20 BTers at the Viking Ski Club
As has been the pattern for much of this winter, the surprise snowstorm on Saturday night dumped much more snow in the city than up north. When we arrived at the private Viking Ski Club in Morin Heights, we could see from the amount of fresh snow in the parking lot that they had only received 1 cm. But no matter, there had been enough new snow over the last two weeks to cover all the trails.
It was about -2 C and mostly sunny as we assembled. Some people put on blue wax, but most others put on violet. We met in the main lounge of the Viking’s charming A-frame club house where we were greeted by our genial host, Derek Wills. As usual, he demonstrated “uncommonly good social skills” while he explained the trail options to us. (I will explain the quoted phrase below.) We then made our way across the road and down the hill to the main starting point on the lake. There we agreed that we would split up into three groups. Three people opted to stay on the wide and well-maintained racing trails (a 10-km loop) with Derek’s wife Hjordis. A group of nine intermediate skiers were led by Derek around the Red touring trails. The third group of eight skiers was led by me and Cheryl, in the absence of Dennis M who was waylaid by a foot injury.
My group set out to do the Crown South touring trails, the same route that some of us tried to do last year, but with limited success as we lost the trail halfway along. The trail had been track set the day before and was well-covered, although you could see from some plants sticking out of the snow that the cover was not very thick. But the skiing was lovely all the way along. The mild temperature and the lack of wind made even crossing the open lakes a pleasure. There were several long quiet stretches through the woods where everyone was just enjoying a perfect day of skiing.
Our group of eight set out with the rough objective of going 20 km or being out for 4 hours. Now, for a group like ours where we like to think we can keep up a good pace, 4 hours seemed like plenty of time to cover that kind of distance. But while these touring trails are groomed, there is still an air of back country skiing about them. We often had to stop to re-group, re-wax, re-fuel or re-read the map. Sometimes it was all of the above. Our navigation skills where challenged on several occasions, but on this day we managed to stay on course. Well, there were a couple of interesting short cuts, as featured in the Photo of the Week. In the end, we covered 19 km in 3 hr 45 min. Nobody could be talked into doing an extra km to reach the nice round number of 20 km. When we got back to the club house, we found that most of the skiers in the other groups had returned a good bit earlier and had already departed.
It was another great day of skiing at the Viking Ski Club! Our thanks go out to them and especially to Derek and Hjordis for graciously hosting us. Oh, and that reference above to Derek’s social skills was a quote from an article that coincidentally appeared in Monday’s edition of The Gazette. There is a fun, feel-good story about Derek’s son on page A6. Derek and Hjordis are mentioned towards the end of the article. You can can read it here:
http://digital.montrealgazette.com/epaper/showlink.aspx?bookmarkid=49FPF3X8BKD8&preview=article&linkid=180bf10c-b3f8-480e-9911-6675b9ad91c0&pdaffid=qolY5qNF4g9qR7vvx7mkAQ%3d%3d
You can check out the photos from our outing on the web site.