The great thing about living in SW Calgary is the availability of local Nordic skiing when we get a good dump. The winter of 2008/9 waited until mid December to bite, then hit us with cold weather (left) and masses of snow. I live close to Fish Creek, and was able to get out a few times on my skinny skis. I'd like to say I'm improving my technique on these treacherous strips of plastic....but I still fall over a lot. No broken bones this year though.
One thing that was almost quite good (in retrospect!) was Christmas Eve, when I caught the bus to Fish Creek LRT station (funny looks) and then skied to my office, 16 km around the rivers. The going was actually really poor, despite all the snow - off-trail I was breaking through 2 feet of drifted snow and snagging on underlying vegetation. Cue falls and a lot of loud swearing.....but at that time of day the park was empty. On trail, I was lucky if the parks dept had left a cm of snow on the edge of the path to skim along. I'm not planning on repeating this journey - it took me 3 hours, with the last 3 km mainly done on foot due to over-zealous trail scraping (read: removal of gravel to 2 cm below previous path elevation) by contractors along the Bow River trails. And then to add insult to injury, Riverbend McDonalds wouldn't cook me a burger because it wasn't 11 AM yet. They had no idea how much the thought of that burger had fuelled my skiing....sometimes a granola bar just doesn't hit the spot.
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