Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25123
TORN BETWEEN THE CITY AND THE MOUNTAINS, A SKIER AND A SNOWBOARDER HEAD TO THE CANADIAN ROCKIES TO FIND A NEW SENSE OF FREEDOM. Lately I've noticed a woman walking around my New York City neighborhood with her face buried in a newspaper. I don't know how she sees the ground, or the people in front of her, or the cabs flying across Broadway. But she survives and no one really seems to care, and worse, sometimes I think I see the logic in her actions. New York City is a place where the border between sanity and insanity is forever blurred. But that isn't such a bad thing. The city buzzes with an energy that is frenetic and addictive. Perhaps it's the 7.3 million people packed into 34 square miles. Maybe it's the unbounded thought, the galvanizing art and more varieties of sex than the best Tantric manuals provide. Or maybe it's the electric stares: In the time it takes a synapse to fire, a neuron to dance, you've seen into the lives of more people than you'd ever want to know. But there is a limit, a line you cross, like a backcountry cliff with no landing below. You're airborne and you say to yourself, "Is this it?" Yet somehow you ski out of it and realize you're alive. Reaching safety, you understand something grand and wonderful has happened: you've achieved epiphany. I decided to break out of NYC. With my friend David, I tunneled, rode, hiked, flew and days later found myself in British Columbia. BC is land of the Kootenay powder, the grizzly bear and the 100 mile-per-hour avalanche that'll steamroll you like an insect. We set out from Vancouver and made a quick economic discovery, the exchange rate kicks ass: US$1 to CND$1.60. Every third day is virtually free. Our second eye-opener