Beautiful Day

A beautiful day to skijor the trails in & around French Gulch this morning.

Sun, Snow & Siberians - what more could you ask for to make a beautiful day!

Today's video highlight shows some of the complexity of "backcountry skijoring" (as opposed to groomed or nordic center skijoring). When in the backcountry, the trails are rarely wide as today found us on trails one snowmobile wide with very fast conditions. The complexity of a narrow & fast packed trail is "how to operate under control?"... If you put both skis in the track then it is not wide enough for you to use the skis to keep under control. You have to proceed with one ski "in track" (the speed ski) and one ski "out of track" (the control ski) and the faster your partners go, the more complex this becomes - the video gives a good example of this as we progress along at varying speeds working the human's ability to operate under control with in & out of track skis.

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

One of the highlights of the day was finding the top crust of snow strong enough to hold Max & Zorro's weight. This allowed us to ski across a couple of untracked meadows throughout French Gulch to add some additional fun to our outing!

Yeah - the crust is strong enough to hold our weight. Through the meadows we go - wheeee!

Temperatures were in the upper 20s all day, so you know what that means:

"Rolling snow angels to cool off at our midpoint!" performs Max.
"Chomping snowcones to cool off instead!" demonstrates Zorro.

All in, a great day touring around French Gulch:

"We approve - what a fun day!" say my happy pair!

A peaceful run in French Gulch covering 9.2 miles with 850 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 18 MPH.

2013/2014 Season to Date: 132 days on the trails covering 1141.4 miles with 131,900 feet of elevation climbed.