Beaver Tails Nordic Ski Club

In keeping with our tradition of making things easy for our members who partook of the Christmas Party the night before, we designated Mount Royal as the destination for the weekly outing.  There was no traffic and it took no time at all to get downtown.  At 9:45 am, 19 members assembled at the Beaver Lake Chalet.  It had to be noted that 8 of the 19 had not been at the party.  So that meant that only 11 of the 30 party participants made it out the next morning.  Hmm, maybe we did not make things easy enough!  More likely, many of them understandably had holiday preparations to address that morning.
In any case, it was a good turnout for a Sunday walk.  We presented the proposed route and off we went.  It was 0 C and overcast.  The first part of the route was a detour around the Beaver Lake construction site.  For those of you who have not been up on the mountain since last winter, it turns out that Beaver Lake is being replaced with condos.  Just kidding, not really.  But Beaver Lake does look like an open-pit mine as they are in the midst of completely rebuilding the lake over a two-year period.  They have fenced off Beaver Lake, as well as all the park land between it and Remembrance Road, so the start of the ski trails will have to be relocated this winter.  But the refrigerated skating rink will still be accessible and we noted that a first thin layer of ice had already been put down.  (See the photo of Jessica B testing it!)
We climbed up to Olmsted Road, and then walked along it, on the side of the mountain facing downtown.  The wide thoroughfare was buzzing with activity on this Sun morning.  It seemed like most other people on the road were either jogging, cycling or on roller skis.  The question was asked by some, if we are all members of a cross-country ski club, who come none of us were on roller skis?!  The answer arrived at was — because we are not a “hard-core” ski club (i.e., not pretending to be training for the Olympics)!
We continued along Olmsted Road, past the big stairs by 700 m to the entrance of a 2-km trail loop in the woods that goes up to Camillien-Houde.  This is the trail loop that some of our members who ski at Mount Royal on Wed evenings will add on to the regular route if they are feeling particularly energetic (or want to pretend to be training for the Olympics).  We hiked around the loop and then retraced our steps on Olmsted Road to the big stairs.  This is the landmark 256-step wooden staircase that the city rebuilt a few years ago for over a million dollars.  Many people use the stairs as a piece of training equipment, going up and down several times.  For most of us on this day, going up once was just fine, thank you very much.
This brought us up to the Grand Chalet where we paused to admire the view from the lookout / take a bathroom break / warm up inside.  We then set out on the road behind the chalet, taking the counter-clockwise direction up to and around the cross and then back down towards the Grand Chalet.  As we reached the westbound part of the trail, we were exposed for the first time to a chilly breeze.  At the Grand Chalet, we took a right turn along the upper part of Olmsted Road and headed down, past Smith House, and then back around the open-pit mine to return to Beaver Lake Chalet.  We covered 8.3 km in 1 hr 50 min.
We returned with slightly diminished numbers.  Two in the group opted to skip the big stairs.  Others went off ahead at a faster pace and finished early.  But we still had a quorum of 12 walkers who convened on the upper floor of the chalet for a coffee or hot chocolate.  A good morning of exercise, even if none of us were on roller skis!