There are few winter activities that I enjoy more than snowshoeing. It's not particularly demanding in the skill requirement needed to do it section, and yet, it's very physically demanding. Then again, you can get into a rhythm and just tromp along on top of the snow pack and not notice that you are working hard.
Like I said, I just love snowshoeing.
The Pack River flows out of the Selkirk Mountains in the tippy top of the North Idaho Panhandle. It's a meandering body of water that has more twists and turns that San Francisco's Lombard Street. During the summer people float the Pack in inner tubes, kayaks, and canoes, and during the winter the area is a snowmobiler's haven. And of course the area's snow covered trails draws in snowshoeing folk.
So, this morning as I bounded out of bed, I had a anticipatory smile on my face, for I was going to get to take my beautiful blue snowshoes out for a Pack River bank spin! We met at my friend's place a few miles up the Upper Pack River Road, got out of our cars, and strapped on our snowshoes. We were ready to tromp!
Even though we are starting our descent into spring, there is still several feet of snow covering the Upper Pack River area, so I squealed like a snowshoe clad lamb as I bounded up onto the frozen crust snowpack. It was then that our journey began.
To start with, today was an absolutely gorgeous day! Like best phone filter blue sky and the snow was whiter than a movie star's teeth. While I hike or snowshoe I always snap random pictures of interest. Today was no different.
The yurt that the kids sleep in when we go camping on the Pack in the summer is still quite buried. Many games of Throw Throw Burrito have gone down in that building. As has the ingestion of countless pizzas. It is a place of teenage food ingestion and board game carnage.
The hundred plus year old apple tree is quite naked right now. But soon enough it will be full of blossoms and then developing fruit that our friends let us harvest to press for cider. My hubs made several gallons of hard cider off of this tree's apples last fall.
We then started our meander down to the river bank, but I kept pausing to take pictures of the sun-bathed natural beauty we were wandering through. While I was paused for a photo op, my friend's snowshoe bindings slipped off her foot and she went face down an inch away from this:
That was a close one!
Aside from the moose leaving their call signs, there were animal tracks everywhere! We saw turkey, deer, wolf, and beaver tracks. The wolf tracks were especially impressive because they were as big as my hand. Big puppers!
After a bit of a ramble, we ended up on the edge of the river and stopped to catch our breath. Okay, and to BS for awhile, because that's part of the fun of snowshoeing with friends. Or really doing anything with friends for that matter.
And who wouldn't want to stand around and enjoy this view for a bit!
After good old fashioned bovine fecal matter stacking session, we continued on. Now, out in the sunshine the snow was still nice and frozen, so you didn't sink down, but under the trees was a different story. All of us ended up on our butts or sunk up to our hips a couple times. Giggling commenced and we gleefully unearthed ourselves, but then there was.....The Crossing.
We had to cross this little creek drainage in order to get back over to the main trail, and it required ascending and descending the bank and crossing over the water.
Now, I snowshoe in my muck boots like a proper woods-dwelling hayseed, so the water fording thing was pieces of cake. However, I am prone to dramatic acrobatics when there is a ditch to get through.
Yep, I surfed down the ditch on my butt. Snowshoes are a bit tricky to go down steep, slick hills on, you kinda have to go at an angle. Or you can just sit down and slide. I was feeling a bit perky, so I slid. One of my friends slid not on purpose. I thought she did it with skill though.
Fording the muddy little drainage was no biggie, but getting up the opposite bank took some finesse. One of our peeps got their snowshoe a bit stuck on some shrubbery, but she got out mostly unscathed and it was then that I allowed myself to be peer pressured into something.
As I was (jokingly) talking about how we almost died getting across that creek my friend J was like, "Kat! You should totally throw yourself on the ground like you are dead, M will take a picture of you, it'll be great!". Now, J has been going through a lot of stress lately, and for some reason she was really excited at the prospect of my faux demise, so I launched myself (very theatrically I am told) into the snow. We even painted the scene like a bit of a crime scene before I went full launch. We staged one of my gloves and a pole so everything looked authentic.
According to my friends, I acted my part so well that they are now convinced I have a future starring in soap operas. It's probably going to break their hearts that I am going to pass on that, but I'll keep that decision to myself for now. People have to have their dreams.
And just like that we had snowshoed back to our cars. And lunch. In my crew the words hiking or snowshoeing are synonymous with eating. We cruised down the road a bit to my friend's house and had a lovely lunch of herb roasted salmon, bacon and onion infused green beans, and homemade jambalaya.
