Garrett and I have some experience with the town of Revelstoke—the past two years we’d been on hut trips out of Roger’s Pass and spent a few days in Revy on our way in and out—but had never been to the newly-established Revelstoke Mountain Resort. The resort, which hangs above the town from the side of Mount MacKenzie and occupies what used to be a small ski hill and old cat skiing terrain, is only four years old and boasts the most vertical in North America and 40 to 60 feet of snow annually. But the most attractive part—though I doubt the owners of RMR would agree—is the ghostly emptiness of the lodges and lift lines.

The town of Revelstoke is a combination of Northern Exposure’s Rosyln and Out Cold’s Bull Mountain, a mix of loggers, railroad workers, cosmic cowboys and ski bums. Giant trucks, beds crammed with equally-giant sleds, fill every other driveway, and blocks of clearcut forest dot the valley wall opposite the resort. Anyone looking for a glossy, comfortable Mammoth/Alta/Aspen-esque experience shouldn’t bother. Anyone looking for a Whistler-esque night life, or any night life at all, shouldn’t bother. Anyone gaming for park jumps or worried about their outerwear getting dirty shouldn’t bother either. Revelstoke is five hours and a gnarly mountain pass away from the closest metropolitan area. It is still a true rough and raw, in-the-middle-of-nowhere mountain town, and despite the resort’s efforts, a rough and raw, in-the-middle-of-nowhere ski hill.

We got into Revy early Monday afternoon and moved our stuff into a cozy, ski-themed bed and breakfast called the Cheeky Beaver (a great place to stay, give Lisa a call at 250.837.5886 for info on reservations) then met up with local snowboard ninja and splitboard ambassador Joey Vosburgh. Joey is known by and knows every resident of Revy by name, and is the most unassuming, hardest-shredding snowboarder I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. His franken-snowboard setup, a combination of customized Dynafit ski boots and toe and heel bail bindings (he came up with the system as a better alternative to the traditional splitboard system), is both bizarre, brilliant and possibly revolutionary. Watching him rally his creation disproves any criticism of hard-boot snowboarding and hints at a new era of backcountry snowboard touring.

On Sunday RMR had gotten a good dump and Joey promised us there’d be plenty of fresh inbounds. We were doubtful—as Mt. Baker locals, we’re used to giant numbers of aggro riders and a resort completely tracked out by 9:30—but we trusted Joey so Tuesday morning we loaded the gondola. What we found was 3,000-foot, untracked pillow lines directly under the gondola, unridden alpine turns, and untouched gladed tree skiing. The first two days Joey led us around the resort and the bordering slack-countr. A ten minute hike put us at the top of rock infested, pinner chutes and 45 degree couloirs, and a 15 minute hike above massive bowls and strips of cliffs and spines, all eerily empty. I hate to admit the amazing quality of skiing RMR offers at the risk of hordes of riders overrunning the place, but it’s too ridiculous not to say something. You’ll have to find the really rad stuff on your own though—and good luck with that.

RMR is incredible, but the touring at Roger’s Pass is mind-blowing. Our third day of the trip we got a pre-sunrise start and headed up the pass to meet Joey and some friends, including Christina, a former Olympic downhill skier, Chris Ruebens, the professional big-mountain skier, and Joey’s girlfriend Danyella, one of the National Park’s head avalanche forecasters.The original plan had been to summit Video Peak, but bad visibility had us taking a less-bold route—by less bold, I mean only 6,000 feet of climbing rather than 10,000. Greg Hill, the touring legend on a quest for two million vertical feet of human-powered skiing in one year, was possibly going to show up as well.

The more mellow terrain consisted of waist deep pow, a sacrifice we were all willing to make. Greg did end up skiing with us, or more accurately near us, as his laps were twice as long as ours and he’d easily catch us by the top. He was completely different than I expected—I pictured cross-country tights, sunglasses, and 70 mm-waisted skis with three pin bindings. In reality, he was sporting fluorescent, stylish, and somewhat baggy outerwear with stiff touring boots, Dynafits and fat skis. His first words after catching our group were to call us pansies for not skiing a gnarlier line and to goad us into touring up another 1,000 feet to the top of a nearby knob. At the bottom of our last run, he left us to take another lap or two and faded up into the clouds, stacking more vertical towards his two million (you can follow his progress on his blog, http://greghill.squarespace.com/).

Friday the sun came out, and we spent our day mini-golfing the still mostly-untracked slackcountry on the edges of the resort. I quickly broke myself dropping a cliff to flat, but Garrett, Joey and Paul kept riding, and Garrett came away with some beautiful photos of Joey and Paul riding some equally beautiful lines. With the sun setting, it was time to pack our exhausted selves into Paul’s Subaru. We had one more adventure, however—Joey had made us promise that we’d try poutine, the Canadian guilty pleasure of French fries smothered with gravy and cheese curds, before we left, and after saying goodbye he pointed us towards a burger joint that he said had the best in town. Uncomfortably full and feeling strangely Canadian, we headed south, with a new addiction to French fries, gravy, and the feel of an empty gondola.

All photos are copyrighted by Garrett Grove. Check out more photos on his blog.

Pat stared up at the walls with a sigh. “Jesus. The creek even looks easier,” he said, looking up and down the drainage. Then his face lit up. “Let’s hike up the creek!”

There was obviously some hesitation. But something about Pat’s idea sounded enticingly sadistic. We tossed our skis on our shoulders, loosened our boots and headed upstream.

It was the end of January at Mt. Baker, where once again the weather was defying all physical laws regarding H?O. After weeks of 40-degree snow and 30-degree rain, Baker somehow still had a respectable, 100-plus-inch base. Holding it down in the face of adversity? That’s Mt. Baker for you.

The night before, we had decided to take advantage of the forecasted sunny day and tour out to the top of Mount Anne. Apparently, despite the current balmy temperatures and sunshine, the wet weekend had sealed off any good turns, and we punched our through an inch-thick rain crust on top of 8 inches of sugar. We headed up, hoping to find better snow at higher elevations.

The ascent was infuriating. All around us lay classic Cascade lines, untracked and begging for turns, but our steps kept crunching through the insidious crust. We headed for Shuksan Arm to try some turns in Hidden Bowl.

Before dropping in, Garrett and Pat decided to do some cornice-trundling, only to have the cornice blow away from the sweaty, straggly tree holding it in place. Garret ended up with a rope-burn and Pat with a racing heart after nearly being yanked into oblivion.

And then we were at the creek.

At first it was a bitch. The rocks were slick, we were in alpine boots, and the water was COLD. We struggled over snow bridges scrambled up waterfalls. But, having reached a spot where it seemed we might be able to climb out, our eyes kept being drawn back into the creek.

“It looks like we’re free,” Garrett said, and then added, half-jokingly, “or we could keep heading upstream.”

We weren’t joking. It was back into the creek.

The next hour belonged in the movie Cliffhanger—rappelling off alder branches, free-climbing snowy overhangs, making mossy 5.8 moves in ski boots and javelin-ing our skis up onto the snow bridges. We even had to stem up a waterfall. Stallone ain’t got shit.

Eventually we came to steep, narrow section where, no matter how radical we got, going farther was impossible. The riparian adventure finally at an end, we struggled up a boot pack up and out, towards the traditional exit and guaranteed freedom…

…and found ourselves separated from the cat-track by an open, 10-foot wide, 12-foot deep streambed. After hours of struggling towards the magical ease of the chair, we were faced with another hundred yards of boot-packing. Or not.

“Fuck this,” Garrett said. He tossed his skis and poles over the gap and leaped.

His foot busted through the edge as he jumped and he landed Vertical-Limit style on the other side, arms clinging to the snow and legs dangling into the hole.

But he made it.

After the standard “sick!”s and “hell yeah!”s, we all risked the leap, Tristan even getting extreme with his skis on his backpack. Starved but stoked, we crashed through the trees and tumbled out onto the cat-track above Chair Eight, covered in pine needles and sweat, just as my brother and some friends came riding by.

“That sounds horrible,” my brother said, after hearing the day’s events. “It wasn’t good inbounds, but it was better than that.” We agreed, smiled and made some jokes about some of the sketchier parts of the creek bed. We skied up to the lodge at 4 p.m., seven hours and many miles after those first horrid turns, just in time to nab free pizza from the cafeteria.

We were tired, scratched up, sweaty, and, after hours of skinning, had only made three or four hundred feet of shitty turns. It was 40 degrees out and the parking lot was a muddy mess. Loading our gear into the car, Tristan voiced what was going through all our minds.

“It may be warm and the snow may have sucked and we may have barely skied,” he said, “but that was one of the funnest days I’ve had in awhile.”

If it’s not powing…at least June-uary’s always an adventure.

Photos by Garrett Grove

So when we rolled up to an empty border crossing and, a few miles later and empty Sea to Sky, we were completely confused. Arriving at Whistler on a sunny, 7-inches-of-new day should have been like arriving at an international gong-show. This was the Olympics, and there were no ticket lines, no lift lines and no mad parades rushing through the village. There were still plenty of characters—skiers in skin tight, Finnish-flag one-pieces or snowboarders in jeans and wife-beaters, to name two specifics—but those come with the territory, both Whistler and Olympic. We got our tickets and hopped on the gondola.

Most of the course was closed to the public, but a friendly Whistler employee we met on the chair directed us to the corner with the best view. We squirmed our way through the crowd—many wearing Canadian and American flags for capes—and up against the race barrier.

I’m going to be honest—I’ve only seen downhill ski races on TV. They’ve always looked terrifyingly fast. In real life they’re ludicrous speed. And even with my non-racer background, I could tell the course looked tricky—the shady snow ice, the sunny snow mush. The first few racers hurtled past to me shaking my head in awe–and then we saw Lindsey. Even before we heard the time on the cat’s radio, we knew she had won it.  If the other girls were rockets, she was a laser. I even wished for a second I had a cowbell to ring.

With Lindsey done, we had seven inches of sunny pow that required our undivided attention. The snow was great, somehow staying soft in the balmy weather, and nearly everywhere was go-able. We celebrated the victory first with some Crown, and then, heading to Blackcomb, with some deep turns, fun lines and respectable goggle tans. My amazement wouldn’t go away—somehow, on such an incredible day, both mountains stayed empty and we were still finding fresh turns when the lifts close at 3:30.

Now apres-ski, we sat back at a restaurant at the base of Whistler to enjoy the last of the sun. Just a few feet from us on the deck, set up as a backdrop for some TV announcer and bordered by two massive sleds, was a hot-tub brimming with bikini-clad girls. In front of us, mounded 6-inches high and guarded by two pitchers of beer, was the biggest plate of nachos I’ve ever seen.

So much for expectations. Thanks to Ryan Proctor and everyone at Whistler-Blackcomb. Pow turns, sunshine, and the fastest women in the world. It doesn’t get much more Olympic than that.

For so many of you who may not already know, I would like to clarify that I am not, nor have I been involved with Warren Miller Entertainment (WME) or their ski movies for quite some time now. When I sold the company to my son in 1988, I was excited about staying involved and helping carry the company forward. However, the company has twice since been sold, and it has been six years since I have had anything whatsoever to do with the films bearing my name.

The lawsuit that WME has filed against Josh Berman and Level 1 Productions is something that never should have happened. WME has no valid claim for Trademark Infringement, and that is why they are attempting to delay the action with Level 1 and go to arbitration with me. The judge will rule on the stay of action sometime this week. For Josh and Level 1, a stay of action only means that WME gets to put off their lawsuit, until the arbitration between them and me is finished. That is unacceptable as it leaves Josh and Level 1 hanging in the wind.

I stopped working with WME because our ideas on what the ski films should be weren’t on the same page, and they demonstrated that they didn’t want my involvement in making ski films any longer. WME’s statement that they “would like nothing better than to have Mr. Miller be a continuing part of WME,” but cannot because they are “a small company with limited resources and we are not in a position to meet the financial conditions Mr. Miller requires” is really absurd.

I have never made ski films solely for the money. I have always done what I do out of my love for skiing, passion for people, and the freedom that I find while on the mountain. I sat down and did an interview with Josh, a friend whose entire company, Level 1 Productions, generated less than $100,000 in revenue in 2008. While on the other hand, WME is the largest company of its kind in the world and is part of a multi-million dollar corporation, which is owned by a larger global conglomerate that posted more than a billion dollars in revenue in 2008.

I am really flattered by how much support so many people have shown not only to me, but also to Josh and Level 1 Productions. Thank you for reading this. Let’s all look forward to bluebird days and untracked powder snow!

-Warren Miller

(Text via Businesswire.com)

Miller's statement was in response to the hold WME put on its case with Level 1, which would leave the production company in limbo while WME and Miller were in arbitration. By keeping Level 1 waiting until the arbitration was finished, WME could basically threaten them with the possibility that additional claims might arise during the process and force them to accept the stay to avoid legal expenses.   

The statement also defines the reasons behind his Warren's split with WME. It is great to see the legend's motivations are still as pure as they were when he started making films.

In a U.S. Ski Team press release, Rearick expressed his optimism Miller’s return. “Because Bode is such a great competitor he's going to challenge everyone on the Team to push their personal limits and strive for greater performances,” he said. “I look forward to Bode being a positive team member and leader.

Miller’s return doesn’t guarantee him a spot on the Olympic Team, however.  As with other athletes, his competing on the team depends on his performance in the 2010 season. The roster for the Olympic Team will be announced on Jan. 26.

Although it doesn’t look like Miller will be racing in Soelden, Austria, for the Audi FIS World Cup season opener, watch for him at the Visa Birds of Prey World Cup, Dec. 2-6, in Beaver Creek, Colo. – either on the race course or in the bars.