Sunday, February 11, 2007

It's not just like walking

What we thought was an 'introduction' to snow shoeing turned out to be an advanced back-country snow shoe trip. Back-country as in lots and lots of up, down, and sideways on hills at 35deg inclines while wearing shoes 5 times as big as your feet and walking on 5 feet of snow, sometimes with holes underneath that you fall into. We managed ok and didn't fall behind, but now we're pretty tired.

Here's a view of Mt. Hood right before we walked down one of those steep inclines. I would've taken a picture of the incline except that I had no idea we were about to walk down it. That's the head of our guide, Doug, at the bottom of the picture there.



The weather was perfect, not too hot, not too cold. We had periods of very heavy snowfall with big, fat, beautiful snowflakes, and then periods of sun break. A little bit of wet snow too here and there. Mostly it was too cloudy to get much of a view, except for this view of the mountain.

Of course, no working in the studio today, and I'm not about to get started in my current condition.

2 comments:

Sundry said...

This is not a sorry excuse. This is fabulous! Sounds wonderfully challenging and exhausting. Do you have to lift your feet a lot higher in snow shoes?

Thanks for sharing the adventure. Beautiful!

fingerstothebone said...

When you're on level ground, you don't really have to lift your feet up higher than usual. The shoes just kind of drag behind you. When you're going down the steep hills, and someone ahead of you has already made the tracks, you do have to lift up way high so you can step into their tracks without catching the end of the shoe on the stairstep they've made. Not sure if that's a clear description or not.

It was a really fun day.