8:30am at work, as the sun desperately tries to rise.
Category: snow
Since the start of December (or some time around then) the snow just hasn’t left the streets. Well, technically it’s left the streets. Unless you count the mushy brown stuff that looks distractingly like creamed butter and brown sugar. But it’s still everywhere else.
These photos were taken at the start of December, just before Banff Avenue re-opened (after months of roadworks). It was a perfect surface for skiing up and down on.
The Christmas lights are coming out all over town now. And suddenly all of those Christmas cards and images and song lyrics make a lot more sense. I’ll have my first white Christmas this year.
And when there’s enough snow on the roads, you can skate (ski skate that is) up the Tunnel Mountain road, and get this view of the Banff Springs Hotel at night, surrounding by snow covered trees.
Over the last week or so, a nice big flow of warm moist air has been sweeping over here from Hawaii – the particular weather pattern is referred to as the Pineapple Express, and is renowned for bringing large dumps of snow. We got 50 or 60 cm over a few days, and the snow has kept trickling in since. Today was the first day with much blue sky since all the snow arrived to cover the diminishing base…
All right stop collaborate and listen …
Erm, so I went ice climbing. Nine in the morning and we were strolling along a packed snow path up to Mt Stanley Headwall. Two hours later, and we’d completed the final slog up through deep fluffy snow, arrived at Sinus Gully, and were strapping on crampons. In my case they were a pair of antique crampons that attached to my ski boots via a mechanism involving a couple of trusty leather straps that were probably just as good as they were when the crampons were originally purchased (in Kathmandu in 1972 – no really).
My old tele boots were a size too big, designed for touring, and I’ve been using them for four seasons now. My feet could have invited a whole other pair of feet to have a party inside them. So now I have shiny new boots that fit (and are designed for turns rather than touring). I plan to thoroughly test them as soon as possible.
