AMC ski trip to the top of Cardigan

March 28, 2009

Emilie Phillips

There was a bit of confusion leading to today’s trip. The location changed a few times. The primary leader had to cancel. And the weather, at times was looking not great. Depending on where the trip was going to go, we potentially needed to crash tonight at Tony’s because we are going back north tomorrow.

It ended up that we went to Mt Cardigan. The weather did fine. In the morning it was foggy, but by the afternoon it cleared up to blues skies and blazingly warm. Nice spring skiing conditions.

We skied tha Alexandria trail. It is a little harder than the other trails I have skied there. Tyson and I had helped with trail maintenance on it last fall, so we were both curious to ski it.

I hadn’t quite predicted how hot it was going to be, so I spent the whole time going up stripping layers off. I think I managed to put enough sun screen on that I don’t feel burnt yet. We actually made it almost to the top of the mountain before running out of snow. Tony had an idea that if he just wandered around the rocks a little bit more, he might find another snow field that went farther up. I decided that skiing down rock cliffs didn’t look like my thing, so I rejoined the rest of the group.

Coming back down, I did ok on the first windy bit, but then once we were on the main trail I didn’t do so well. I had Tyson watch me for a bit, and it turned out that I wasn’t getting down far enough. Unfortunately that was most of the way to the bottom of the Alexandria ski trail. Since it was only 1pm, a bunch of us dropped our packs and went back up to the top of the ski trail. The others enjoyed the sun back at the lodge porch.

The second run down was both the second run of the day, which I always seem to do better at, and we didn’t have packs, so my balance wasn’t off. I won’t say I did great, but I was able to consistently link turns together and not fall. And I got a bunch of photos.

We met up with the others at the AMC lodge. It wasn’t terribly late, and the weather was so nice that we all just stood around chatting. Eventually a few people decided to go home, and the rest of us adjourned to a local pizza joint.