A bonus foot of snow for the morning. Thankfully it was basically all melted by the end of the day.
And a bonus picture of the Moosling with a bucket. He likes the bucket. And now he can crawl, so he can get to the bucket whenever he wants.
Category: canada
A spur of the moment trip, and we spent a night up at Sunshine Village. Once all the lifts had shut down and the people had (mostly) gone away, it was time to tour out to Rock Isle Lake. Well, meander. It doesn’t take much more than half an hour, even if you are taking your time about it.
With the sun setting so late these days (it’s about 9pm now), we weren’t anywhere near sunset, but it was still lovely out there.
We were wondering how long it would take for the path through to Mount Assiniboine to clear though – we hiked it a week into July last year, and had a few snow patches to wade through. This year the snow pack is so much deeper. And what do the ground squirrels do while they’re waiting for the snow to melt? Do any of them run out of food?
Anyway, Rock Isle Lake, it’s nice – oh, and they’ve got a groomed trail all the way out there at the moment from the Village, so if you had skate skis, you could skate out there.
Categories
Ross Lake Circuit
Another day, another ski trip. This time to Yoho National Park, and with the Moosling in the Ergo rather than in the Chariot.
Around the 9.5km Ross Lake circuit, the route description runs as follows:
From the Lake O’Hara parking lot, follow Highway 1A until you reach the Ross Lake trail head sign on your right. The trail climbs gradually for 1.3 km to this small lake bounded by a great rock wall. Turn west at the lake and continue for 3.2 km to the Lake O’Hara fire road. Turn north (right) at the fire road to return to the parking lot. There are some narrow and fast sections on this circuit.
The trail up to the lake through the trees is quite cute, then we chilled on the lake in the sun for a while, before heading out.
They were right about the narrow and fast sections, the trees from Ross Lake back to the Lake O’Hara fire road were all sorts of fun. I was glad not to be towing the Chariot (and also wishing I’d remembered some Glob Stopper, but you can’t have everything – unless you’re better at remembering things than I am).
If the snow is going to last forever, at least the skiing will be warm now.
Last Winter, we got so little snow that hiking up Ha Ling Peak in February wasn’t a problem. This year has been a little different, it was obvious from the start that there was still a lot of snow, with fresh skin tracks heading up beside the trail.
Still, with a nice packed trail, hiking in the snow was pretty easy. Until we hit the treeline.
Then our nice packed trail dispersed into a myriad of snowshoe trails. We did some tentative exploration on one of them. Brendan post-holed a lot. So did I.
This was the view from one of my holes.
Meanwhile Finn just hung out in the Ergo with his sunnies on.
So, conclusion? Bring your snowshoes if you want to get to the summit. Or maybe wait another month.
Instead of going skiing yesterday, we optimistically decided to head out on the Legacy Trail. Theoretically it was rideable, as it was certainly bare of snow in huge patches. It would be the first proper test ride for the biking version of the Chariot as well.
Things went well until we actually reached the Legacy Trail, at the Banff Park gates.
We rode around the first huge snow drift, then there was just a whole lot of gravel, as we were right next to the highway. That wasn’t great, but still, easy enough to ride on.
But then we hit the uphill, which was covered with a huge snow drift. We could see a bare patch afterwards, so we though “Why not?”, and pushed on up through it.
Alex started out through the next drift, and this was the “Seriously? There’s just more snow?” moment. So the Legacy Trail is rideable in parts, if you’re happy riding on the highway the rest of the way. We opted to sit in the sun on the bare trail and eat cookies, and then turn around and go home. Defeated once again by Super Winter. At least the Chariot passed the biking nap test.