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canada general moosling snow

Chester Lake

Against my better judgment, we headed over to Chester Lake for some ungroomed skiing – for the first time this winter! The backcountry hasn’t exactly been appealing, so we’ve been sticking to nordic skiing on groomed trails. Sadly everything was a little crusty, and the weather remained pretty overcast, so the old familiar trail wasn’t rendered exciting by awesome weather.

Thanks to the crusty trails, we didn’t get the boy to ski much, but he did manage 600m or so once we were up around the lake. The rest of the time he was hanging out on my back in the Ergo, not getting any lighter.

We even found an excellent hole for our midday luncheon:

It provided no end of amusement, as additional holes were dug, and small people climbed in and out and in and out… and then complained about being hungry because they were so busy climbing in and out of the hole that they’d refused to eat lunch.

An updated version of the “Chester Lake family in a hole” photo was taken too.

Here’s the January 2013 one, for the sake of comparison.

And then nothing remained but to snow plough my thighs into oblivion, down the chopped up, icy trail with an excited wiggly weight on my back.

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canada general moosling snow

A day on the hill

A day at the ski hill with the boy. But first, he had to climb the mountain in the car park.

After some time in daycare, and then some lunch, we headed out together. And I towed him up to the magic carpet.

Mama was only allowed on for one ride, then I was told off if I tried to follow him up the hill.

I spent some time skiing backwards, unable to convince him to snow plough (or pizza, as it’s apparently known in these circles)

I tried to see if he wanted to ride the Strawberry lift, but he wasn’t keen. So we skied down towards Goats Eye, and then – well, there’s only one way to get to Goats Eye, you have to ride the Jackrabbit chair. So he had his first chairlift ride.

The first run was so successful that he demanded: “More chairlift!”

And so we had some more chairlift, and more skiing!

And then a long nap at home.

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canada general moosling snow

Some skiing

As the boy gets better and better on his skis, we’ve been luring him out to cover longer distances.

He doesn’t always want to go skiing though (as evidenced here, as he hangs onto the Chariot for dear life, preventing it from escaping without him.

And I did some ski orienteering, with 3 days in a row of events. And then got a little sad when it was all over. Because there’s just something about looking for orange and white markers that seems to make every activity more fun.

I also managed to ski 1000km this season, a largely pointless goal with no photographic evidence. But on the plus side I may be a slightly better skier now.

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canada general moosling snow trip reports

Invasion of PLPP

More new trails! Peter Lougheed Provincial Park is down in K-Country, and has an absolute nest of cross-country ski trails set for classic skiing. And that’s probably why we’ve avoided it for so long. Because up until this winter, we’ve only ever had one pair of classic skis between us, and we’re both much more competent when it comes to skate skiing. Our classic skiing is slow and a little bit painful.

PLPP is a lovely spot though, and as we went to explore the trails it snowed and snowed and snowed all day. Not much in the way of spectacular views as a result, but lovely snow, and picturesque snow covered trees (that the Moosling wanted me to keep hitting the snow off).

The Moosling skied for the first 1.5km – which took close to an hour – but he managed to get up and down a lot of hills in that time, before he got too tired and distracted to ski, and was thrown in the Chariot.

We’d parked at the Boulton Creek parking lot, and ended up skiing a loop that consisted of Moraine, Fox Creek, Elk Pass, Tyrwhitt and Whiskey Jack trails – about 19km, with 438m of climbing. People kept asking us if we were going to the cabin, and telling us we would love the cabin, and then telling us we’d missed the turn-off to the cabin. Maybe we should go and ski out to stay in the Elk Lakes ACC cabin one of these days!

Then the day ended with a photo session in the backseat of the car: “I cheese a Mama!”

Oh, and in other exciting news, I finally got a pair of Julbo goggles – because whenever I try and ski with normal sunglass-type things on, they just fog up immediately. Then I end up trying to ski without anything, which is bad in terms of sun glare, and when it’s snowing it’s terrible in terms of snow pelting my eyeballs. I love them! And am kind of wondering if I can either use them for biking, or work out some similar kind of visor arrangement for biking with. Great field of vision, and very minimal fogging compared to sunglasses.

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canada general moosling snow

Family Day ski

A little jaunt on Family Day, the Moosling and I headed out to Banff to ski up to Sundance Canyon.

We wandered around at the canyon for a bit, then I kept skiing out towards the Brewster Creek trail junction (thinking about skiing as close as I could get to the old trailhead at the bottom of the Sunshine Village access road). But by then my shoulders were getting a bit tired from carrying a great heavy toddler, so after a few hundred metres of winding through the trees, we turned around and skied back to the car.

The sky wasn’t quite blue, but it was nice out, not too windy, and we had 9km of skiing fun, with quite a bit of singing going on in my ear. I really need to learn the words to some Thomas the Tank Engine songs, so I just don’t get “Thomas the Tank Engine! He’s a really useful engine!” sung on repeat.