Louise, she is a scornful one
I got to go out skiing on Saturday. One of the nice things about living in Calgary is that one is never more than a couple of hours drive away from the mountains, which in turn makes for convenient skiing. Contrast this to Edmonton, where skiing needs to become a long-weekend-long multi-day extravaganza, or to most of the rest of Canada where it exists, but is to Rocky Mountain skiing as wood panelling in cheap 70s motel is to a log cabin. (The "mountains" east of the Rockies would be laughed at by the children of British Columbians and Albertans as being unsuitable for their Krazy Karpets. This is not to say there is no downhill winter activity out there, but it is inferior.)

Any skiier will tell you that a bad day skiing is still better than a good day at the office, but the conditions at Lake Louise this weekend, however, were attempting to stretch the truth of that phrase near the to the breaking point. Allow me to explain snice to you. Snice is a word that I may have just made up now, and refers to ice that masquerades as snow. You see, snow is created when vaporous water high in the stratosphere spontaneously condenses and freezes into a pristine crystalline structure, unique in appearance. When enough snowflakes get together, you have snow, and it is a happy thing. Snow packs together nicely, but can also be gently deposited in a large blanket, ensuring the employment of the plow-people, and the enjoyment of skiiers and boarders everywhere. Snice, in contrast, is what you get when your bacardi sneezes before you can add the fruit syrup and the booze. It is more like finely shattered windshield than snow, and does not pack like snow. If fact, when you first see it, it is immediately apparant that it is but a cheap facsimile of snow, inferior in nearly every respect. When it begins to melt, snow simply becomes denser, and when re-frozen, becomes as a crustier, crunchier version of itself. Snice does not; when it thaws and re-freezes, it turns to ice, and if you wish to traverse ice there are far better ways of doing so. (Determining said ways is left as an exercise for the reader. No points for skating - that one's obvious.)

So snice bad, and as a result of basically consisting of nothing but snice, Louise is not so good, and were it not for two things, I might almost be dissatisfied with my Saturday. One, go back to the paragraph before this one and re-read the first part of the first sentence. Two, nestled in the forbidden reaches of Louise's backside, off the beaten path of the Larch chair, there is a run called Rock Garden. It is more or less the result of some moron seeing a large number of boulders and saying to himself, "this would make for a sick run!" Fortunately, most people disagree and do not choose to leave the resort grounds to do this run, and that is why there was honest-to-God snow there. If there were a trophy for Best Snow In Whole Bloody Resort, Rock Garden would be the unchallenged recipient. The only disclaimer to all of the above is that long skis are not advised. Navigating through a field of boulders is tricky when you have 2-meter long planks bound to your boots, and as a corollary to that, the best way to get said planks off your boots is not to try and roll forward as though doing a somersault. Doing that involves potential pain, and the less said of it, the better.  ¶ 1:03 p.m.