Once again I apologize for my lack of frequent postings at GuideGatineau and point you to some of the other work I’m doing. This should be of particular interest to Ottawa residents because it relates to what your city council is doing (or not doing).
At this time some city councillors are trying to suppress information on how the city is missing it’s targets for greenhouse gas reduction, and worse want no part in planning how to do better in future.
If you live in Ottawa please tell the mayor and your city councillor to include two things in the next round of buget planning: (a) an over-arching climate change action plan; and (b) five short term initiatives identified by city staff as having the largest greenhouse gas emission reduction impacts.
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The CBC’s Giacomo Panico has a video of Dave McMahon and crew seeking snow in the dark in the park. It’s entitled Anxious Ottawa cross-country skiers
]]>Guess I’m just sensitive to that since my daughter had a head injury this summer (and she was wearing a helmet – it was quite smashed afterward)
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France Rivet and Shelley Ball were good enough to spend time with me discussing the photographs on display at the Gatineau Park Visitors’ Centre this summer. Click on the image at right to see the promo poster and listen to them talk about the exhibit in this four minute video.
]]>It looks like it happened mostly at Camp Fortune but what caught my attention was the caption saying that it was both shot and edited on an iPhone. It’s simple but it’s brief enough that it doesn’t get boring. Well done.
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What follows are a few videos that popped up in my search engine results. They have no particular theme or redeeming value, but they are about Gatineau Park.
It must take a certain something to have the courage to step off a cliff like that. I’d have dedicated the whole post to that video alone if it hadn’t been for two problems. It appears to have been posted with copyright protected music or something so YouTube has suppressed the audio, and at 12 minutes or whatever it’s just a little too long for most people to watch.
This is one of a series of short pieces all of which are marked “Maria Hawkins Road Trip Gatineau Park.” Unfortunately all of them include audio of running water or driving noise so you kind of wish YouTube had suppressed the audio.
Here we have audio and editing (whew).
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What sort of ads would you expect to find in old Ottawa Ski Club newsletters?
Of course there were ads for equipment; skis, boots,hats, socks.
Here’s one for “witch-elk” ski boots, whatever they are.
Ski fashions; clothes were often called “togs.”
But I was amused to see as the years crept on ads appearing for car frame straightening—presumably for all those bad roads getting to the Gatineaus
—and fabric repair for when you tear your ski togs. Then there was muscle liniment, and if that didn’t do the trick, chiropractors. Still don’t feel better? How about accident insurance? 
The best part of this is that the insurance ad includes a picture of the Big Dipper hill from the Merry-Go-Round trail. And if all of that doesn’t satisfy, you’ll have to hire a lawyer.
As a bonus in looking at these old ads, I came across one for these special ski bindings that are supposed to let you “vorlage with ease.” Since Vorlage is the name of the ski hill at Wakefield I turned to my Oxford English Dictionary to find that the word vorlage comes from German and means “to ski” but in particular, to ski leaning forward from the ankle, without lifting your heel.