Partially groomed from P10 to the T junction. Rock skis to be safe but you may be able to get away with good skis. Thin coverage. Only parkways at high elevation are good today. Too many rocks on ridge still.
The weather office is calling for 50cm of snow in Chelsea this weekend.
Although Twitter has been ringing with celebrations of “lots of snow” in Gatineau Park the fact of the matter is there is “just enough snow” to get a real ski in. Here’s a photo of the north loop from P8 showing plenty of pavement. Not the most encouraging place to start, although the view south toward Penguin looked much better.
In contrast, below is the view up Fortune Lake hill from P10. That’s where I skated. There was snow all the way up with only a few places where the blacktop had been exposed though I could feel the pavement beneath my ski poles with every stride.
I’ve seen a number of tweets, trail reports and TriRudy submissions in the last few days talking about how the skiing is still good if you get high enough into Gatineau Park. The NCC trail conditions page even showed the Fortune Parkway as skiable as recently as yesterday (today they show zero percent of the trail network open).
So today I went to find out for myself.
There is still skiing. There were 10 cars in the parking lot (P10) when I arrived. The people I met were all wonderfully happy that there was still skiing.
They were also willing to put up with plenty of very large patches of asphalt and a number of places where the snow was so scarce that it was like a Scottish highland road; one lane with passing places.
Here’s what it looked like just above P10.
There were certainly areas like this, just above Keogan
and I was told by numerous people that once you get past the few hundred yards of snowless parkway at Huron, the conditions are great out toward the fire tower.
But frankly, the season is over. It only the keenest and most enthusiastic skiers who would be willing to take on the walking spaces to get to these dwindling ribbons of last winter’s fun.
Cyclist Craig Barlow was out for a ride yesterday and today posted two pictures of the trail at P7 Kingsmere, one a week ago, one yesterday. To see these “before &after” images you have to scroll down past his photo of some horse poop (why would he photograph that? why would he plan to send the poop to his friend?)
Gatineau Park Cross Country Ski Trail Reports is a companion site to GuideGatineau the site for people who love Gatineau Park.
Contribute Trail Reports
The GuideGatineau Ski Trail Report is open for you to add to.
You can even post on-the-trail reports from your iPhone or BlackBerry.
To do so email [email protected] to say you want to submit trail reports and we’ll set you up.
Please be patient, we might be out skiing ourselves.
XC Ottawa has also set up an excellent trail reporting web-app and plan to allow other skiers to contribute. Their app extends beyond Gatineau Park. XC Ottawa is probably the second most important trail reporting resource in the region; their reports are qualitative while the NCC's are more quantitative.
The NCC is the most important trail reporting resource if only because they have the "brand" to pull in web visits. The volume is serious for them, representing the second or third most frequently visited part of their website. They are in the midst of a web redesign process and are also planning to incorporate an interactive component so that skiers can contribute.
