If you are reading this, I hope you and your family have had a restful winter break, wherever you may be. Since my last post in mid November, temperatures around Calgary continued to be above average, with little snow on the ground. Work stayed busy for both of us, and we continued going on weekend adventures. Many thanks to Laura for her many great pictures in this edition of the blog. I’ve got an updated camera and new lens on the way for the new year, so I hope to be taking interesting pictures again soon. Lately we’ve been more focused on skiing as many kilometers as possible – over 500km already this season! If things continue as well as they have, I’m on track to have the best ski season since 2015. Alas, there isn’t a single competition in sight anywhere on the calendar to test my fitness, and Laura was looking forward to getting ready for her first ever xc ski race. But we can’t complain, the mountains have been good to us this early winter.
After a lovely hike in the Sandy McNabb area on Saturday, we returned on Sunday with bicycles to take advantage of the winter road closure. These mountain highway road closures are an absolute blessing. They provide a safe space for both families and serious cyclists to ride in amazing scenery without the noise and danger of motorized traffic.
This year we discovered that Alberta has a Personal Use Forest Products Permit (PUFPP, rolls off the tongue) program which allows residents to harvest Christmas trees in carefully designated and mapped zones. We took advantage to cut ourselves a very nice little Christmas tree for the holidays.
Over our holiday break we have cross country skied (both classic and skate) on 10 of 11 days. On Christmas day we went on a lovely snowshoe trip which was especially fantastic since 50cm of snow had fallen just few days before, and was still completely undisturbed in the area we ventured into.
Along with all the skiing and eating, we’ve fit in two short ice skating sessions.
Jan Thomas Rossiter 