I am constantly trying to improve. Usually, it is a concerted effort that focuses on one of my primary activities (skiing, climbing, photography). Sometimes it takes the form of technique work or practice days. Others, it involves testing out new gear (and I do this a lot ... the gear stores along the Calgary / Canmore / Banff corridor love me). I use the weekends to try out different things, then spend the week going over the data and my impressions of how they worked out. It's a lot of fun, but exhausting at times, and can even be frustrating when something I try ends up backfiring.
Every once in a while though, it's nice to just slap on my old classic track skis and push hard.
Carol and Simon wanted to start training for our Elk Lakes hut trip in March. They had initially suggested the trails at either Peter Lougheed Provincial Park or Mount Shark, but I'm pretty bored with the former and had been to the latter twice already this season, so I countered with Cascade Fire Road. None of us had actually skied all the way to the end of the trackset portion of the trail (to Stony Creek bridge) before, so it felt like something new and potentially exciting.
The trail starts at the Lake Minnewanka parking lot and winds its way to the backside of Cascade Mountain along its east face. It's possible to loop back along the west side and end up at Mount Norquay (at the ski resort), but our plan was to simply get to Stony Creek and back. None of us had done much classic this season, and at 29.6 km, it wasn't the shortest of days to begin with.
Roger, who had missed the Rockbound Lake trip a couple of weeks back with a broken wrist sustained from a biking accident, was also itching to get out, although I did him no favours by misrepresenting the trip (I thought it was around 16 km round trip).
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| Roger's broken wrist didn't seem to slow him down at all |
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The trail is quite popular with beginners as it is nicely groomed (for skate) and trackset (for classic) for the entire 14.8 kms, with the terrain being gentle and rolling with a couple of bigger hills. Most people stop at the Cascade River bridge (6.3 km in), where there is a campground with toilets and picnic tables
Beyond the Cascade River bridge, the trail narrows a bit but otherwise has the same character as the section before it. There are some nice looking slopes on the unnamed peak just north of Cascade Mountain, but on this day we could see that a slab had released recently.
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| Basking in the sun at the end of the groomed portion of the trail |
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When Roger and I got to the end of the groomed trail, we noticed that Carol and Simon were no longer behind us. Thinking that they would be joining us shortly, we settled in for a relaxed lunch. The scenery along the Palliser Range was nice, but the views were mostly obstructed by trees as we were at the bottom of the valley.
After a while, two other skiers came by and told us that they had seen them skiing back the other way. We figured they had had enough and needed to get back to town at a reasonable time, so we leisurely finished up our lunch and then decided to see if we could catch up. We pushed pretty hard, not taking any breaks on the way back. Unfortunately, we got back to the parking lot to see that they had already left. It was a good workout though, and reminded me of how fluid and smooth a day of classic could be.
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