My Trail - Winter
:date: 2025-12-08 15:45 :tags:
Winter is here! We have had a very strong start to winter. In mid-November we got some light snow and I was able to get out and test ski my trail. Several of those days, the snow was so thin I could only ski it once. But it did allow me to spot a few problems and make some edits like taking out a few trees that were worse than I thought, etc.
At the end of November however, we got hit with the full winter experience! There were blizzards day after day dumping several feet of snow. Unusually for this time of year, this wasn't just lake effect snow where some wet snow barely makes the temperature cutoff to be snow. We also got some rather cold temperatures too. I'm not sure we've seen temperatures above freezing for two weeks now. And much of that has be extraordinarily cold — the kind of cold that one might expect briefly in February.
A couple of months ago I posted a video of my XC ski trail in the autumn. I said then that I suspected that riding a bike was probably not the quickest way to take a tour. Back then I managed to bike the km in 6:23 at 9.4kph. Naturally I've been out skiing on the trail every day and yesterday I managed to do the full loop in 6:00. It's taken some time to get the snow packed down enough to do that. I'm sure it's possible to go much faster, but today I thought I'd try getting something demonstrating roughly what this looks like on video. And I did!
The skis I'm using here are ones I picked up at a ski swap sale for about $50. They apparently belonged to "Nora" according to the Sharpie note on them. But these are a slightly older model of Rossi Evos and I've found those skis (the older Ukrainian ones) to be incredibly tough and versatile for the challenging wild terrain skiing I do. I have been too lazy to wax my normal collection of skis (soon, soon) and Nora's old skis have really impressed me.
I'm wearing my chainsaw gloves because after this was shot, I went out with the sled and hauled a bunch of wood in from the forest. That's how I've been compacting the trail. So before anyone tells me how fast they're skiing, make sure you've done all the grooming with your own muscle power first. Compared to ordinary XC skiing, doing it while pulling a weighted sled through deep snow is obviously a much harder sport!
But I am very much enjoying it! It's extremely nice to have a trail that's close to my house and that isn't getting wrecked every day by snowmobiles. Every day I go out, the snow gets better. Very fun!
And I love how in this photo I look like a snow Ewok!
