Cypress Night Ski and Freestyle Grand Prix

Last night being a Tuesday means that Robyn and I get to use our Night Ski pass up at Cypress and we were both looking forward to the evening. With receiving 25cm of snow the previous day it should have been great conditions right?

The nice thing I find about night skiing is that the slopes are not as busy as the weekend is. There are no crazy lineups at the chairlifts and the snow can be somewhat decent. Well the snow depends really on the weather and in Vancouver we haven’t had the greatest snow so far this Winter.

When we arrived at the parking lot they were practicing for the Freestyle Aerial event, Canada Post Freestyle Grand Prix that Cypress is hosting. The event’s venue is actually where the 2010 Winter Olympic Aerial and Mogul event is being held. It was cool seeing a couple of the people launch off the snow ramps, but we thought we’d check it out after our time on the snow.

I would also like to mention that I was mistaken in my last post about thinking it was part of the WordCup event which is being held at Cypress too. The LG Snowboard WorldCup is being held this month as well. My favorite part of the mountain is closed as they set up the border cross course. The Skiing portion is for the FIS (International Ski Federation) and they are doing Aerials and Moguls.

We took to Panorama as our first run of the day. The sun had not quite set yet so I was hoping we’d be able to get some photos of Vancouver from the ridge.

Metro Vancouver from Cypress

It seems that we were in luck and managed to get a couple shots of Vancouver and the surrounding area with Robyn’s camera.

The Lions

The view is amazing from Cypress as not only does it show you the the city, but if you face the other way you can see the Sunshine Coast, Horseshoe Bay and even the Lions.

After the initial run on Panorama as a warm up we found the snow to be very icy. Luckily there were not many people on Panorama as it is the only run open on the Black Mountain side during night ski as the north runs are closed due to the WorldCup Cross course being set up.

Setting up for the LG WorldCup Snowboarder Cross Event

The runs for the PGS (Parallel Giant Slalom) and Boarder Cross are PGS as well as the Upper portion of Fork. Going up the Eagle Express Chair you can see the course marked out with blue paint as well as all the rollers they have created. It looks pretty sweet actually and fun too.

We headed back over to the Lions Express chair and tried out Collins. I had a bit of a spill at the beginning on a patch of ice and hurt my tail bone but the rest of the run was better than expected. We hit Collins a couple more times as we thought that the other runs were far too icy.

Black Mountain at Dusk

The view of the mountains and surrounding area as the sunset was pretty impressive. Seeing the FIS Grand Prix event lit up as the sun set was pretty cool too. We headed into the lodge after a few runs, ate our food and went back to the car to pack our gear.

After we got our gear in the car and on the rack we decide to head over to the aerials and check them out. We ’snuck’ in pretending we were part of the event and no one seemed to really care we were there. Yes I do wish I had brought my dSLR but I had fun using Robyn’s point and shoot camera to try and take photos.

FIS Grand Prix Aerials

I did manage to get one decent shot of an aerial. The others, the action was too fast for the camera to capture properly. We stayed there watching jump after jump. It was pretty cool seeing freestyle aerials in person. Jump after jump we both thought the landings were quite hard. We think about 95% of the aerials ended up falling when they hit the snow, which sounded hard and really icy.

We saw one person fall bad and ended up injuring his leg. He was moved into the tent behind us and looked at by the first aid attendents. I guess he twisted his knee as he had a huge ice pack wrapped around it when we left.

You can check out the rest of our Cypress photos from this night as well as others over at my Flickr Cypress Set.

Again we did enjoy our time up at Cypress even if the snow was icy and a bit nerve racking. We also really enjoyed watching the freestyle aerials. Robyn is glad she got to see part of the event as her work schedule will be interfering with some of the other events she would like to see such as the WorldCup Snowboard Halfpipe. If only I could get media accreditation for the event to take photos of such an event.

Filed Under: Events, Mountain Talk, Skiing, Snowboarding
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