My spring skiing adventure

After reading all the trip reports from Saturday, and considering I wanted to take Tessa with me, I decided to head for Lake Louise and the Pipestone trails.

I went prepared for all eventualities(or so I thought). One pair of skis with klister; my waxless skis, freshly glide-waxed with yellow; and a pair of “normal” waxable skis.

Pipestone trails

At the Pipestone trailhead the air temperature was +4. The snow looked to be on the wet side, so I decided on the klister skis. Right out of the gate, everything was working well. Good grip, reasonable glide and a beautiful day. We took the side trip down to mud lake for the first time ever. It’s only 400 metres off the main trail with an elevation drop of 20 metres. Worth seeing.

Continuing on the Drummond trail, it started snowing. Heavily. Fresh snow is no friend to klister. Within 20 minutes, there was 3 cm of fresh snow in the tracks.

The scene was very beautiful, and I had lots of time to admire it, because I came to a dead stop.

Impossible to go anywhere, and not about to walk, I first tried to cover the klister with some hard wax but it was icy and the wax would not stick to the klister. If you’ve worked with klister, you’ll know that it’s impossible to get it all off without base cleaner, but I scraped it off the best I could, and applied some VR50.

Another issue with klister is that it creeps down your skis and bits of it stick on the glide area. It was slow going for the rest of the way, but we eventually made it back.

Moraine Lake road

We were out for almost two hours, so Tessa had enough exercise(although she never wants to stop), and I decided to check conditions on Moraine Lake road. After not being here for some time, the first thing which struck me was how the trail marker sign was now at eye-level. You usually have to look way up to read it.

The snow was colder, and although I was using my waxless skis, I probably would have been okay with wax. The tracks were not wet, they weren’t icy, and they were firm and fast. There’s been about 7-8 cm of new snow since it was last trackset. Skaters were having a tough time.

My guess is they’ll be out tracksetting tomorrow, and with the colder temperatures on the way, it should be the destination of choice.