Over one hundred brave contestants turned up in blizzard like conditions to attempt to skim across the 80 foot long pond on Whistler Mountains closing day. This skim was very challenging due to the 5 foot drop into the water, along with the sheer length of the pond. The slow inrun didn’t do anyone any favor’s either. I estimate that the success rate was as low as 5% – very few people skimmed across the whole pond and I don’t think a single snowboarders made it across . Lets just say that there was a lot of competition for best bail.
One thing that the Whistler Slush cup did a bit differently than other pond skim events is that they let competitors attempt the skim as many times as they wanted to. Typically this would result in lots of opportunities for tricks and progressive riding, but not this year. This year was the year of huge bails and hypothermia.
Every spring at Whistler Blackcomb, Whistler mountain closes in mid-April while Blackcomb mountain remains open until early June. Each closing day Whistler mountain plays host to everyone’s favourite spring skiing event – the pond skim. Typically when you think of the pond skim event, you would think of sunny warm spring weather with people skiing in t-shirts and bikinis, goggle tans and people BBQing in the parking lot. The 2023 Whistler slush cup was nothing like that! In fact it was quite the opposite. It was a full on winter powder day. Temps at the pond were hovering at around -8 and over 33cm of cold Powder accumulated on the day. “The Slush cup presented by Corona Tropical” – How ironic…
Hats off to the competitors for braving the frigid waters and putting on one hell of a show for the huge crowd of spectators in attendance.
