Woke up to another cloudy morning but it felt almost warm, it was only -2C. Bodies felt tired though yet again – maybe skiing for 10 days in a row is taking its toll. First off though we had to find the trail system of The Revelstoke Nordic Club. Since we didn’t have internet last night Jeff wasn’t able to check. We assumed that it is somewhere located near the downhill ski area – like in many other places we had been to that offered both. There were lots of signs leading us to it. But when we got there people hardly even knew what cross-country skiing is never mind where the trails would be. We finally found the one person that knew and got directions. Of course it was on the other side of the river at the Mount MacPherson Recreation Area. It didn’t take us long though to get there – another nice cabin and a good trail system with mostly green and blue trails. Since it was just below 0C it was questionable if my grip tape would work but I wanted to try it anyhow. Jeff took his classics as well. It was nice to be able to dress up a bit less warm and to tie the shoes without pain :-). We hit the green trails first to warm up – well I had Jeff in sight for about 1 min. Like Golden, these trails were quite a bit more up and down. The grooming was good but unfortunately classic tracks were only set on one side even though these were bi-directional trails. So you always had to watch out for oncoming traffic on the downhills. So I went outside the tracks on most. Otherwise the trails were really nice. Nice long climbs and fast downhills – even the black portions that connected some of the blue runs weren’t too bad, now that I know how to snow plow :-). And the grip tape worked great the whole time. No real views though mostly because of the clouds – only got a couple glimpses of the valley from the top of the black trail since it went along the power lines. Saw some moose tracks on the trail – they looked quite big. Apparently Jeff had not seen them even though he was ahead of me. Could I have just missed the moose?! I did feel tired the whole way even though I managed another 21km in 2hr45min.
When I got back to the cabin Jeff was already waiting even though he had said we wanted to do another hour and a half more skiing when I met him on the trails an hour ago. But the hills were too much on skates on those tired legs. He probably did between 30-40km every day!! That’s a lot of time on skis. So we both were ready to give it a rest and instead of stopping over in Kamloops for one last ski we drive all the way home that day. It’s a long drive and it got dark before we hit Kamloops. We stopped for a nice New Year’s Eve dinner at our favourite Pub in Merritt. So far the roads had been great the whole way and even the Coquihalla was nearly snow free the whole way. So the remaining part of the drive went super quick while we were listening to an audio book Jeff’s dad gave us a while ago. We were home by 10pm and in bed by 11pm too tired to stay up till midnight. It will be New Year for a whole year :-). What a trip though!! It wasn’t cheap but I would do it again. There wasn’t a single place I wouldn’t want to revisit – maybe with the exception of the noisy motel in Golden. So many great places to ski in this province – almost 200kms of trails. And we didn’t even hit them all…. Now I need to start working on speed. Below a map of the whole trip (use this link https://k2incanada.wordpress.com/category/bc-ski-trip-2012/ if you want to read them in sequence):