Wednesday, June 20, 2007

A bit more Winter

For those of you that are now enjoying the end of summer, I would like to take you back to last winter.

We had the opportunity to hit the slopes of Mount Tremblant this year. Known as the Whistler of the East, it is a posh ski resort about 1:30 mins north of Montreal. Unlike Whistlers' windy sea to sky highway, the road to Tremblant is a 4 lane divided freeway, so you can imagine the amount of people that come up here to ski. Even though you pass by 10 ski hills on the way up, Tremblant is still packed. The high speed gondola moves 8 people at a time up the hill so line-ups aren't too bad. I stopped just before the last downward slope to the gondola, to show the remarkable resemblance Tremblant has to a European village nestled in the Alps. The only thing lacking are huge mountains in the background, of course.



Enough of that being on the ground stuff.........Jennilyn described this next photo as a picture from space, looking down on the earth below. Close, but the Dash can't go that high and I hope she doesn't think I am an astronaut. We are in a steep banking turn going towards Les Iles de Madeline and that is sea ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The ocean never freezes solid here but it definitely has a lot of ice in the winter.

The wind blows the ice around so it is constantly changing formations.



Montreal


Montreal gets its fair share of snow I am told. The snow removal crews cannot simply pile it up on the sides of the streets, so they load it all into trucks and move it out of town. In the middle of the city there are two huge holes. I believe they are from some type of mining, back in the day. They have installed dumping zones all around these holes so the snow trucks can back up and dump all of the city's snow into them. It took until late June for all the snow piled in this hole to melt. I have seen another snow dumping site on our approach path into the airport, but this one is above ground and when trucks dump the snow CAT machines push it up into a giant pile. This site seems to be fairly modern having been built on gravel and surrounded by a water collection system. We probably drink the water from there. They use enough salt here I am sure the water has been thoroughly sterilized.


If only I still had my GT snowracer. Maybe my kids need one soon and they will let me borrow it. I'm doin' it. Don't even try and stop me!



A view of Montreal looking West. You can see the Olympic Stadium/Park on the left side of this picture and the desolate looking Botanical Gardens to the right of it.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm not too sure about the winter pictures in August when I am feeling like the summer wasn't long enough - It proably is never long enough.
I'll bet there is more salt than snow in those piles.
BJR

11:36 AM, August 29, 2007  

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