alavigne
New member
For this weekend, I had a bright idea - A traverse over Gothics and Armstrong, starting at the Garden, going up the Orebed Brook Trail, and ending at the St Huberts parking area. Good in theory, because there's not a lot of wasted elevation gain and loss involved. However, the trail conditions are always a factor! And with last week's huge dump of snow, we were definitely challenged.
Everything was cool and peachy up to the col between Gothics and Saddleback, but after that, it was full-on trailbreaking through very tough, deep, unconsolidated snow. The weather open up for us on the top of Gothics, though, and we had super-spectacular views. Even though the little bit of trail over to Armstrong has little elevation gain, it was still a tough slog given the conditions. Coming down the connector trail into the Ausable valley was also quite hard. Even breaking trail downhill was tough.
We managed it all, though, and now there's a good trail broken up over Gothics, over to Armstrong, and down the connector trail between them into the Ausable valley and the Lake Road.
A more detailed writeup with lots of pictures can be found here.
If you want to see a detailed track of what's been broken, please refer to page 4 of my writeup/image gallery (where you can find an interactive trackmap with the track outlined).
Everything was cool and peachy up to the col between Gothics and Saddleback, but after that, it was full-on trailbreaking through very tough, deep, unconsolidated snow. The weather open up for us on the top of Gothics, though, and we had super-spectacular views. Even though the little bit of trail over to Armstrong has little elevation gain, it was still a tough slog given the conditions. Coming down the connector trail into the Ausable valley was also quite hard. Even breaking trail downhill was tough.
We managed it all, though, and now there's a good trail broken up over Gothics, over to Armstrong, and down the connector trail between them into the Ausable valley and the Lake Road.
A more detailed writeup with lots of pictures can be found here.
If you want to see a detailed track of what's been broken, please refer to page 4 of my writeup/image gallery (where you can find an interactive trackmap with the track outlined).
