Lake Placid timing shed

Timing shed
Originally uploaded by kenmore_photos.

I took the day off and went down to Lake Placid to ski at the (former) Olympic facility. They have an excellent trail network that is maintained at world-class levels. I like to make the trip at least once a year just to change it up and ski some new trails. Last year I waited too long and the snow disappeared before I got around to it... so it had been too long.

The day was absolutely gorgeous but what strange (beautiful) weather I had. I arrived at 9:30 (first car in the lot) and it was 5F. By noon it was 25F and when I left it was 35F (sorry for the units... L.P. is in the States...). It was sunny and cloudless all day so the temperature soared with no apparent front moving through - strange (but beautiful!). The snow was super cold and dry, packed powder when I started in the morning and starting to get slushy by the end of the day. I had 2 pairs of skis (both waxed with blue glide – real smart :-o ) so I had about an hour midday when the skis were rocketships - before that they were slow and by the end they were really slow.

But today wasn't about fast skiing; it was about having fun on the windy trails that zoom up and down. I did a lap of the main loppet trail in the morning (~25k) and then after lunch I poked around on some of the smaller ones and took a few pics. This photo is of a timing shed on the course - a remnant of the 1980 Olympics. This one is at the base of the Porter mountain trail climb. I guess they took split times of the Olympians at the bottom and top of this massive climb to see who could climb the fastest. They could have timed me with a calendar today ;-) but it was still good fun! I’ll post a few more pics over the next few days. As I got back to Ottawa the rain started…. Skiing could have an abrupt ending in the next few days.