Getting to Mt Cain was an adventure in itself. It involved a half hour drive to the ferry terminal, a 1.5-hour ferry ride, a 3-hour drive north once on the island to get to the base of Mt Cain, and then an hour-long journey up the mountain in the dark, dodging hundreds of potholes on the snow-covered gravel road and stopping halfway to put on snow chains!
Our companions on this adventure were Conrad and Chantelle, who came in our car... and Ted and Rach, who followed a few hours after us in Ted's truck. We arrived around 11pm, and Ted and Rach arrived sometime after 1am... bearing messages to two other groups on the mountain that their family or friends were stuck in snow somewhere down the road!
Photos from the ferry ride...
Dinner at Aladdin's Cafe in Nanaimo - I'm still raving about my donair pita wrap with sweet sauce...
Putting the snow chains on...
Our accommodation on Mt Cain was the Kapitany Lodge. It was hostel-style accommodation, and the six of us shared the only room on the third (top) floor. The rest of our floor was taken up by common areas - couches and a huge kitchen - shared with the groups staying in the seven rooms on the second storey. It was great to have the common areas right outside our door, as our room was way too small to hang out in. It felt like we were actually renting a house (that just happened to have random other people wandering through it)!
Here are some photos of our home-away-from-home...
The lodge and a few other buildings near it are pretty much all the amenities at Mt Cain - it's a small mountain (just two T-bars and a tow-rope) that is mostly only open on the weekends. Most people around here haven't even heard of it - we ended up there because some others had recommended it to Conrad and Chantelle as having awesome snow since it can build up all week with nobody skiing over it! To top it all off, our accommodation was about 20m from the base of the bottom T-bar, with incredibly picturesque views from the windows.
On Saturday, the six of us hit the slopes for some snowboarding in the soft, deep powder. The scenery was absolutely stunning: snow-covered mountain peaks, snow-covered pine trees, and snow-covered wooden buildings. Gorgeous!
Ben was so excited to finally go boarding for the first time this winter, after a few previous attempts to go hadn't worked out! The snowboarding itself was not the highlight for me though, as I'm not good enough or confident enough to really have fun. However, it was a beautiful setting in which to be falling off T-bars, panicking about getting buried in 2.5m of powder, and rocking side-to-side to inch one's way up hills one did not have enough momentum to summit the preferred way!
I only did four runs, and actually made it all the way to the top on my third and fourth T-bar attempts... after discovering that the strategy for not falling off the T-bar involves singing Slim Dusty songs aloud to myself while being towed up. This seemed to provide an appropriate distraction from "thinking myself into falling off"!
Chantelle...
Ben...
Ted, Rach, Chantelle...
Me...
Beautiful...
Looking down and up the mountain (and that's the T-bar)...
We took a break for a late lunch, and only the three boys ended up going out for one more run before the T-bar closed.
That night we enjoyed delicious chilli courtesy of Chantelle, and introduced the others to Killer Bunnies (for our KB-playing readers, check out Rach's unbelievable line-up of bunnies!!)...
The next day, Sunday, the six of us enjoyed some lovely fellowship and conversation while the rest of the lodge's occupants were out on the slopes again. We had to wait until 1pm before the roads were cleared and traffic was allowed back down the mountain, and in the meantime Ben took some more amazing snow shots...
Ted shovelling snow out of his truck so our snowboards could fit in it...
Our car, buried under 1.5 days' worth of snow...
Kapitany Lodge (the top window second from the left is the one bordered by Christmas lights earlier in this post)...
Then we were on the road again! Following Ted and Rach down the mountain...
Taking the snow chains off once we left the snowy road behind...
And that was Mt Cain... a fun and memorable weekend getaway!
