Only at a Paralympic Event...

This photo was actually taken in Oberried, but I had borrowed Tyler's camera and I only just got the photo and I couldn't resist posting it. I think it is a good reflection of how so many people with disabilities have a great sense of self-confidence and humour - who else could leave their two artificial legs in the snow right beside the main path to the stadium in such colourful socks? Only at a Paralympic event would you see something like this! I thought it was hilarious!

Anyway, I have to comment on my post from yesterday - I got some flack from Andrea (in a nice way!) for saying that Canmore has prairie snow.What I meant by that is that the snow here is dry - a lot drier than what we get out on the west coast! Alberta is a prairie province so they can't have coastal snow conditions so I loosely used my own term of prairie snow, okay? Saying Canmore has coastal snow is sort of like seeing a sign on the side of the road in Calgary that says "Fresh Seafood for Sale!" Really? Remind me again how many kilometres away the closest ocean is? And for your prairie people reading this, I like the prairies! I just think that having a staging camp on dry snow when we likely will have wet coastal snow for the Paralympics just slightly defies logic.....especially when our Olympic counterparts chose a coastal ski area over Canmore. Hmmm....

The upside of being in Canmore is that Andrea is going to take me to some of her favourite local ski areas like Mount Shark and Peter Lougheed Park. I'm definitely looking forward to that!

So tomorrow we have a 10km skate race and it looks like it will be fun with fast conditions, which is good because we have some serious climbing on our course! A dump of snow would slow everyone down and make the course a lot harder than it was today. Most of the trails I have skied here in Canmore  either go up or down so there aren't really any flat sections to stretch out on, which is where my strength in double-poling works well. But this course has harder climbs than Callaghan so the good thing about doing this course is that Callaghan will look easy peasy!