The following is an excerpt from the Great Canadian Heli Skiing newsletter they send out to all their clients.  I will be posting a review on their operation at the Powder Highway blog site linked to below.

The Ultimate Ski Bum

No doubt many of you would have heard of the Ultimate Ski Bum contest. It was a competition organised by Kootenay Tourism (our regional tourism association) that promotes the “Powder Highway ” a joint marketing venture between ski resorts, cat-skiing and heliskiing operations in the area.

The person who made the best “Why I’m the Ultimate Ski Bum” video was the extremely lucky recipient of free skiing all winter long with unlimited resort skiing at places like Kicking Horse, Revelstoke, Red Mountain, Fernie, etc and the coolest part: 1 free day of heliskiing at all the different cat and heliskiing operations in the region.

A 2nd generation Aspen/Sun Valley ski bum, Chris ‘Tats’ Tatsuno won the competition with this video: powderhighway.com/SkiBum

Tats visited us last week for a day and had a blast! In fact, he racked up 14 powder filled runs! Maybe he should of visited us last as we may have spoiled him!!

The athletes and organizers of the Freeskiing World Tour had a powder day today, choosing to use the optional weather day to wait out the surging storm. Revelstoke Mountain Resort is offering up the use of their helicopter to shuttle athletes to the landing zone (LZ) at the top of the almost 2000 vertical feet of spines, chutes, and cliffs. With everything on hold for the day, the mountain was abuzz with the whoops and yells of roving groups of freeriders dressed in baggy, bright clothes.

If you had a chance to ride the 8-seater gondola from the mid-mountain lodge today, you would probably have seen some frozen waterfall lines being sent by shredders in full-face helmets. Or snowboarders slashing some turns down a steep, powdery face. Not much sun out, so most folks were taking advantage of their low-light goggle lenses to battle the drab greybird day full of indistinguishable clouds. With all the gladed, steep tree skiing on the main aspect of Revelstoke’s frontside, poor-visibility is not an issue.

To wrap up our day, some friends and I ate some good burgers at Nomad’s and finished it all up with a hot tub session.  The yoga from the other night can still be felt in my muscles, but the hot tub definitely helps.  Tomorrow, the comp wraps up; I’m hoping to get some interviews with fellow POC athlete Arne Backstrom , while he sits in third place going into an epic finals.