Even while hiking on the PCT, I dreamed about skiing, a lot of skiing with the upcoming Canadian winter. I especially wanted to get into backcountry skiing, to experience the freedom of exploring the wilderness.

The problem is I have no idea where to even start. I have none the equipment and zero knowledge on where to even begin searching for good equipment.
Luckily, I met a friend of a friend when we all went climbing (oh yea, first time back to climbing was pretty bad) and he does a lot of touring and was more than happy to show me the ropes. (climbing joke but not unfortunately we are talking about skiing.)

So after some splurging, I finally got everything I needed and it’s now time to get thrown into the world of Ski touring.
Luckily, I live in the Canadian Rockies and our beautiful mountains welcomed me back with insane, unexpected amount of snow. So Oct. 6th, we went out on our first ski touring trip.
So on that Saturday morning, Aaron picked me up and I was introduced to his friend, Steph. Then after some delicious and nutritious Mcdonald’s breakfast (I ate a bagel sandwich with a hash brown stuck right in with the eggs and sausage… healthy) and then we were off on the open highway. We spent the drive mainly talking about our favorite ski documentaries, adventures planned for the future and Steph’s rap career. She actually has a recorded rap song about skiing which we listened to! It was super legit, yo.
Our goal today was to drive to a nearby ski resort, Nakiska. Ski up one of the runs and then ski down since it was way too early for the resort to properly open so the whole mountain was our playground.
Since it was my first time, Aaron showed me how to do everything, like how to put on the one side sticky one side carpet like “skin” on the bottom of the skies so that the skies will only slide one way. This is used to help us get up the hill on our skis. Then I struggled quite a bit with putting my boots on to the bindings and then we were off. It wasn’t too long until I started getting the hang out walking up on skis. The trick is to keep your skis on the snow surface and not lift them everytime you take a step. This way, it is way less tiring.
The day’s weather is amazing! Beautiful bluebird sky and warm, so warm that it was too hot being in my thermal weight baselayer. I guess you don’t expect that from a skiing day!

We were just going along and then Aaron declared it was puzzle time and then pulled out a puzzle book out of his backpack and started reading puzzles to us while skiing. From the picture, it looks like he is consulting with map but nope… it’s a puzzle book.

“If you have a drawer full of 20 red socks and 20 blue socks, what’s the minimum number of socks you have to pull out of the drawers one at a time to guarantee that you get two of the same color.” Leave your answers in the comments! 😀
When we got to some of the steeper stuff, I was introduced to a new aspect of ski touring called kick turn, which is how you turn around when zigzagging up a steeper slope. That involved some balerina move where you have to turn one ski to face the turn and do some tricky balancing while trying to kick your other ski clear of the ground to turn that ski around. Let’s just say I am thankful that no one got a video of me trying to do it.
We eventually made our way up the slope, ate some lunch with a great view and then prepared to head down.

This is when it became scary all of a sudden. It has been so long since I stepped into skis and everything about it felt so foreign. It took me so long to work up the courage to even make one turn. There was also quite a bit of falling down and then trying to reattach my skis to my boots. While I was struggling, Steph and Aaron skied down the hill as easy as walking. Once we got past the steep part and I got a bit more comfortable on skies, the fun began. I did manage to get some good stretch of skiing in the not as steep sections, made some nice turns and picked up some speed and adrenaline which reminded me how fun skiing is. I miss this so much! All it takes now is lots and lots of practice.

After more struggling closer to the bottom, I made it down without hurting myself, miraculously. An end to an wonderful day out in the mountains. We packed up and started driving out when Aaron said “What’s that gate doing there?” I look up and saw the gate in front of us, blocking the only exit out of the empty resort. Uh oh.

We are trapped.

We checked the lock and indeed it was locked tight. Time to think about options. A quick walk around the resort with some shouting concluded that there’s no one here at all. Not even the maintainance cabin.

We started joking about staying for the night at this point and how to sleep three people in one tiny car.

Thankfully it was a Saturday so I ended up calling the Nakiska office in Calgary and after much awkward questions like: “what are you doing there again?” “We you with someone from Nakiska?” which made me seriously doubt our permission to be here. Thankfully the lady on the phone called someone and they are on route to come and open it.

Yay we are saved. So we go back by the gate to wait. After 20 minutes, a truck shows up with two maintenance guys. One guy is laughing his head off and the other looks like we just took him away from his wife’s child birth.

After much thank you and apologies and receiving some comments about reading the sign next time (“resort gates could be closed without schedule or warning” we totally missed it), we finally made it out of the resort.

The whole day was a crazy fun adventure. Couldn’t imagine that I would be skiing fresh powder in October. The next few weeks the temperature went up again and we are back to the stupid shoulder season waiting for more snow to fall and dreaming about a winter season full of beautiful places and ripping down powder.