Year 2009
The winter started early. Already in the middle of June we had a good snow fall in Lake Mountain. How convenient it was to use Melbourne Nordic car pooling system and be driven to the mountain by Martin. Everywhere we could see scars after February fires. But the snow was beautiful.
Unfortunately, this was the only snowy weekend in Lake Mountain this winter...
.... next opportunity to ski was Hoppet Week in Howmans Gap.
The weather was quite tricky, lots of winds. The worst came for the night before Hoppet, raining all the time. The course had to be shortened to 29 km or so. Here I made a serious mistake. I was planning to race 42 km on classical skis. With the race shortened I should have gone on skaters. As the result I was too slow and finished the first loop when the worst rain came and loud thunders roared. Organisers closed the course and stopped me.
To add insult to the injury someone picked up my dry and clean skating boots from the drying room. Sad good-bye to skating.