The weatherman called for the rain to start overnight and basically rain all day but when I got up it wasn’t raining at all. I made periodic reviews of the satellite shots while I was watching the Australian Grand Prix and it looked like, if I hurried, I might get a ski in before the rain got underway. Loaded up the rock skis and raced up to the park deciding on P16 as a nice alternative to P10 (where I’ve started the last few days).

Under grey skies I skied up the first big hill (getting thin) and sure enough once into the trees the snow was excellent. Pine Road hasn’t been groomed in a while (some may say that's the best thing for it based on the comments of shoddy grooming along here I've read about) so the classic track was mostly melted away but this left a nice extra wide, smooth track for skating… Just excellent. I skied out to Lac Phillippe finding a few muddy spots that required portaging but with my rock skis on I just picked the softest, grassiest line and trotted across. They were never more than a few steps and I was off and skiing again in short order. After Healy/Herridge I noticed that Demsis had made their (presumably) last visit to the huts today on Quad bikes which had left some nasty ruts in the track but it wasn’t too bad. In fact the biggest headache was crossing sections of pine needles that littered the track in spots. It was certainly easy to understand how Pine road got its name. I haven’t yet figured the wax that glides well(or at all) over pine needles. Suffice to say purple wax isn’t the right choice. Fortunately the worst sections of needles were relatively short, few and far between so the skiing was for the most part fast and easy.

Once I got to the lake – as Mr. Murphy would have told me – the heavy rain started to fall which made my decision easy to turn for home. Passed a couple of other people out for a soggy ski as I worked my way along, getting back to the car somewhat drenched but never cold or uncomfortable so another good ski. It rained pretty hard the rest of the day so we’ll see what that does to the ski track in the days to come. The snow base along Pine road was still pretty good most of the way along so, like Ridge road, I expect it’ll last for a while… but no big snow dumps in the forecast that I can see.