SLEDDING -- The day starts the same for all of us, we get up early, call each other up and complain a bit to the other guy about having to be up early. I guess that's pretty much the way most good shredding days start though, quite misleading if you think about it. Evan picks me up and we are on our way to meet up with Toby, Rupert, and the wild card Jordan. When I get in the truck Evan informs me that he has checked the avalanche conditions for the area that we are going to and everything is looking good. This is going to be the first time sledding for Rupert and I and we don't have sleds, so Evan and Toby are going to be doubling us up.

We meet up at the parking lot and there is already a mob of trucks unloading sleds forcing us to park alongside the highway. The sleds get unloaded, we all get suited up and we are on our way up the trail, stopping every five or ten minutes to kick some snow in to the track to keep things cool. 15 minutes up the trail we stop to make sure everything is running smooth as we are all on fairly old sleds. I look over at Toby's sled and see a waterfall of coolant coming out of the bottom of it and all of the sudden the mood changes quite a bit. I am thinking our day may be over before it has even started as generally that amount of coolant pouring out of an engine means there is something seriously wrong. We lift the hood and have a look and can't seem to see anything visibly wrong, but we are still thinking that the sled is done from what we just saw. Here is where the wild card comes in to play, Jordan has a big jug of coolant with him so we fill Toby's sled up with it and carry on. We still aren't quite sure what happened there as Toby's sled seemed to run just fine after that for the rest of the day, until he ran out of gas on the way down that is.

Sled problems out of the way we keep on going higher up in to the mountains to try to find some dry snow to shred. Our first stop is this little set of cliffs that Evan thinks we should test out, so we shuttle each other up but quickly find out that the snow is still a bit to punchy for our liking. We continue climbing higher.

We come over a ridge and have made to the zone we want to be in, the snow is dry, the sun is shining and it is time to have some fun. For the first hour or two we just shuttle each other around and shred some lines in some mellow rolling terrain above the lake we are chilling on. As soon as the sun moves up in to the sky all of the snow on the terrain we are riding quickly turns sticky and somewhat slow so we take a break and scope out some shaded spots to hit. There are quite a few crews up in this zone today so we have to search around a bit to see what has not yet been claimed.

While we are looking around we run in to some guys we know hitting a jump they have spent the morning building and decide to hang out in the same area and see what else we can find to hit around there. There are a few small cliffs to hit and an almost natural jump that could be quite fun with some minor building.

We all spend the rest of the day shredding various lines that we see and by the time 4:30 rolls around we are all ready to head back down. Rupert and I have made it through our first day sledding and probably have the same thing running through both of our heads, I need to get myself one of these things.

- Eldon Sparks with Evan Cs, Rupert Davies, Jordan Bell & Toby Stanek
February 17th 2008