More trips along the Legacy Trail…
Ridiculous lunchtime hike-a-bikes…
Evening loops out to Lake Minnewanka…
Solo rides up the pass on unsettled days…
More trips along the Legacy Trail…
Even more solo trips up the pass…
Group rides up the pass…
Clearing fallen trees by hitting them with rocks…
Lots of bike riding, at any rate.
Sometimes solo, sometimes with a crew along, but the pass has been the ride of the season for me. Good for a quick workout, good for laps or hill repeats. And really, although it’s a great big dirt road when I’d rather be riding singletrack, the views really are pretty amazing.
25 times so far this year. Enough to make it pretty familiar.
Much more fun when it’s not dusty, or running with snow melt.
And even more fun when Reclaimer is in good shape for a fun singletrack descent, instead of flying back down the road. It’s all good training though.
It’s pretty fun to spend a day out on the snow with the boy these days.
He’s happy to ski for a few hours, has firm ideas about where he’d like to go and what runs he’d like to do – and I no longer have to do the entire run in a squat, hanging onto him and snow plowing like crazy to control both our speed!
And at the end of the day, he likes to do the ski out down. And then go home for a nap. Perfect ski date!
Now the boy is big enough to big enough to be pedalling we’ve sold off the bike towing devices, and he’s only ever on the trail-a-bike if we get out on long rides together.
Sadly though, the trail-a-bike we have really doesn’t handle offroad trails that well (at least not the rough rocky rooty ones around here). We’re still torn about what to do as a solution – Tout Terrain make a gorgeous trail-a-bike with suspension, but it also costs close to $2000.
In the meantime, the boy really enjoys riding the trail to Banff, and has taken to suggesting it often (could it be because he gets icecream if we go there?) (and I tend to agree because I know we’ll go to the Wildflour Bakery).
And he’s actually pedalling these days. At least occasionally. Which is helpful when you’re trying to haul a 12kg bike plus however many kilograms of small boy up a hill.
Mostly he just pedals when he really wants to get to icecream or a toy store though, and isn’t convinced he needs to help me pedal into the brutal headwinds that tend to lurk on the route to Banff.
We had our last adventure with Al and Lincoln on a ride to Banff and back – they’ve now disappeared back to Australia, and we have lost some good quality adventuring partners. Sad faces all round.
On what was probably the last cross-country ski of the season, Alex had a biathlon class out at Mount Shark. It had been relocated there from the Nordic Centre, seeing as all the snow at the Nordic Centre had melted.
I set off there earlier in the morning, riding my bike out along the Spray Lakes Road, in the rain. As you do (it was good practice).
Once we had all arrived, eyed the rain with resignation, and donned ski gear, I skied around with the boy while the others skied around in the rain and then shot at things.
There were ludicrous puddles everywhere though. And it just kept raining. The boy and I ended up doing small loops near the car, after an attempt to bypass this puddle was turned around by the fact that we just couldn’t get around it. I did like the fact that he was the one who suggested we try taking off our skis and hiking around the puddle in the bushes though.
And meanwhile these guys tried to pretend it was fun to lie on wet mats in the snow while it rained on them and they shot at targets.
So, the ski season is dead! Long live the bike season!