Marmot Basin - sunny but cold and closed

The tempearture was -25ºF, as shown on
my car's display panel.

The Arctic cold blast persists. It got even colder.  Yesterday at Harper Mountain, it was -10ºF.  Today, at Marmot Basin (which is further up north), it was -25ºF (which is -31.6ºC).

It was actually a perfect bluebird day with plenty of sunshine and no wind.  But it was cold.  So, the Marmot Basin ski area decided to not open the lifts at all today.  This was actually the second day of closure.  The day before (Sunday), while I skied at Harper Mountain, Marmot Basin was experiencing even colder temperatures of -34ºC.  So, they closed the ski area due to "extreme" temperatures.

Marmot Basin posted on their website that if it warms up to better than -30ºC on Monday, they would then open the lifts.  But with the temperature today at -31.6 centigrade, the management decided the ski area should remain closed.  There were a bunch of skiers and snowboarders waiting in the cafeteria, but eventually, everyone went home.

Marmot Basin should perhaps be called "Black Diamond" mountain.  When you look at the trail map all you see is black diamond runs and many double blacks too.  In fact one whole hill on the left side of the map consists of nothing but double blacks.  And the area on the right side of the trail map is called "Tres Hombres" (Three Men), named after 3 guys who first skied there many years ago when that area was out of bounds.  Now it is all in-bounds, but all the runs in Tres Hombres are double black.

In between these two extremes are mostly black diamond trails, with just one or two green and blue trails, so you can get down easily if those black diamonds are too scary.

That hill on the left is all just double black runs.
The slope behind me is the easy blue/green runout at the bottom of all the black runs behind it.
And, see, I am not wearing a hat or a jacket, and I wans't terribly cold. The sunshine helped.

 What you see from the day lodge is just one of the green/blue trails at the bottom of all those blacks.

Basically, you have 3,000 vertical feet of challenging terrain served by 7 lifts:  2 express quads, 2 fixed quads, one triple and one double chairlift, and a magic carpet for beginners!  And skiing would have been free for me here with the Fusion Pass, as part of the Powder Alliance deal.

Oh, the only thing I would have had to pay was an admission fee to the National Park.  Both Marmot Basin and the nearby town of Jasper are within the National Park.  So, if you want to ski at Marmot Basin, you have to pay the National Park fee, which is something around $5 per day.  Also, if you stay the night in Jasper, you have to pay the additional fee of $5 per day.

Why couldn't they have opend just for an hour or two?!!!

But, you know how it is.  Misery loves company.  So, bad things rarely happen alone. Something else bad usually comes along too.  In this case, it was the closure of highway 93, known as the Icefields Parkway. 

The icefields parkway has lots of interesting attractions along the way, such as waterfalls and glaciers.  I was hoping to stop and see some of them along the way.   The drive to Banff would have been about 3 and a half hours.

But this road south to Banff and Calgary was closed because a recent avalanche had dumped a lot of snow onto the highway and crews were cleaning it up.  Nobody was sure if the highway would open later this evening or perhaps the next day.

But, I had to be somewhere around either Calgary, or Canmore, or Banff by tonight, because my next ski area is Nakiska, the closes ski area to Calgary.  I should ski there tomorrow.

The only other feasible alternative was to make a big semi-circle, driving east to Edmonton and then south to Calgary.  So, instead of a 3.5 hour drive, I now had to deal with a 7 or 8 hour drive. This literally doubled the driving time!

Well, I did it, and I shaved off at least 30 minutes (or possibly up to an hour) of drive time by not going all the way east to Edmonton.  Instead, I turned southward on Highway 22, which turned out to be relatively free of snow and ice, so I could drive fairly fast on it.

I am now staying in motel in Calgary.  Tomorrow, it's Nakiska.  Let's hope they will be open, despite the cold.  By the way, the cold is actually good for the snow, which stays nice and dry and powdery.