The best of the best, a day to beat all the rest!

The best of the best, today beats all the rest!

Today was our last day riding here in Kamchatka and the day dawned with perfect blue skies just as predicted.

We had a couple of snowy down days which worked perfectly into our planning as we’d ridden 5 heli days straight and everyone was in need of a bit of leg rest. Friday we headed into Petropavlovsk to visit the decaying city centre and followed it up with a big night out at a local club. Needless to say Saturday started off quietly for most. Steve and Aasma headed off dog sledding whilst a group of us headed off for a go on the guns at the shooting range.

Seb won the shooting comp but was immediately disqualified for being French and so that of course left me the winner, narrowly beating Alan who tied the same score as me but my 2 bulls eyes over his 1 clinched the deal, also I was the judge and made the rules and just may have poked the pen through my target on the way back by mistake, we’ll just never know but anyway I won!

Today was our last days riding and so we needed to find something pretty special. The gang were pretty keen to see some Volcanic action so we headed South to the big active cone of Mutnovsky 2322m. Here you find Volcanic smoke and steam rising from a huge crater and even more impressively from the Glacier that half fills it. Imagine doing a descent down a Glacier complete with crevasse danger and then the ante is upped yet again by Volcanic activity deep underground. At least you can see the crevasses as there’s smoke coming out of them!

Jim warming up in the Western range.

Anyway after a couple of warm up runs in the small mountains en-route we hit the jackpot on Mutnovsky with deep fresh powder on the North facing slopes, miles and miles of it with fresh lines for all!

Steve and Mark on Mutnosky

Daryl gets his fill.

Alan gets one in for Scotland.

We did a 3 big lines here riding some 2000 vertical meters each descent.

The first run from the rim of the crater was awesome and gave us a peek at what was to come. On the way in we had spied a couple of nice lines to the left, one coming right off the summit. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the landing on the top and so dropped on the shoulder below and did a short hike up to where we could access the goods.

Seb hard at work on Mutnosky.

Another amazing line in the bag and another one waiting on the wings.

Aasma in full flow, Mutnosky.

Jazzy Jeff gets one in.

Dave hanging out on Mutnosky.

We headed straight back up and nailed the last one which of course turned out to be the best.

Simon on our last run of the trip, Vilyuchinsky.

A quick picnic and we had enough fuel for one more drop so we started heading back via the big perfectly shaped Vilyuchinksy volcano 2173m. Here we once again toured around to the Northern slopes for another massive perfect descent and a great finish to the weeks riding.

This has to go down as my best Kamchatka trip, 5 days of perfect riding, a couple of days of snow and then the Grand Finale today!

Seb has been filming and already edited a couple of real nice movies from the first half of the week so expect to see those on line next week, I’ve a couple of new screen savers coming on line from the trip and an article on ‘the inner workings of Heli Guiding in Kamchatka’ a behind the scenes look into the life of Heli guiding over here which will be on line sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Ok we start our long journey back tomorrow, I’m back in Cham on Tuesday and then away again at the weekend for my next BC Voyager trip to the Lyngen Alps, Norway.

Neil.