chester lake – evilmoose

Ok, so we went skiing up to Chester Lake again. There was a lot of fresh snow though, and the weather was great, the company was great, and the Moosling had an absolute blast (spoilers).

We met up with Maria and Neil at the trailhead. We got the Moosling into his alpine skis, and hooked him up with a harness – from there, Alex and I took it in turns to tow him up to the lake. It’s far easier than towing a Chariot or pulk, that’s for sure. Although I’m wondering if we should try and get a towing system with a little more give…

We headed up to Elephant Rocks, and I realised the last time I’d made it up to here was when I was around 10 weeks pregnant, and Brendan was busy dislocating his shoulder and having us put it back in (thankfully, otherwise it would have been a long and painful journey back to Canmore to get it done).

At Elephant Rocks, there was a lot of exciting holes to be dug, and food to be eaten. We watched ski-mo guys cruising about getting in lots of elevation.

And then, it was time for the descent! And by that, I mean it was time to take skins off and pretend we were going downhill, where in reality we were trying to tow the Moosling across flat and sometimes uphill sections of trail while having no grip at all because we took our skins off.

On the plus side, the Moosling was having a ball hitting clumps of snow off the trees.

But eventually things did start heading downhill. And all the time on the hill has really helped improve Moosling skiing skills, as he easily cruised down, having a blast on the tight treed trail.

The snow was soft, the sky was blue, the mountains were snow-capped. We had a pretty great run down.

By the time we got back down to the carpark, Finn was pretty keen to ski back up so he could do the run again.

We decided to head back home though. And he fell asleep in the car – big day!

Distance: 9.5km
Elevation gain: 350m
Moving time: 2hr15min

The thing about finding ski tours to do without any avy danger – they all seem to involve skiing to lakes. Ok, not all, Goat Creek and Cascade Fire Trail are at least two exceptions I can think of. Nonetheless, on Sunday we skied to another lake.

Up and away

It was snowing the whole time – the cover of the Chariot got a good coating

A quick lunch by the lake

Happy to be out in the snow

And skiing back down again

The handlebars on the Chariot definitely come in handy for descents when some manoeuvring is required. Also on ascents on a narrow trail, as it likes to try and dive into tree wells – it really doesn’t track very well.

The Chester Lake trail is about 10km return, now with a one-way section in force for part of the ski trail (all signed and obvious). Nice and wide for the first half, turning into a thin and windy trail through tighter trees towards the end, but still plenty of room to get a Chariot through (although with the tree wells and sections that are a little off-camber, doing it alone could get interesting). Our heavy skis were overkill, seeing as we weren’t actually heading out for any turns – cross-country gear would be much more sensible (although the downhill is definitely much steeper than the Moraine Lake trail).

It’s pretty popular for snow-shoeing as well, though there’s a separate snow-shoe trail to the lake (no idea what that’s like for towing a Chariot on). On weekends in general the trail can be pretty busy, with half of Calgary turning up there – if you can get out and back early you’ll miss a lot of the other traffic though.