Superb!
We had just left the Boulton Creek trailhead when we bumped into Blaine(far right in photo) and his manic group of skiers at the Whiskey Jack – Moraine junction:
Do these guys look like they just skied 60K? Jan 2, 2010
Blaine made the excellent video which was posted on here about 10 days ago of skiing in PLPP(if you missd it, click this link Video). They had been out since 7 a.m. this morning(you can see that one of them still has his headlamp on), and they were planning to continue for a few more hours yet. I should mention it’s now 2:30 pm. I wonder how many Ks they finally got in today. I have a feeling that Blaine might be training for the gruelling 71K of the Lake Louise to Banff Loppet. That’s a great photo of Morant’s curve on their home page 🙂
All in all it was an amazing day of skiing and a great way to kick off the new year. I’ll have a video for you a little later in the week. The 5 skiers were Tony Smith, Kirk Howell, Brendan McCracken, Carl Pryce and myself.
Keep up the great work on your blog!”
If you watch the video, take note of the colours on Kirk’s pole baskets. Cheryl spotted it on the video, and again today:
Kirk's colourful pole baskets. Jan 2, 2010
Now, what about trail conditions? Couldn’t have asked for much better. Everything was recently trackset, and although there was some fresh snow on top, the trails were all in great shape.
Tyrwhitt trail. Jan 2, 2010
We skied the loop consisting of Whiskey Jack, Tyrwhitt, Elk Pass, Fox Creek, and Boulton Creek. Fox and Boulton were fast and too much fun! I recommend doing these from south to north for maximum skiing pleasure.
The air temperature was right around zero, but the snow was still cold and the wax worked well. I was using Toko red rated for -1/-2 and it was perfect.
When we arrived at the Elk Pass/Patterson junction, the Elk Pass trail had fresh snowmobile tracks on it all the way to Fox Creek and I would imagine they continued all the way to the trailhead. We surmised that a rescue must have occurred an hour or so earlier, especially when we remembered hearing sirens as we were waxing up at the Boulton Creek trailhead. I truly hope nothing too serious happened.
We noticed that the Pocaterra parking lot was chok-a-blok full of vehicles as we passed by.
We ran into a lot of skiers who recognized my new SkiHere.ca toque. Thanks for saying hi, and if you see us on Cascade Fire Road tomorrow, give us a thumbs up.
The Kananaskis trail report shows some recent grooming on the Ribbon Creek – Skogan Pass trails.
I should add that the Greater Bragg Creek Trails Association has been doing a fantastic job of maintaining the ski trails at West Bragg. Your financial support of the GBCTA will not only help with ongoing grooming and trail improvements, you will also get prompt trail condition updates via e-mail, when fresh grooming takes place.
Ski Here has a link to the GBCTA webpage, under “Share The Trails”, at left.
Great skiing and superb sunny warm weather again on Sunday at West Bragg. The trail crew has renovated most of the damage done by the off-roaders, just be careful on the downhills where some ruts are still evident. We skied pretty much all of the trails to the south of the parking lot today, while there are some thin spots, overall I would rate conditions as very good.