I remember the winter of 2005. Rain in January. Skiing through standing puddles of water on Wheeler in PLPP. The parking lot at the Visitor Centre was a sheet of ice. I’m hoping that with only one more warm night and day to endure, we might escape anything that bad.
Lake Louise and Yoho may be the only places with good snow right now. Let’s hope that at higher elevations, this rain will be turning to snow, so we might have some trails rejuvenated in PLPP by the weekend.
When I saw the webcam at PLPP reading +8 at noon today, I headed west to Lake Louise. It rained all the way there, and only turned to snow at Lake Louise.The Moraine Lake road parking lot was quite full of vehicles when I arrived.
SkiHere readers from Edmonton had just finished skiing Moraine Lake road
Air temp was +1, snow was -2. I chatted with a few skiers who were finishing skiing and most were having some challenges with waxing today. I decided to use my waxable skis, and if I could get no satisfaction, I’d return and get the waxless.
On days like this, if your wax is too sticky, you’ll end up with big icy clumps of snow stuck to the bottom of your skis and it’ll be hard to go anywhere. I used an old Toko pink wax which you can’t buy anymore. It’s rated -1/-4 for new snow. I use it sparingly as I don’t have much remaining. It usually works in conditions where it’s warm with falling snow.
My grip was barely adequate, so I added just a smidgen of Toko yellow(for -2 and warmer) and corked it in really well. That improved the situation, but a few times I had to kick the clumps off my skis.
Carl, who just finished a long day on the trails, has recently joined the tracksetting crew at Lake Louise
Although trackset this morning, MLR already had about 3 cm of fresh snow. With all the traffic, the tracks were skied-in well. At 1.6K, I made the right turn onto Fairview which is in excellent condition. Rather than completing the loop, I skied up to the lake and on the lake for a little ways.
As I was heading back down to my vehicle, I had brand new tracksetting on Tramline on which to ski.
At the parking lot, I met Carl, who has just joined the tracksetting crew. He and Hans had trackset almost everything today, but with the 10 cm of snow in the forecast, it will be covered by morning. Carl expects they’ll be back out tomorrow doing it all over again.
