Sun, Jan 27 2008 - Tubing and Intro to Snow Shoeing (View Original Event Details)
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As we started the day off at 8:15 AM, we all learned a valuble lesson about Sundays and the TTC Downsview subway station: Not only do subway trains start running at 9:00 AM but this is also the time that the doors of the passenger pick up area are openned! Despite having to meet and wait outside, every member of our crew held up fine as the weather was quite mild; some of us even got to enjoy jumping over the short fence that separated the bus terminal from our meeting spot.
After welcoming everyone specially our new members Daniel, Johanna, Courtney, Laura and Joy to their first TOC event and going through our standard TOC pratice of collecting waviers, donations and doing carpool assignments, we were off as we still had to meet up with 4 other members at Snow Valley including another new member Michael who was also attending his first TOC event.
After arriving at Snow Valley we had a encountered a bit of a delay as the very young staff there were having difficulty figuring out how to properly collect the payments for our tubing & snow shoe fees and hand out our tickets. But they were still quite cordial and still mananged to get us onto the tubing slopes early enough before lines got really big.
And as soon as we started tubing, there was no doubt we all started to feel like kids again! Jenna was able to take some great pics and also a couple of movies of a big group of us spinning & tubing down the hill! And as while some of us thought from last year's experience that going down the hill in groups of six was fun, this year we discovered that that its more fun & quite a bit faster when you go down with a group of eight. The weather got better the rest of the morning when the sun came out which made us enjoy this even more. And even though at times we got separated into smaller groups, it was easy to find each other due to the small number of people tubing at that time .... at one point it even looked like the only groups ready to be pushed off the hill were all TOCers!
After a quick lunch break at the chalet, the weather got even nicer as everyone got set up with their snow shoes and hit the trails. The trails at Snow Valley are great for anyone trying out snow shoeing for the first time as they as they are not too long. However they can still present quite a bit of a challenge specially for those who decided to challenge the steep uphill climbs of the yellow trail instead of the moderate climbs of the blue trail. Everyone was able move along both these trails at varying yet good paces and we all met up back at the chalet afterwards for some well deserved warm up beverages.
At the end of the day everyone had a great time and it looks like this event had created some new fans to snow shoeing and can't wait to sign up for the next TOC snow shoe outing!
Have some photos from this event that you'd like to share in our photo album? Please forward them to Erik Sonstenes at photos@torontooutdoorclub.com. Please note that we prefer to receive the photos in approximately 640x480 or 750x500 pixels - do NOT send original high-res photos. If you have a LOT of photos, please submit up to twenty of your favorites (only) for a day event, or up to forty of your favourites for a multi-day event. Thank you.