Winter’s last hoorah

We took advantage of Kai and our borrowed child Golo’s spring break for one final winter trip to Lake Louise — our new favourite spot in the world.

The kids took three days of lessons — ending the season with an afternoon of black diamond runs with their instructor. It became clear to us after a day of skiing with them that we could no longer keep up. We accidentally skied down a black diamond run with them (they had done it before so we figured it must be OK), only to have the kids ski through the moguls in seconds while Andreas and I hacked our way down the hill and prayed to the gods that we would survive this. No bones were broken, but Andreas’ telemark ski binding didn’t survive the run. Lesson learned: only green and blue runs for the old people. Nevertheless, we were happy to be on the mountain again. Andreas, in particular, was happy to find his telemark muscles returning.

Unfortunately, the cross-country ski season was over this time — the trails were icy and rough and we discovered this the hard way on an easy trail. Or I should say: I discovered this the hard way after hitting the ground a couple of times. Argh! We moved onto to snowshoes (we are triple threat winter adventure family). Andreas and I snowshoed into the pass behind Bow Lake, and together with the boys we snowshoed onto Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park where we ate lunch in the middle of the frozen lake. The last adventure of the season was a quick snowshoe trip up to the Peyto Lake lookout.

The last few days at Lake Louise were over 10 degrees–warm enough for us to eat dinner outside.

We returned to Edmonton to find that summer had arrived prematurely–it’s been above 20 degrees for the last two days. We have some months of serious work ahead of us and then a real summer adventure awaits us. We will be driving to Ontario in July to meet up with the cousins and other friends. Oh, and we’ve already booked our Lake Louise adventures for next winter!