Jingle bells!

Christmas is well and truly on it's way here in Fernie, and the tourists arrived in their droves this weekend. Fernie mountain opened on Saturday and it was a fantastic day - the sun shone, the snow was deep and crisp and even, and nobody pushed in front of me in the lift line... a revelation! I stacked it three of four times, but I keep being told that it's good to fall. Tell that to my aching limbs!

But what a change from our usually empty mountain! Three of the car parks were full by 8.30am and the lifts didn't open until 9am! Regrettably, we were dumb enough to forget our camera in the rush to fill the van with bodies and zoom up there for first lifts so you'll have to take our word for it!

There were queues of people at the Timber Bowl Express chair - about 100 or so gathered. By the time we'd sorted out passes and meandered over to the Elk Quad chair they had started to run it, and we queued for about...um.... three minutes in all. It's a travesty, I tells ya! ;-) And within about 9.10am, everyone had dispersed to different areas of the mountain and it was hardly busy at all. If this is what they call "Fernie Busy" then I will be a very happy bunny for the rest of the season:

We could still do with a bit more snow, particularly as the mountain has been scarred up this weekend and there probably isn't a stingle stash of white fluffy stuff left anywhere. It's pretty hard in the mornings - a tad icy - but when the sun shines and it softens up, it's still pretty good. We're due for a dump (of snow - stop sniggering at the back) this coming week, so fingers crossed.

Our first guests arrived at the Lodge this morning, so we're in the process of settling them in. We've got more arriving on the 15th, and then a full house for New Year's Eve. Yay!

I had to work today (all alone, snivel) but I told myself that I MUST get around to doing a blog as I've been pretty slack lately and I can't leave Jethro to do everything! Work is still great, but we are getting noticeably busier. I had my first lot of ski and snowboard rentals this week, and I put $239.99 on someone's credit card when I meant to put $23.99 on it. DOH! Nice one Alex. But owing to the miracles of modern technology, I managed to refund the credit card so all was well in the end and the customer was very nice about it.

Finally, I wanted to introduce you all to our new friends: Basement tree and Lounge tree! These are our newly "acquired", shall we say, Christmas trees that are now sitting pretty in the Lodge. I must admit that we did chop them down ourselves, but we have been assured that this is perfectly acceptable and that everyone in Fernie does the same. I can't imagine why anyone would spend $30 buying a tree when we are surrounded by thousands of the things, but I guess some people are odd! We gave them a good shake before tossing them on the roof rack, just to make sure we weren't bringing any unwanted critters home too!

And I think you'll agree that they look rather nice:

Basement tree. He's not wonky! Just interesting!


Lounge tree. A little more sophisticated, and bearing presents!


(You may be wondering why we have two trees? Tis simple, dear readers. We divide our time between the basement and the lounge, so we need to have the spirit of crimble time in both, naturally!)