Sunday's cobalt sky was about as crystal clear as it ever can be. Conditions in Muskoka at 10.00am when we departed for a 2 hour ski were mid-winter cold - around minus 6 with a good breeze from the north. We walked down the big hill, across the bridge and started along the creek towards Saw lake. This particular terrain on either side of the creek is flooded and swampy from April until December and it takes the full winter snowpack to build and form itself before entering the daily thaw/freeze cycle in March to make it accessible on skis. As the sun begins to expose the structure of the snowpack, we can see underneath it in places and the alder bushes are pushed right over in clumps with the snowpack sitting on top like a lid just barely containing the pent up branches. The clumps provide a beautiful, gently undulating surface to ski on. Always a highlight, and to get it on such a perfect day as this. Then a full loop of Saw Lake at record speed on the thin skiff of softer ice and snow on top of the 2 feet of solid ice. Changing to interior, shaded terrain, we negotiated the trail to Keyhole Lake and came back to the road on the Johnson Trail. A full sampling of very challenging trails under these conditions. Siobhan has a purple bruise on her hip from Saturday morning.

March offers some of the best and most challenging skiing of the season. The snowpack is very hard in the morning and softer later on, especially in the south facing areas. There's still 40 or 50 cm of snow in the shaded areas of the bush and, when it's cold like it was today, our ski trail is like little luge tracks and falling is like falling on concrete. It's fast and unforgiving. It seems like we know, and maybe we subconsciously hope, that the skiing season will soon give way to paddling and biking in our corner of Muskoka, but I really do love the cross country skiing that we can do from our cottage door.

4 weeks to go before we go to the US Southwest. We sketched out our tentative route on Friday night and it looks really good. We'll head from Phoenix to the Tucson area and visit Seguaro National Park and then we're going to spend some time in New Mexico. There's an off-grid, hippy town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico which caught our attention but we want to see White Sands National Park and Santa Fe so we have some decisions to make as we can't see everything in 8 days.

Hoping for big things to come, blog wise. I am going to get a new computer and probably a new video camera and I will be posting video and really taking this up a few notches. I may even separate the football from our outdoor pursuits. Stay Tuned.