Fernie 11 Week Instructor Course 16/17 - Week 10

Week 10! Woah... what happened there? The winter is coming to an end! This week's focus for the Fernie gang was putting in the final lot of training ahead of Level 2 exams! Throw in an 80s fashion show and some spring pow and you've got yourself another stellar week. Here's what Heather got up to.

Level 2 exams are fast approaching this weekend, so this week has been a constant focus on practice teaching scenarios and rider improvement sessions. We did lots of video sessions so that we can refine our analysis and improvement skills which form the basis for how we structure our lessons. The beginning of this week was spent with instructor Alex, as we worked through some groomed terrain scenarios involving short radius turns. The guys in my group this week are all at really impressive level of riding so it was a challenge to keep up with them, and as a result I definitely felt improvements in my own riding!

On Wednesday a group of buddies and myself went in search of some fresh lines on the ’new side’ of the mountain. Despite it being late March, the snow has been falling pretty consistently on the upper mountain, with slower, stickier, wet snow on the lower elevations, so we lapped the Whitepass chair on the upper mountain several times. We decided to go on a bit of an adventure into Anaconda Glades, which involves quite a long traverse through trees and over sneaky bumps. It’s really fun to go and explore in a resort like Fernie due to its vastness, there’s always something new to find. The Glades turned out to be a bit sketchy but we had a laugh negotiating the trees on the crusted powder! Later in the day we hiked up to ‘Milky Way’ and enjoyed some great spring pow turns!

On Thursday, after a fun day of going through freestyle and freeride scenarios with instructor Clarence, it was time to witness the annual Hot Dog Day fashion show at the Red Tree Lodge! A little context... Hot Dog Day at Fernie is a retro day dedicated to donning your best 80’s ski garb inspired by the 1984 film, ‘Hot Dog… The Movie’. The outfits in question were kindly modelled by our instructors, and the auction, MC’d by Nonstop host Matheson got underway – there were some fierce bidding wars for the best items! It was a really funny, lighthearted night which offered some comedy respite from the looming Level 2 exams! All proceeds from the night go to a local environmental charity.

On Friday we got back into some teaching scenarios and in the afternoon we enjoyed some nice powder turns in Timber Bowl. I gave probably the best practice teach I’ve done so far that afternoon, a lesson on carving, so that boosted by confidence for this weekend.

Saturday called for an early start in order to get up to the hill to begin the first day of our CASI Level 2 course. We were sorted into two groups of six and headed up with our instructors who magically transformed into our evaluators in their official red CASI jackets. The first day was really fun, there had been some fresh snow the night before so we headed up to the new side with Clarence, who was our evaluator, and trainee evaluator Matt. We spent the morning working on some riding improvements and then we were given an example lesson presentation of the material we’d be expected to teach the next morning.

Sunday didn’t go exactly to plan, I let nerves get the better of me and didn’t deliver a very good lesson, which put a bit of a cloud over the rest of the day for me - I’m sad to say I briefly thought about calling it quits, I kept that too myself at the time thankfully. The absolute best thing about Nonstop is the amazing friends you make, and the encouragement and support we give each other in these situations is crucial – I'm really grateful for that! I went home that evening and tried my best to assimilate the end-of-day feedback and prepare for all the possible teaching scenarios we may be tasked with the next day.

*Spoiler Alert* - it gets better!

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