After a week moving offices and driving a PC today I get to play in the snow again. My snowboard just arrived in whistler but I can't get it yet so....
I started out with an hour on the snow shoes this morning then we all went out on the snowmobiles to try and get to a ski run on Cinnabar. Cliff, Ron, Jeff and Rose and I headed up Friburg trail rather gingerly as there was no tracks there yet, but the snow was firmer than last week's trip.
We went about 50m before we found the first deadfall blocking the trail and out came the chainsaw. Another 50m and the next tree across the trail... and so it went on until we got to the Pearson trail and we climbed up to clear even bigger trees off the trail.
Eventually we got to the part of the trail that I remmeber from mountain biking and Quad biking is pretty eroded and just wide enough for an ATV to squeeze past, the eroded part is a steep fall straight down a hillside through trees- so you really don't want to fall!
Cliff was ahead of me and he slowed up, looked at it then went for it keeping way to the right and leaning all his weight on that side of the sled, he almost got through but hit a branch and the sled started to tip over to the left, he tried to get off the right but he was tipped with the sled as it flipped over and he rolled over the track on his back and carried on down with the sled as it flipped again and he disappeared down the hillside. I jumped off my sled and ran to check he was not under his sled but he was way down the hill and his sled had dug in higher up thankfully!
He was a little bruised and I started to giggle at him, as you do when you see something awful but awful funny and you don't know whether to be concerned or laugh!
Then we started to try and dig out his sled and upright it to get it back on the trail. This all took at least 30mins of digging, pushing, driving and digging, pushing driving.
Of course then we could not turn around so we had to dig and build a snow bridge to get all of us across. Yow! Scary!
We made it though but not much further til the next big deadfall, we cut this but it was now 3:30pm- just 1 more hour of daylight so we kept on up until we found a bit to turn around on and stopped and had a beer taking in the views of the mountains.
We turned around and headed back down this time much faster and finishing the trail in the light of our headlights. We'd been out for over 3hrs and no skiing today but a lot of fun and hard work on this adventure. My face was glowing with the thrill of being outdoors in the cold cold snow again and the fun I'm having living up here in the middle of nowhere!
Tonight hot tubbing outside in the snow! And tomorrow... back up on the sleds to get to the ski run this time!