Walking In A Winter Wonderland

Normally, Lake Louise, Alberta is one of the best places in the world for ski racing at the professional level. The weather is amazingly consistent (either very cold or unbelievably motherfucking cold), and so when it snows, the snow comes down as pixie dust and doesn't accumulate much.

Counterintuitively, fresh snow is bad for ski racing. Race courses are injected with water to make them almost as hard as ice, so any snow that falls after the course is injected must be removed from the course, either manually or by snow blowers.

Yesterday we got in a really smooth training run with 95 competitors. Very high number for a World Cup "speed" event.

It snowed all last night, and oddly, the temp is barely below freezing, so big flakes fell from the sky, and the accumulated snow on the course was knee-deep in places this morning. The race jury called it a day by 8AM, so we had nothing to do except clean up a few details in The Batcave and then go powder skiing.

Bonus.

The powder skiing wasn't that great, as there's very little snow under the fresh powder, so I gouged up my "work skis" pretty good on the rocks. But that's what work skis are for.

It's supposed to snow all day and then really snow hard tonight, so tomorrow might be another powder day.

Very unusual for Lake Louise. In all the years I've been doing races here (since 1994) I can only remember one other day off due to too much snow.