What are the benefits of skiing? You get to exercise in the fresh air and potentially reconnect with your loved ones. It forces you to get out of the house and possibly head out on a new adventure on a road trip to ski at a new location. The endorphins make you happy especially when you feel like you’ve accomplished something. There’s potential to motivate yourself to beat your time and cross-country ski further than during your previous outing. Try more difficult blue runs downhill skiing once you’ve worked up to it and feel confident that you can ski a harder run. It makes you feel happy and well to be outside. Why not encourage yourself to get out as often as possible if it’s good for your mental and physical health and makes you feel much better after being in the great outdoors?
Table of Contents
Fresh Air
Breathing in the fresh air and feeling the cold natural air fill your lungs as you glide on a classic cross-country ski track with trees covered in snow makes you feel so good to be alive. It encourages you to move faster as you continue to inhale and exhale. The day can be filled with so much potential. Where do you want to go?
Cross-Country Skiing
Cooking Lake-Blackfoot has 125 kilometres of wonderfully groomed trails with tracks on both sides for two-way traffic. How far do you want to go on your cross-country ski outing? Warming huts are located along the way where you can eat a snack or lunch. These are especially nice on cold winter days. Cross-country skiers typically start from Waskehegan or Islet Staging Area. There are many cross-country skiing destinations in and around Edmonton as well as in the mountains. It’s up to you how far you’d like to go for the day or a weekend.
Downhill Skiing
What are the benefits of skiing? Downhill skiing at Lake Louise, the views as you disembark the Larch Mountain chair lift make you appreciate the experience of being outside on the top of the mountain. There are various directions you can take from this chairlift. As skiers dissipate in different directions, you can feel a sense of awe for the grandeur of the mountains around you. Let that soak in for a minute as you breathe in the fresh air. Make a decision about where you’d like to descend on your next run and go have a blast! It’s not every day that you get to enjoy this beauty and adventure, right?
Exercise
Beginner Skiers
What are the benefits of skiing? It always feels so good to be out in nature exercising. This was our trip to Panorama. It’s busy starting out as the tracks are just on the outskirts of the village with many cross-country skiers coming and going. Many people are at different skiing levels at this point; it can get congested quickly waiting on beginners to get their footing. I love to see beginners trying out a new sport. A little patience from us to get them feeling confident and welcomed on our trails will hopefully entice them to have 10 reasons to love cross-country skiing one day.
More Experienced Skiers
Once you get further into the trails, the more experienced skiers can be found gliding with ease and enjoying the scenery without many souls around. Warming huts can be found further along the trails too. The feeling of having your entire body moving in unison as you feel all the muscles in motion makes you appreciate having the capabilities to live your best life outside. It doesn’t matter how many kilometres you do or how long you stay outside cross-country skiing, the important thing to note is that you made the effort that day to do exercise and be outdoors.
Reconnect with Family
Connect Downhill Skiing
The best way to connect or reconnect with family in my books is to spend time doing an activity that you all love outside. In the first picture, we went downhill skiing at Marmot Basin with Kris’ dad. It was a great way to test each other’s endurance, discuss what runs we all preferred and enjoy downhill skiing together. So many different conversations came up while skiing and eating lunch at one of the restaurants. We enjoyed laughing together, and each other’s company and we appreciated the beautiful mountain views around us. You have the option to make it into a day excursion if you’re lucky enough to live close to the mountains.
Tip: If you live further away, consider turning it into a weekend trip. You can go skiing both days if you’re up for the challenge and love skiing. Or, you could dedicate one day to downhill skiing and one day to explore around Jasper, such as visiting Maligne Canyon. Both activities would allow for different conversations to develop. Appreciate the time you have to bond together.
Cross-Country Ski with Family
Even during the early COVID-19 outbreak, when we had to stay apart, we still managed to get out cross-country skiing with my parents, as shown in the second picture. It’s a wonderful opportunity to have conversations and catch up with our lives. Funny enough, while cross-country skiing, since the length of the skis, is so long and we ski one behind another, it forced us to stay far apart while still able to maintain conversations on our outdoor adventure. It did create a funny picture of having the couples on opposite sides of each other but in the future, that will promote some discussion and something to look back on.
Get Out of the House
Prioritizing your Mental and Physical Health
What are the benefits of skiing? Can you see the lovely snow in this picture? The benefits of skiing encourage you to get out of the house and see the wonders we have in nature around us in Alberta. This picture was taken in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park as we backcountry skied into Elk Lake Hut. All of us have day-to-day to-do lists that could stop us from getting outside. But, what about our mental and physical health, shouldn’t that be at the top of our priority list? I think so!
Gorgeous Scenery
The beautiful scenery allows photographers to take a variety of cool winter shots, once a skier gets deeper into the park ski trails. There are so many magnificent views from the mountains when cross-country skiing. Whiskey jacks often like to visit when you’re eating your lunch and see if you’re willing to share a snack with them.
Tip #1: Don’t share your food with wildlife. It’s important that they can find their own food source and don’t rely on humans to survive.
Tip #2: It can often get cold at the top of the passes when skiing in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park. To ensure you have a Happy and Warm X-Country Ski, make sure to bring enough layers and additional items such as hand warmers and gaiters to have a fantastic day.
Tip #3: Many kilometres are available at PLPP for cross-country skiing. As of now, you’re required to purchase a conservation pass to park your vehicle in Kananaskis and Bow Valley. The current government might choose to abandon this pass.
Road Trip
Explore a New Area
A road trip can entice you to explore a new area or see it differently from summer compared to winter. There will be new scenery to look at and opportunities to take pictures. You’ll be able to go on a new skiing adventure whether it be cross-country skiing or downhill skiing. Are you torn between Downhill Ski Sunshine or Lake Louise? This post gives some tips to help you make a decision. Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, as mentioned above is a gorgeous area to explore, whether you are familiar with it or you haven’t been. They offer cross-country skiing but also downhill skiing at Nakiska Ski Area. Panorama offers both types of skiing as well. It’s a fantastic place that offers a variety of runs for skiers of different skills.
Whistler
Whistler is an awesome place to downhill ski but beware it’s super expensive to ski and stay there. If you want to cross-country ski, beware that the skiing conditions in town are often very warm and you might have problems with snow sticking to your skis if applying the wrong wax.
Tip #1: Use waxless skin cross-country skis to avoid waxing issues.
Tip #2: Travel higher up in the mountains with a vehicle for potentially better ski conditions.
Endorphins: Feel Happy
What are the benefits of skiing? The best downhill ski day in Lake Louise involved practicing my turns without moving my entire body and improving those skills. The run was nice and wide providing plenty of space for other skiers or snowboarders to go around me when they passed. It was a gorgeous day to carve into both blue runs on Larch Mountain at a perfect steepness and feel happy to be outside and working on my technique.
These two runs exude confidence in my abilities and make me want to keep practicing over and over again. Some might say that it could get tedious but the back side runs also tends to have better snow with less ice compared to the front side with the sun shining down on those runs if it’s a sunny day. Larch Mountain features more advanced runs which typically exclude beginners from coming over to this side making the hill less busy.
Tip: It’s also possible to go further to the left side of the mountain off of Larch Express Quad for more variety of runs if you want to change things up as opposed to skiing to the right side of the chairlift where I like to spend a lot of my time.
Feel Accomplished
Spending a few hours cross-country skiing or setting a new record for yourself such as doing fifteen kilometres in a day is an amazing way to feel accomplished.
What are the benefits of skiing? If you’re able to carve perfectly into the mountainside and complete the difficult blue runs that have been on your bucket list for a while, it’s a fantastic achievement. It will encourage you to set new goals for future trips when you’re outside. Keep practicing your goals and eventually, you’ll get there. You’ll be so proud of yourself for never quitting.
Motivation
Seeing your overall cross-country skiing kilometres completed in a day or how fast you were going as indicated in a Samsung app will encourage you to keep pushing yourself and be motivated to keep doing better. Try to beat your old time whether it’s skiing for a longer period of time or going faster than you previously did. Enjoy your outdoor adventure and get outside multiple times over the course of the season.
Maybe you’ll want to practice and improve your technique on the same downhill ski runs you’ve been doing, or try some difficult runs and see how far you can push yourself. The sky is the limit. Push yourself (within reason) and see what is achievable.
Final Thoughts
What are the benefits of skiing? To exercise in the fresh air, get a new perspective while in nature, connect with your family and best of all enjoy yourself. See how far you can push yourself. What are you hoping to achieve whether it be cross-country skiing or downhill skiing? Feel the endorphins working as you feel happy to be outside with your loved ones. What motivates you to be there? Get a chance to get out of the house and go on a road trip. Maybe you’ll try a new area that you haven’t explored yet in Alberta or maybe you’ll even get the chance to go to another province such as British Columbia.
It feels awesome to be outside loving nature in the winter months getting to play in the snow. What are you waiting for? Time to plan your next trip and get outside in the winter wonderland!
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