Lizard Skinner Skimo Race

Drive.  Sit in car waiting for avalanche closure to open.  Forget thermos left in middle of road.  Drive.  Tim Horton's.  Drive.  Arrive in Fernie, ask about conditions.  "It's been raining all day".  Should be interesting.

The warm weather and rain made for a -very- fast start up the cat track.  Some would call it a drag race.  Skin selection for this course was much debated - skinny for the kilometers of almost flat cat track, or wide for the abrubt transition to straight up a steep, extremely icy, run?  I elected to go skinny for the first lap and for the most part, it worked out really well for me.  The very final 20 meters of steep groomer had me struggling with purchase, but this was over with soon enough - although not before Kylee caught me.  

Luckily at around this point we found the freezing level from the previous day's rain, and the skiing was amazing.  It couldn't have worked out better - deep powder for the first steep descent, and then we hit the rain line and the groomers at the same time.  Two laps of this (including a mid-lap skin change to get rid of badly balling skins), back and forth with Kylee (second race in a row), and then the final skin over to the last decent.  This I grant was not quite perfect.  I think the organizers said something along the lines of "please don't die", but with the finish line in sight the ice-moguls-with-branches skiing was bearable.  Almost exactly repeated results from Castle with 9th overall / 6th Canadian.