here are a few pictures.

We first had a dinner with the whole NONSTOP group together, and afterwards the music started playing. We all had a few drinks, and after a while everybody was on the dancefloor and suddenly it was New Year. It was a good night.

The day after, some people had kind of a hangover, but everybody just went skiing. We didn’t have lessons that day. The skiing was pretty good, but we were still all waiting on the powder snow.

Sunday and Monday, we both had lessons. We had some pretty good runs out there.

But Tuesday, that’s where the real stuff began. The powder was coming down, and coming down and down. We didn’t know this was only the beginning of a few awesome days. From 8 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon up to our waist in fesh tracks. Days like that remind you why you got into skiing in the first place. We can all agreed it was the best days skiing we’ve ever had!! We couldnt wipe the smile off our faces going to sleep.

Tuesday was also the day of the Avalanche Course. If you were doing that or not, you still got some really great runs to do as the snow was still falling.

Wednesday it was even better. It had been snowing a lot and it kept on snowing all Wednesday, so we did a lot of fun runs with our instructors. There was some real Fernie Powder. It took a few weeks, but now we’ve definitely got that experience.

Thursday was our last days of lessons, and we were all sad as all of our instructors were absolutly amazing people and we ad all learned allot from them already!

Today is meant to be a cool one again but the faint sound of the ski patrol setting off avalaunche bombs can be heard over breakfast so maybe some more powder to top of a fenomenal week.

There is promise of a big dump of snow this week en so we all have our fingers crossed.

Tom Devonald
Harmen van den Berg