Andrew Underwood

The Practice, Then the Race

Well a month has gone by since I was in the Birkie and I said that I would talk about it a bit more. First I’ll backtrack to three days before the race when I went out to the the race area for a 30 km practice ski. The starting location for the race isn’t a usual skiing area. It starts on a lake and then the trail goes into Elk Island National Park. The trail wasn’t groomed yet so I had to find where it started coming off the lake via guess and test. I found the trail head and almost immediately I hit the fence that encapsulates the park. It’s the 8 foot high page fence type to keep the elk in. The gate was closed and I was considering taking off my skis and climbing it.

Right then two park rangers came along the inside perimeter on double track skidoos. They stopped on the other side of the gate I was standing at and came to talk to me. I asked if this was the Birkie trail and they confirmed. Then I asked if I was allowed to come in, to which they replied “Sure, here, we’ll open the gate for you but you’ll have to climb the fence to get out.” That was fine with me so they let me through and stayed there to shovel away some snow around the gate. As I was leaving them one ranger shouted up to me “Oh yeah, you might encounter some Wood Bison on the trail!”

Sure enough, about 1 km up the trail there was a handful of Bison standing right on the trail. At this point the trail was straight and followed the fence. I had never had to deal with Bison before and wasn’t too sure about ‘Bison etiquette’ if you will. The only time I’ve seen Bison before was from the safety of a vehicle. I knew the rangers were going to keep going after they finished digging out the gate so I just waited for them to catch up. I didn’t want to climb the fence to get around them and I also didn’t want to go around them on the inside because the snow was deep and I didn’t want to put them in a position where they would be between the fence and myself. Two minutes later the rangers came up from behind and went straight towards the Bison, at which point they just moseyed off the trail. They only moved enough to get out of the way of the snowmobiles, however. The rangers kept going.

I continued with caution, skiing on the trail that went along side the fence to my left and the bison only a few meters to my right. Luckily the Bison took no notice of me and I continued on not encountering any more as I skied up to the 15 km mark. I had to climb the fence to get out of the park and onto the rest of the trail system. Thus on my way back I had to climb it again to get back in.
It was starting to get dark on my way back and the temperature was going down to -25 C. I was pretty cold and tired and just wanted to get back to my vehicle. When I was about 5 km away from completing my ski I came to a turn in the trail and there were more Bison in my way. Except this time there were no park rangers to clear the way for me. This time I had to climb the fence to go around them.

This was especially uncomfortable since I was already cold and didn’t want to slow down, let alone trudge through the deep snow. Still I’d rather do that than be charged and squished through the page fence coming out in cubes on the other side. I knew I was almost back so I took some time to take my camera out and take a couple pictures of them, even though the light was bad and the the bison were obscured by the fence and some trees.

After climbing the fence twice to get around them I had to climb the fence one more time to get out of the park. A total of 5 fence climbs!

So, now on to the actual race day. My Dad was also entering in the special wooden ski category so we both stayed at my uncle’s in Sherwood Park which was closer to the race than Edmonton. The race it’self was what I expected for the most part. I seeded myself to finish in 6 hours among the mass of other skiers. The mass start was quite exhilerating, here’s a couple of pics from that moment I managed to snap with my phone right before the cannon went off. Yes they used a cannon.

I finished in 5:50, which was about what I was aiming for.  There were food and drink stations every 7 km or so and perhaps I did spend a bit too much time at a couple of them than I should have.  It’s hard to resist spending some time a feed station when you’re being offered a cup of noodles by a cute and chatty volunteer.  Next year I’ll be more hardcore and perhaps race to be competitive.

At the finish line I seem to have gotten frostbite on one of my fingernails and it’s in the process of falling off right now :(.  Also my shoulder was killing my the next day but it was fine the following day.