It’s always sad when you get close to the end of a trip. Today we awoke to fabulous weather, and it looked like our last full day here would be a great one. Our plans for today… Skiing, of course!

Here we are outside waiting for the shuttle bus under beautiful skies.

After a short bus ride, we were at the ski resort and heading up the hill. Here is the familiar view from our first run.

We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon having a great time on the slopes, and are greatly looking forward to returning again next year.

Back at the hotel, while we still had some daylight, we went for a walk by the lake.

Here are a few images from out on the lake.

It would have been great to have had these clear skies for our dogsled, snowshoe and cross country ski days.

We were slowly making our way to the back of the lake, to see the views we had on our day of snowshoeing, but with clearer skies. Unfortunately, Nadine wasn’t watching her footing carefully enough, and stepped into a big puddle on the ice surface. After stepping in water over the top of her boots, we headed back toward the hotel, which basically ended our outdoor walk today! Fortunately, the hotel has a very large boot drying machine behind the ski valet, which we took advantage of.

Here are a couple final images from our walk back to the hotel.

After getting cleaned up (and dried off), we headed down to the Alpine Social for our final dinner of this trip.

After a day of cross country skiing yesterday, Nadine was feeling a bit tired, so opted to relax around Lake Louise. I, however, was eager to get back to the slopes.

I had a quick breakfast, and headed over to the hills. Instead of stopping to take photos, I pretty much just skied advanced runs all day long, so I don’t have much to report. Just a fun day on the slopes!

I haven’t been cross country skiing in many years, and Nadine had never been, so today we thought we’d hit the trails. It was still the long weekend, where the ski hill was likely to be busy, so getting out on the cross country trails would provide a bit of solitude.

We rented skis from the hotel for the day, and decided to stick to some easier trails. Since we had been up the lake on snow shoes the other day, we decided to follow trail #2 below, which heads out below the base of Fairview Mountain and toward the Moraine Lake Road.

Here we are heading down the trail.

And here is Nadine getting the hang of things.

We skied out to the end of the “easy” part of the trail, turned around before the steeper sections, and headed back to toward Lake Louise. On the return, as we were getting a bit more confidence, we detoured onto trail #4 for the final stretch home.

It was a great day of exercise and nature!

Back at the hotel, we enjoyed a nice relaxing meal in the Lakeview Lounge.