Yes, planning for the MLWR is well under way. Feb. 20/21 in Bancroft. The route is about 400 km, divided into 3 legs. First car out is at 10 pm, finishing about 6:30 am, with a great breakfast provided at the end. Instructions will be simple - tulips and distance-to-turns. There will, however, be some timing challenges, and perhaps some other twists that we've not seen before.
More details to follow.

On-line registration will be up soon, and will be limited to 50 entries.

Is it wrong that it only took me about 20 seconds of that to know where it was?  

more video. Still no snow. Bloody cold, though!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx-i02M0YkE

There's lots of sand on the roads (except the one in the first video). What's underneath depends on whether it's in the shade or not; packed snow, ice, pavement, gravel - it's all there.
On one of the roads, though, there are spots where the snow melt has run across the road and frozen, leaving large patches of thick ice, usually on a slope. I'll try to flag those in the instructions, but they may be gone, or there may be more.
Anyway, let's hope for more snow!

We just need six inches of snow in the first hour like last year.

Won't be able to make it this year... but last year was definitely interesting with all the snow that came down right at the start.

We were up doing the green crew on the weekend.  The road conditions were very different then in the past and for the most part in great shape.

The "back roads" are mostly frozen and smooth, while the paved major roads (Hwy 28 and 62) are incredibly rough.  The drive to the rally will be worse than the rally roads!

The massive frost heaves from past years are almost absent. There were only a few that will overtaxed the suspension if you don't slow down. Most are marked in the routebook and the others are clearly visible.  

At night, most roads were a mix of frozen dirt with periodic icy patches (at most 10 metres long, usually in front of a south facing rock face -- run off) and a dusting of light snow (Bancroft got a couple of cm of snow on Sunday night).  A couple of roads were hard, thick, packed snow with excellent traction and almost no ice.

With the warm daytime temperatures and sunshine over last weekend, some exposed roads turned into a layer of  mud over a frozen base which quickly froze up after dark.  This was the really slippery stuff, but should be frozen again by the 10 pm start.

The snow banks are almost absent everywhere (30 cm, at the highest) and the ones that were out there are as hard as concrete. Once over these small banks, the snow is granular and soft, but not much of it with rocks protruding everywhere.

The forecast is calling for another few cm of snow this week and continuing "warm" temperatures, which will change everything!

As with all winter rallies, be prepared for anything!

Paul and Rita

I was tying up flagging tape for the checkpoints!  The STi was firmly planted on the road.

Paul