It was a gorgeous bright sunny day with the mountains and forest cloaked in the fresh snow which fell over the weekend. We started out at an envigorating minus 28 deg C, but we slowly managed to warm up. We had parked at the Evan-Thomas parking lot planning to ski as far as we could on the Bill Milne trail, possibly to the Ribbon Creek parking and on to the village. Reports that the trail was flooded south of the bridge over the Kananaskis river below the village were accurate and we turned around about 800 metres to the south of the bridge

Mt. Kidd and flooded Kananaskis River

Our turn around point

We continued on past our starting point to do a loop to the south, around toward Wedge Pond, then across Evan Thomas creek and back to the car. The recently track set trail was in excellent condition and views were close to spectular. It is amazing how different the perspective is from a ski trail as opposed to a car!

View of the Fortress

There are a couple of service road crossings which can be done carefully on skis but one must cross highway #40 on foot. There is also a section of about 200 metres just north of Evan Thomas creek which must be walked.

John walking the short section between groomed trails

Shortly after resuming on the trackset trail we ran into some dreaded footprints in the tracks despite signage at the parking lot. Perhaps we smoothed them out a bit for subsequent skiers.

Another view of the Fortress

On reaching the car we had skied just under 15km and it was time for lunch. We drove up to Kananaskis Village where we enjoyed an indoor snack in front of a fire. We then skied a further 5.7 km around the village trails (Kovach, Aspen) which were in great shape. We were back in Calgary around 4pm.

We all enjoyed a different view of familiar territory and were happy to have avoided frostbite.

Participants: Philip, John, Inge