Activity

Birds Hill Park, Tuesday afternoon, -8° & sunny:
Classic: Previous reports from d baniuk and Gary Wickens accurately describe conditions.
Skate: The 5+ cm snowfall from the Louis Riel long weekend has been skied-in on the middle-inside of the road’s width. Adjacent to that, it’s usually semi-skied-in. The outside edge of the road is either loose snow (the south half of the loop), or packed from the park’s snowmobile (the north half of the loop). The two internal bays have a narrow user-packed width (from skijoring and kick sledding?) => not very good.
Bottom line: It’s a good track; I’m glad I skied it.

It’s interesting that I’ve now heard/read speculation from three skiers that the park’s Pisten Bully grooming machine is broken. Why else would only Chickadee and Bluestem have been groomed last week after a 5+ cm snowfall a few days earlier?
The Pisten Bully is now 11 years old. It was almost exactly this time last year that the catastrophic breakdown occurred and trail grooming ended for the season.