For the Canmore Winter Carnival, the main street was covered in snow and track-set. So the boy tested out his skis, with brand new gumboots that are still a little on the large side.
He was very pleased with himself, and enjoyed tromping about (although he did have a tendency to cross his tails… and stop to dance when they started playing a catchy song over the speaker system).
The Moosling and the Namna Mouse
(click on image to embiggen)
On a gorgeous sunny February afternoon, we decided to hike up Ha Ling. It was packed snow all the way, except when we finally got above the tree line, the snow cleared entirely in the end. Very nice conditions!
When we reached the top, the Moosling’s jacket was stashed in a pack that hadn’t made it to the top yet. So he had run around in my down vest. Very on trend.
There was barely a breeze too, perfect conditions up there.
And then the Moosling tried to descend on his own – this didn’t last long.
This was another lesson in the “It’s quite hard to take a lot of photos when you’re the only one towing a Chariot and looking after an offspring” factor.
Rockbound Lake is just near Castle Junction, tucked in behind Castle Mountain. And I’d skied it before, pre-Moosling. At the time it had seemed like a fairly easy day-trip, a nice little easy jaunt. Towing a Chariot made the whole thing a lot more uphill. The hills! They didn’t stop! My legs! Ow ow!
It was a gorgeous blue bird day though, and lovely and warm (about 5oC in town), pretty much Spring weather. And we only came across two other people there the whole day! On a weekend!
Getting the Chariot up there was pretty easy, with a wide trail that wasn’t too off-camber. But then the trail swung around towards the west, and the skin trail became a narrow little winding path. Then I started to need help getting past trees and tree wells, and getting up some of the steep little rises. Do-able, but if I was to ski there with a Moosling again, I might use the Ergo instead.
We stopped for lunch in the sun. The sun had other ideas, and buggered off behind the peak about a minute after we sat down. And then half the party headed on to Tower Lake, while the other half went “blow this for a joke, snow-covered lakes are boring”, and started working the Chariot back through the trees (with only a few sideways Chariot on the snow incidents on the way) and stopping and chatting in any handy sunny patches they found.
We met up in time to do the fast descent together, flying down the icy track without incident to find the sun again in the carpark. Ow, my legs.
Elevation gain (to Tower Lake): About 650m?
Distance (to Tower Lake): 15.5km return
I got a Polaroid 420 Land Camera for Christmas – and so far it’s been a very gradual process of getting the power supply to the shutter working properly, getting things cleaned, and then working out how long things have to be exposed for at what temperature, and the best method for pulling out the photo from the camera without ending up with chemical stains on the final photo.
But we (the Moosling and I) wandered down to the river the other day, and I took a photo. We got back home, and I let the camera warm up, and eventually remembered to develop it, hours later. Which resulted in this:
Hurrah! Polaroid success. Now to improve my strike-rate…