John the tracksetter sent this update a few minutes ago:
“Hi Bob;
We got a big snowfall at Emerald Lake, on top of groomed trails, all open except the Connector. I’ll head up to L.Louise this afternoon, see whats up and groom Emerald later. Great interview on CBC, Please save a hat for me, see ya.”
Sorry about not having an update yesterday. I had a “Calgary” day. Christmas parties and such.
I would expect they did some grooming in PLPP yesterday. It should show up on the Kananaskis Trail report later this morning. If you’re heading out there now, stop at the Visitor Centre for an update.
Hi Bob,
Just a follow up on the grooming and t-setting. You are right about the snow depth dictating whether a trail is track set or groomed. The average track depth runs from 2 1/4″ to 2 3/4″ depth. This time of year when the snow pack is shallow that extra depth can take you down into small rocks and dirt. So depending on the ground underneath we like to let the packed base build up from about 3″ to 6″ before we set a track.
Sorry to be a bit late with this…… we did the Fairview Loop at Lake Louise yesterday. It had just been trackset, still soft with quite a few twigs poking through, but we had a lovely ski 🙂
Driving home, it looked like the Redearth Creek area still had rather thin snow though we did not check out the actual trail.