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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Astronaut material? NOT! lessons learned

One, I need a checklist.  We were camping the first night travelling north and I realized, I forgot my jacket. The worst part of the night was remembering what I forgot, the best part was seeing the space station cruise across the sky with the |Soyuz re-supply following it.  Mark thought they might have been 200 km apart. Amazing to know there are astronauts living up there crusing at 370 km above travelling almost 7.5 km per second.  Going to the Columbia Icefield is as close as I'm going to get to being in space, but I blew the launch. But as Chris Hadfield writes - always best to think of worst case scenerio so to be prepared because adaptability is the prize.

The glacier has changed, there isn't a snow field anymore up the icefall, now it's ice bridges to navigate it looks like.
But we'll have to save that investigation for a later time. 
It's good for me to be adaptable.  We decided to go up to the toe of the glacier since we were there. I thought it would be really stupid to go up any further without appropriate clothing.  What could I have been thinking?  Really?  Spring skiing? So, we provided a photo opportunity for the snow-coach tourists as we cruised back down to the parking lot. It was very fast skiing down because of boilerplate conditions and the wind blowing behind our backs.

So, we made a decision to go to Lake O'Hara because neither of us had been there and we figured that it would be a bit more mellow.  There was hardly anyone there, either cause the weather wasn't so good, or maybe it's time for golfing.  Driving, we did see a lot of bicycles on cars - way more than skis.  So it was fun to be by ourselves, out of the wind, in peaceful solitude, listening to the spring sounds.

Wiwaxy was a companion at the campground
We ended up touring higher and wowed ourselves with the beautiful mountains surrounding us. Mark saw a wolverine track while I was holed up with yet another shitty blister.
Beautiful big mountains.

We built a snow cave where we slept for a couple nights - it was warm and cosy.

And winter was still happening as we skied out.  

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