I skied 14 wonderful kilometres at Lake Louise today without going near any of the “Big Three”(Moraine Lake road, Great Divide, Pipestone).
Skiers cueing up for the mogul downhill on Fairview
Let’s give accolades to the Chateau’s Heritage Guides for the fabulous conditions on Fairview. Lots of shoveling, leveling and grooming has made the trail safe and enjoyable.
Spectacular scenery on Fairview
Fairview is trackset to the top of the hill at 2.7K, and the subsequent “mogul” downhill is in great shape for early season. It was fun, not scary. At the bottom of the moguls the trail is not groomed for the final 1.3K to Moraine Lake road and I would be reluctant to ski it with skinny skis.
Skiing across Lake Louise. The Chateau is trying to get a skating rink established.
The air and snow temperature at the Fairview trailhead was -11°C at 1 pm. I put a layer of VR30(-10/-30) on top of the VR40 from yesterday and had excellent grip. The tracks were amazingly fast for being so cold. It probably helped that my glide wax was LF5, perfect for the temperature.
The Heritage Guides work out of the boathouse
I skied to the end of the moguls, climbed back to the top of the hill on the separate up track and returned to the trailhead. 6K return. The net elevation gain to the top of the hill is 70 metres.
I met a number of other skiers on the trail and two of them were living dangerously by continuing on to Moraine Lake road.
Tramline
A fun group of four skiers from Jasper were cueing up for the moguls along with Mike but they made me go first to check it out. I would have gone faster if I knew it was going to be so safe and easy.
The parking lot trail at lake Louise
Everyone made it down okay except for the last skier, who, upon reaching the bottom was excitedly exclaiming, “that was great and I only fell twice!”
I skied across the lake and did the Lakeshore trail for which Chuck has already provided a trip report and some better photos than mine. The ski across the lake was okay. Fresh snow over the frozen slush.
Tramline, which is a trail susceptible to being trashed by walkers, was surprisingly good. The walkers are staying out of the tracks.
The trail through the parking lot is trackset and in good shape. It’s about 400 metres from the Fairview/Tramline trailhead to the lake.
Nice to hear from Dana that she found some snow at Mt Shark.
We too were skiing on Fairview and it was wonderful in the sunshine today. The only difficult part was the ski down towards the Paradise Valley Trailhead. The groomer was working on hill and this made this skiing quite challenging on skinny skis. With a little more snow the trail will be great. My wife returned on Fairview and I skied back on the road. She reported that the groomer was now working on the main trail back to LL and it wasn’t as nice as when we skied the other direction as he was working up the trail. We skied the Great Divide on Wednesday and the condition were good. Tuesday we skied Blueberry Hill and it was great. On the return we skied Fox Creek instead of the big hill, this was fine, but more snow would be welcome. Overall a good three days of skiing to open the season for us.