Don We Now Our New Apparel

Thanksgiving has come and gone in a hurry... and after eating leftover turkey for the past four days it's now officially over for me! Our snowfall from earlier in the week is still covering the ground - in fact it has only been above freezing once this week and that was for only a few hours in the afternoon. Starting tonight the forecast is saying we are due for more snow through Wednesday. How much we receive is yet to be determined, but I am hoping for at least another six inches.

Friday, I found myself standing in line, out in the cold, outside of Staples at 5:15 a.m.. Not bad considering last year I was up at 3:00 and in line by 3:30. Amazingly, my shopping trip to Staples took me less than 5 minutes to walk into the store and check out. By 6:06 I was out the door, and by 6:10 I had gone down the road 4 blocks and was standing in line at Radio Shack. As far as my shopping list goes, I got nearly everything I wanted - which wasn't too much - but I did pretty well for family members wanting things. As amazing as it is, I managed to max out my credit card for the first time ever - I don't know if that's something to be proud of, but I managed to do it! Unfortunately for the credit card company they won't be collecting any interest off of me, I pay the entire bill and I pay it on time. I'm the kind of customer they like to hate. Too bad.

I picked Laura up around 8:00 and we went shopping together. One thing on our list we really wanted to get were snow shoes - and we got them! They will be nice for hiking trails in the snow and getting out for some hikes this winter. In fact, yesterday that's just what we did.

We waited for the temperature to warm up to a warm 21° F in the early afternoon before we hit the trail. We ventured south into the Bitterroot Mountain and up Bear Creek drainage on our way to find a cache. We hiked the trail last spring and knew it was a nice easy trail, so we knew our first shoe shoeing excursion wouldn't be too bad.

The trail was actually really nice. There had been enough traffic on it over the past week to create a nice base and made for a nice smooth hike. The cache was only 1.5 miles in and we didn't hike must slower than we usually would in the summer. In fact, the trail was actually smoother with the snow in the winter than it is with the rocks in the summer.

I took my pack along to haul some things for Laura, along with a few cameras and a tripod for taking some pictures. Not to mention we had to take some swag along to trade at the cache too! The pack is actually a lot more comfortable to wear in the winter because my big winter coat adds a lot of padding and the pack sits a little tighter to my center of gravity. It was still bulky and heavy - actually heavier with all the winter gear on - but I think I will take it along on our next adventure as well.

Laura brought a shovel along to dig for the cache. We expected it to be buried under at least a foot of snow, but turns out a rock had actually sheltered it and the cache was easy to get to. We have looked for caches in the snow before, and it can really be a pain if you don't dig in the exact right spot. We didn't think we would actually find the cache but we really wanted to take our snowshoes out for a hike, so we decided to have some motivation for a hike as well. After we found the cache, we took a few pictures and headed back for the car. The sun had already set over the ridge of the mountains to the south by the time we got to the trailhead around 2:00 p.m. so we didn't have much sunlight to deal with to begin with - by 4:30 the sun is down!

One of the pictures we posed for turned out to be a real laugh. I sat up the camera on the tripod and set the timer. Having my snowshoes on was the downfall of the picture session though - literally! As I hustled back to Laura I had to turn around - and if you have ever tried to turn around with a pair of skis on you know that sometimes you stumble over your own feet and.. OPPS! Down you go...I tried to recover as best I could from the fall but Laura was really getting a kick outta my ballet moves and laughing up a storm. I thought I finished it off with a nice move...Laura and I had a great time in the mountains with our snowshoes. I think we will be headed out with them again this weekend if we can find time. Maybe we'll even find another geocache while we are out.

Until again

-=Nolan=-

Here's a short video of Laura strutting her stuff!