About 5 years ago I looked around the Yukon and realized that all the people who seemed happy and healthy in the wintertime had one thing in common — they cross country skied. Now I had been guilty of the downhillers’ snobbery towards the cross-country folk, but when I found myself diving for volleyballs with people in their sixties who had skied a 25 km loppet that morning, I had to realign my thinking.
Downhillers have to find a full day to ski, or at the least, find half a day on a busy weekend, stand in line, then spend five times the time going up that it takes to go down, and then find a way to warm up after flying down the hill so fast. Downhill didn’t quite generate the efficiencies and calories needed in my life at the that time. (Besides I found I had an inability to slow down after a youth of downhill racing, dangerously denying my body’s increasing lack of bounce.)
Cross country in Whitehorse is practically adjacent to the city core, opening onto 60 km of wilderness skiing. The club was built for the World Junior Championships in the early 1980’s and the network of trails, then world class, have only gotten better since.
Some of the trails are lit for night skiing, but the magical part is — with perfectly set tracks, a forest of snow laden trees and a sky full of stars — who needs lights! Most of us will turn off our headlamp, and quietly wonder at the silence, the sparkles and smooth, nearly effortless glide needed to slide through illuminated darkness.
The Whitehorse Cross Country Ski Club was our first retail outlet, along with Waterstone Products in the Calcite industrial mall. They’ve both been with BoldRush from the start.
The protein bars are flying off the counter at the Ski Base in the lower level of the Mount MacIntyre Recreation Centre. Our local cross country skiers are gobbling up the Apricot Lightening Power Food bars, selling out at nearly twice the rate of Chocolate Determinator.
James and I will be keeping a close eye on the supply of our BoldRush drinks and bars at all of our local retailers and the concessions at the different Canada Winter Games venues. The Games start tomorrow.
Yesterday a woman in town for the Ministers of Sport meeting asked me what she could do in Whitehorse that would give her a feeling for the place. I told her to take an evening, rent some skies at the Ski Base and go out on the Whitehorse Ski Club trails.
That’s where she’ll find a sense of Yukon’s magic.
So true. Achingly true, in fact.
Nothing makes you love this place more than a 5 minute drive to Mt. Mac with a quick ski in the gorgeous snowy forest setting. We’ve had lots of those “this is why we live here!” moments this year.