“Once you’re in the middle of the lake, any spot is as good as any other. You don’t want to kite in the dark there’s just too many ice chunks to catch edges on and whatnot, or split up the team. “The more time during the day that you have where you can use the winds, the better. “The long hours of sunlight makes a big difference,” McNair-Landry says. “If the winds had been different, we could have gone up the North Arm or we could have gone to Res, so that makes it really cool.”Īpart from wind direction, other important considerations are ice conditions and daylight - both of which make late winter/early spring an ideal time to head out, when there is more snow, thicker ice and longer days. There’s five or six more trips to be done on the lake, and this is a great way to experience it,” McNair-Landry says. “There are tons of other communities you could go to, like Yellowknife to Lutsel K’e or back. Though McNair-Landry and Blyth opted for a quick trip to Hay River - conveniently located between Yellowknife and Fort Smith - a similar trek can be made to a variety of places along the lake, as long as the winds are right. Then you stop and realize, woah, it is really windy today!” Where to go “So when we were skiing, it was super hot. “You’re going the same speed as the wind, so even if it’s 30 km winds, you don’t get the windchill because your relative wind speed is zero,” Blyth adds. It’s actually a fairly nice way to travel.” “It may even be easier on the body than snowmobiling across the lake. “It sure beats cross-country skiing across the lake, for example,” McNair-Landry says. Still, both McNair-Landry and Blyth say it’s an accessible sport to people of all ages who are into skiing. And depending on which way you travel, you can end up putting a lot more pressure on one leg than the other. “It’s more your knees and quads, because it’s like you’re jumping on and off a bench about 6,000 times,” Blyth says. The harder drifts meant there was added impact on the pair’s joints, especially their knees, from absorbing the impact. But if you’ve got fresh powdered snow and a strong wind, you can really max out your speed a lot higher than that.” So, you usually don’t want to go much faster than that. “When it’s hard-packed, there’s a lot of chatter on the skis. “Most of it’s the snow conditions,” McNair-Landry says. The duo was slowed down a bit by the hard-packed drifts on the lake left by the storm, but still had a blast doing about 25-30 km/hr across the lake. “Just getting to know the lake a little better is really fun.” “It was my first time across the lake and pretty cool exploring the backyard a little bit,” McNair-Landry said. Though McNair-Landry has done numerous kiting trips in the past, it was his first foray onto Great Slave Lake since he recently relocated to Yellowknife from Iqaluit. “The only place out of the wind and with hard enough snow.” Exploring the big backyardįor Blyth, it was the first time pairing a longer ski trip with a kite. “We skied right up to the beach, and camped next to those abandoned boats there,” Blyth says. Following the path kindly laid by some skidoos in front of them, they were camping at the Hay River boatyard by 5 p.m. With just light winds on Sunday, they decided to sleep in and take off in the afternoon. The two kited their way in the bright sunshine and fresh snow until they were just 60 km north of Hay River and set up their tent in the middle of the lake, surrounded by nothing but ice and the faint glow of lights from the town noticeable only in the darkness of the empty surroundings. On Saturday, however, conditions were ideal for a full day of skiing. “It didn’t seem to make any sense to travel in the storm.” “It wasn’t worth travelling in those conditions, and there are quite a few pressure ridges on the North Arm,” he says. “The storm got a bit too strong for us to travel in low visibility,” says McNair-Landry, who noted that even when using their smallest kites, they were still getting lifted off the ground by the gales.
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