Mill Creek in Winter

Hi all,
January has brought the opportunity for some cross training as the fog and inversion season is upon us. I just can’t seem to get motivated to go out and ride in the fog and grunge. I have been able to enjoy a few trips to the gym for general weight training along with emphasis on leg press and machine squats. More enjoyably, I finally made time to go cross-country skiing up Mill Creek Canyon. You may recall a nice long ride up Mill Creek last fall. Monday brought cloudy but mild weather, perfect for a nice long ski. The lower part of Mill Creek is generally in the shade, so temps in the 30’s were quite welcome.

There was plenty of snow up the canyon, I would estimate around a 3 ft base over the road on the higher portions. I enjoyed about a 2.5mile climb, making it around a mile past Elbow Fork. Mill Creek is a long steady climb until passing Elbow Fork, and then it flattens out and is a very enjoyable trail. The only issue I encountered was slow skis! I found that my skis didn’t run well on the downhill leg, and I had to do quite a bit of poling to maintain speed. I don’t know if it was soft skis bottoming out, or the wrong glide wax. I think I will have to come ski again and do some more research!

Along with skiing up Mill Creek, I carried my new Garmin ETREX Legend GPS! Santa was very nice to me and left it under the tree. I have enjoyed using it so far, and have figured out how to upload tracks to Google Earth. I hope to take the GPS on all of my longer rides, and will share data and images with you. And maybe later this year Kathy and I will try some Geo-Caching too.

My Mill Creek Ski on Google Earth

That’s all the news for now, the weather forecast for the next week most assuredly indicates more indoor training!
Jim