So, after some intense tying up of loose ends in Tbay, (and meeting Steven Lewis in the airport!) I boarded a plane for the day-long journey to the wintery-landscape that is home in Yellowknife, NWT. As Dallas Green’s “I’m Coming Home” floated through my mind, I got the first glimpses of the sodium-orange lights that flood Yellowknife at the G-rated hour of 11:20 pm. Finally I have arrived home to Yellowknife’s greatest season of the year: spring.
After a few nights of chillin’ wit homeboys and such with Das Boot (from Beerfest…) it was time to start shifting the focus back to the approaching New Year. For skiers, Dec 31st/Jan 1st and the festivities that ensue have little to no meaning. It is the week before Trials and therefore often means a bed-time of approximately 10 pm. The real New Years resolutions etc. occur towards the end of April and the start of May. My New Years this year occurred April 28th. It was a Monday that would carry me nicely into May. So far this week I have already trained upwards of 12 hours. And there are still 3 days left in the week!!! What the heck am I doing!? Isn’t this a time to ease back into normal training?? Heeeeell no! In Yellowknife the end of April signals the start of some of the most incredible skiing in the entire World. My hands are shaking even trying to write the prelude of a description that can’t possibly do the skiing justice…
It starts sometime last week. The trails are still in skiable shape, so I bomb around them for a few hours. A few days later, I venture down the Ravine onto Back-Bay on Great Slave Lake. The snow is glazed, bumpy and next to un-skiable. The lake is not ready yet…
I give it a few days. Eventually C-dawg (coach Corey McLachlan) calls me up. We plan to do a bit of a lake ski. Myself, Alex Hopkins (Juvie from YK), Véro (coach and middle school teacher) and C-dawg embark on a testing of the waters of sorts. We bomb down a “piste de motoneige” at Negus Point and rip onto the blazing hot white surface that is Great Slave Lake in springtime. It’s noon, and there is still this hard snow covering the ice. So the first hour is a little tedious, but the weather is nice and there’s not a cloud in the sky. We make it to the islands past Dettah (small community across the ice from Yellowknife) and hit up some pretty good crust skiing on the endless archipelago.
At one point, as I’m skiing a bush-whack slalom course down a little hill, I spot a snowmobile at the edge of a little glade. I figured that since we had seen the signs of a camp on the far end of the island, that buddy had just stored his ski-doo here for a few days. Upon further inspection, I concluded that the snowmobile had been here for a few months and had in fact been hot-wired. Man, those things are so easy to hot-wire! Just rip off the kill switch, pull out the two wires, jam the key-hole into the “on” position, pull the cord and you’re ready to shred some pow! So me and A-Hop approach with caution, and lo and behold! First pull, the machine roars into life! This machine was no pocket rocket. It was a pimped out, after-market decked out, all black 2006 Arctic Cat F6 600! There were many things running through my mind. What do we do with it? Go for a joy ride? Pin the throttle and send it across the lake? Sell it off and get rich? With so many ideas of questionable legality, me and A-Hop have been “sleeping on it” all week and likely will just leave it for buddy who owns the camp…
On the way back from this ski, the snow softens up and skiing gets good. I hulk out and my shirt disintegrates off my winter-pale skin. Time for a tan sesh! We get back to the cars and I head to my place for a “coming home dinner” of vast amounts of Thanksgiving-like food. Score: sick leftovers all week! Over dinner I am told time and again how nice my face-tan is. The half red, half white ying yang symbol that is my forehead is apparently in fashion this time of year…
OK. Now. The snow is giving way to intense over-flow all over the lake. This means the lake isn’t ready yet, but because there was no snow on the ice road, things are looking up for this skiing niche. The other day Corey, Holly (ski coach too..), Moses (Godson’s (Cdn Idol theme song) bro and skiing die hard. Started skiing in his early 20s and is now as dedicated as Kris Freeman…) and I slaughtered a 40 km out and back ski on the Dry Bones Bay ice-road. The surface consistency was well beyond description. Mini ice crystals that allowed for z1 speeds in excess of 20 km/h and that allowed for good “edging” and leg pushes. 30 m wide road, perfectly level, inferno sunny, quietly and efficiently “flying”. This is happiness. In its purest form.
I decided it was a time to test my luck at the land-speed record. Perhaps breaking 1,228 km/h was a little too ambitious, but I got to test my over-speed abilities anyways on a perfectly level surface. Wind was present, but minimal. With my trusty Garmin Forerunner 305, I applied the gas and Emil Joenssoned my way along a few hundred meters. Once the Garmin caught up, I clocked in at 37.8 km/h. This remains the speed record to this day and I haven’t come close to breaking it in the past few skis…
Last night myself, Corey and Véro hit up the Dry Bones road yet again. We came across a Dene trapper who had a “trapper of the year” leather jacket, much like my own from a few years back… He was dangerously close to the island where the F6 was hidden, so I was a bit worried that the secret had leaked… Soon after passing this dude, we came upon a shaken-up Buckley’s Fisheries truck driver. “Man, not two minutes back there I fell through the ice!” weren’t the exact words we were hoping to hear, but my intuition cut-down this tale in seconds. Sure, me and JT had seen some open holes up towards North-Arm way the other day, but there are crazy currents and such up there. There’s no way Mr. truck driver fell through. Also, how the heck did he get out of the water if he did fall through??? Soon after we parted ways, we came upon where he “fell through”. There were a few sunken tire tracks where he had broken through a layer of ice that sat upon the overflow on the road. Rookie… We also found a Bud tallboy there that me and Corey shared on our journey home… We also found a mini-Vodka bottle and an empty mickey… Maybe Trucker was shaking for another reason???
Tomorrow is the epic ski of the year. I thought the Sibley ski was epic, tomorrow will put that ski to shame. The Dry Bones road will be navigated in its entirety. All 55-60 km of it. Out and back. That’s pretty much double my longest ski ever!! But I guess when you’re averaging about 17 km/h into the wind and 22 km/h with the wind, it shouldn’t be too long… Zahab and Karnazes would be proud…
More to come on that hopefully, and hopefully many more pics that will make up for the lack of description in this post!!!
O yeah, some of you may still be wondering about the double-barreled snot rockets. This is a technique that has been perfected and introduced to us by Véro. True New Brunswick style. It’s sort of like the two-footed lunge. Goes against reason and tradition yet holds true in certain circles of the world of physics…
Stay tuned.
We have just started another journey…together…forever… …NAWT!! No, but really…
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Me and Corey atop "The Isle of Drift".
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Among other things, Moses can walk on water.
The "Night Rider" in all its glory.
I guess i was the only one flexing... haha look at those ridiculous Sapmi pants!
Packin' er in at 9 pm. Good day. 37.8 km/h.
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