The Gatineau Park offers the best cross-country skiing in North America for skate or classic skiing.
When you throw on your classic skis, there is nothing like the kick and glide on soft, fresh snow on a lightly groomed secondary trail or a skier-set backcountry trail.
Infact, for many, the BEST trails are those trails that a machine has not touched and where you glide through the woods or swamps lost in another world in tracks perfectly set by the skier before you .. or better yet, finding yourself to be the first to break snow after a fresh dump.
Unfortunately it is becoming harder and harder to find this experience in the Park.
Every year, the NCC is pushing harder to put a snowmobile/groomer down every trail it can find on the miss-guided opinion that machines make better ski trails.
This has resulted in disaster on many of our favorite trails with ice-bridges on creeks destroyed, ruts and hardpack snow greeting you on the down hills and black challenging skier-set trails becoming blue intermediate groomed trails with cement tracks down the centre. To make things worse, we are now finding snowshoers on these trails creating holes the size of watermelons and in some cases compacted tunnel-tracks on the downs.
Let's share our thoughts on this problem, document what's going on in the park and demonstrate to the NCC that there are alot of skiers that want a change to the treatment of these trails.
The NCC has designated 16 trails in the Gatineau Park as backcountry trails and these will be the primary focus of this website.Trail #6 (black trail) will also be discussed as it use to be one of our favorite trails and is now heavily groomed.
To get a feel for where we are coming from on this, check out emails to NCC next, then comment and VOTE.
I hope to be able to generate some stats on the grooming frequency of these trails soon and then would like to come up with a number of specific policy changes we'd like the NCC to adopt.
Harold
