How does the NCC report on ski trail conditions?

After a comment I got saying that ski trail reports weren’t updated unless there had been grooming, I asked the Gatineau Park how they managed their ski trail reporting. Even after several conversations I somehow still felt I didn’t completely understand it so it’s no wonder that the average Park user isn’t sure.

According to what I was told, in an ideal world this is how it would work. The grooming equipment is deployed at night and when the people who run the groomers are finished they submit a report in the form of a matrix, based on which trails they’ve groomed and how they feel the conditions were. The staff at the visitor centre uses this information to update the NCC website usually before 9am.

During the week there are four ski patrollers roaming the park, two in the southern section, two in the northern section. The patrollers are in contact with HQ off and on throughout their ski day and based on this communication the website is often updated twice more during the day, this time based on the patrollers’ skiing experience. Again a sort of matrix of trails, conditions and how recently the trail has been seen are delivered to the communications staff who use the info to update the website.

Weekends the numbers of patrollers are higher when volunteers join the effort.

So much for the ideal scenario. I asked why groomers are sometimes seen during the day if they are supposed to do their work at night. Certainly this is one of the main criticisms I’ve heard from those who understand grooming, that the snow needs time to set up before ski traffic, so grooming at night serves the purpose because there are few skiers out and the colder temperatures allow the trail to set before skiers arrive in the morning. These days there are many skiers into the evening so I assume “grooming at night” must mean late at night or very early in the morning.

It seems that the big machines haven’t even been out of the shed this season because the snow base is too shallow. Grooming done by snowmobiles is restricted to daylight hours to prevent a machine failure from stranding a worker in the woods when there are few staff around to save them.

This still left me confused because I felt sure I’d seen evidence of grooming by something bigger than a snowmobile midmorning on Tuesday. But I could tell the NCC staff weren’t lying to me, there must be more subtlety to this.

An NCC provided image showing snow & ice depth of less than 14cm at P8.

An NCC provided image showing track depth of 10cm.

I was provided with these photos showing that the snow depth is pretty scant and the groomer track bars cut pretty deep. The 15cm of packed snow the NCC wants is counted not from the pavement or ground up, but from the top of the ice that’s currently underlying the snow. I see that since my query the NCC trail conditions page has gotten more specific about required snow depth and whether that includes ice.

When the snow is deep enough (and heaven send it soon) I was told that the groomers were deployed opportunistically based on recent snowfall and anticipated weather over the coming hours. I guess it’s a judgement call as to when the best time to groom is.

The language used on the NCC website is undergoing refinement. On several days the website was reporting that some trails had been worked with machines. It turns out that the work done was chiefly compacting with snowmobiles. Tracksetting I’m told can be done with snowmobiles but isn’t too effective.

I was also pointed at a FAQ page on the NCC website that talks about grooming and trail condition reporting. There it says that grooming ideally occurs 3 or 4 times a week but that there are plenty of times when grooming can’t happen depending on conditions. Most recently the underlying ice layer beneath the snow caused a risk to the grooming machines on some of the steeper hills. As it was explained to me, on a trail like Ridge Road at a place like Booth Hill or Khyber Pass, if one of the big machines gets into trouble, you can’t back it up, you can’t turn it around, and if it gets damaged the repair bills are big.

So this post has wandered off topic from how conditions are reported to how grooming is done. And in both cases there seems still some mystery to the process for me. I’m sure that these topics will come in for some discussion at the roundtable.These are the points of greatest concern as expressed by survey respondents and also points for which NCC staff are feeling some heat. I hope that all sides can be in listening mode. A better understanding of each other’s perspective might be the only way to improve this point of friction.

Or And we could get a big dump of snow.