A springlike Gloppet weekend

This past weekend was a beautiful one for some spring skiing. Cold nights and warm days… and it all seems to have arrived far too early for mid February. Got out Friday night for a long ski and felt really awful through most of it. By Saturday morning it was pretty clear I had a virus attacking my system and it was looking grim if I would enjoy any of the nice weather. Not sure what I did right but I attacked the virus whole heartedly with lots of liquids and a little couch surfing and by Saturday evening my white blood cells had staged an excellent defense and the virus was packing its bags (Yaaa white blood cells!). Felt good enough that by Saturday night I got out with Bryan and his family to snowshoe to Herridge lodge for a little dinner by candlelight. When I say snowshoe, I really mean a hike as the trail was a solid block ice (with some chewed up snow on the surface for traction) and the snowshoes stayed in the car. Clearly we weren’t the only ones with the same idea and it turned into a bit of a freak show. At Herridge a local ski club was having a family outing and that meant a dozen little kids running around screaming and yelling in and out of the cabin all night. Not exactly the peaceful atmosphere we were after. Add to that a group hiking out of the nearby Healey shelter (that we had the pleasure of hiking out with...) had clearly had a few too many and the hike(stumble) out to P15 for them was a raucous one… but so it goes some nights.

Dinner at Herridge (courtesy BvT)
Sunday dawned crisp but with the promise of a warm day ahead. A beautiful day for the Loppet and I had to check my calendar twice to make sure I had the right day. Usually Loppet morning is bitterly cold but sure enough the crowds had amassed at the start line… and so did I with my pack of camera gear to follow the race through my carefully crafted plan of skiing(and a little driving) to catch the racers at 4 or 5 spots through the course. All went to plan for the most part (apart from one short cut that probably was a lot longer than I anticipated)and a good race was had. My last location up near Huron lodge is the high point of the course and I still haven’t figured out how to get from there to the finish line before the racers (perhaps a helicopter?) but fortunately the sprint finish is caught on camera and I managed to enjoy a couple of video clips of the final dash for the line. My photo set can be found here.

The mad scramble at the start

The lead quartet with 15k to go - ready to sort out the podium
Finally Monday I got out and did a bit of touring on the BC trails. I am woefully behind in my “redlining” project this year. I keep waiting for the perfect powder day to tour the classic steep and deep trails… but it never seems to arrive. On this day the ungroomed trails were in decent shape. Better than I expected to be honest and I’d forgotten how nice it can be to ski off the groomed runs. I stuck to the greens and blues though as the crusty surface probably requires more... ummm, talent than I have when you get to some of the steep chutes. It was a perfect blue sky day so that never hurts. Sadly there’s too much of this warm weather in the forecast. There’s a faint glimmer of hope that some snow storms will welcome us into March, but barring that it could be a very early spring indeed.

Warm bench sitting season seems to be here too soon...