A Walk in the Mountains

I went for a walk in the mountains today. The National Weather Service had issued a blizzard warning and the road to the trailhead was already snowed in. I put the truck in four-wheel drive and pushed ahead. At the Noah’s Ark trailhead, I strapped on some snowshoes, grabbed some ski poles, and started up the trail. More than a foot of new snow was on the ground and the stuff was falling steadily. The woods were silent and dusky, and as I walked, I thought about a couple of things, scary things and practical things.

After hiking along through the snow for a few hundred yards, I came across the tracks of a lion. Actually, the lion had been using the trail and I followed its tracks. It was nice to have the trail broken for me in the deep snow, but after a while I began to feel a little spooky about it. I stopped to blow out one of the tracks. There was quite a bit of new snow in it. It must have been made several hours ago. Right? Besides, cats sleep during the day . . . don’t they? Lion attacks are rare, and it is silly to scare yourself by looking warily around in the quiet forest, but I did that for a while until the lion tracks dropped off the trail and fell away below me. (Of course, it was the Noah’s Ark trail, I guess I should have expected a second lion.)

As I worked my way higher on the mountain and the wind began to blow and the snow got deeper, I started to think about avalanches. It wasn’t really avalanche terrain, but there were a few gullies to cross and visibility was low. Now, I don’t want to scare anyone away from the mountains in the winter, especially myself, but avalanches are not rare, and people are killed by them every year in Utah. I kicked at a couple of steep pillows of snow. They weren’t going anywhere—too light and unconsolidated. There was no sense worrying about avalanches today, but it was a good reminder about winter travel in the mountains.

Besides scaring myself, I debated the merits of the snowshoes versus the skis I had left at home. Overall, I prefer skis in the mountains. For one thing, skis are better at supporting you on top of the snow than are the silly snowshoes sold today, which are hardly bigger than a pair of Sorrels. In addition, skis require only about half the steps of snowshoes (the uphill half) and can provide long gliding descents—instead of an uphill slog followed by a downhill slog. On the other hand, skis can be a bit of a trick to maneuver around steep switchbacks. And, sometimes, the gliding benefits of skis can make the descent a little too fast for comfort—especially in thick trees. Today, I was on a pretty rough trail with a number of switchbacks through the dense scrub oak, so I concluded that snowshoes were the right choice for the job.

I got pretty high up on Noah’s Ark today. I hiked along some exposed ridges, the wind blew, and I experienced that fierce joy of being alone in the mountains in the winter. But, besides my camera, I wasn’t carrying anything—no food, no water, no shelter, no dry socks, nothing. When I travel like that, I try to rein in the urge to go just a little further; I start to think about how far I am from the truck and what it is going to take to get back to it. So, I turned around before the top. I went down, I drove home, and I dried my wet socks on the woodstove.

White Out/Black Out

The wind blew hard during the night and, before daylight, the snow started coming in sideways. It was one of those blizzards where you can't see across the street. I was up, in the dusky dawn, starting the fire and the coffee. I had a couple of lights on, but they soon flickered and went dark. It was the start of a three hour black out. The good thing, however, about living like 19th century homesteaders is that our routine pre-electric lifestyle is not really impacted by, well, a lack of electricity. I put on a headlamp (Aha, battery powered devices were not available in the 19th century.), gathered a few candles, and moved the coffee pot to the top of the woodstove. Done. Let it snow. We cooked breakfast on the woodstove (OK, the final touches were done on a propane camp stove.), ate by candle-light, and sat in the living room looking at old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Maybe we'll send away in the mail for one of those new hand-crank washing machines.

Christmas Tree

It isn't all hard drudgery at The Homestead, sometimes we take a day off to enjoy the mountains. Yesterday we went Christmas tree hunting in the snow and fetched home a nine foot fir. I cut about a foot off the bottom to make it easier to wrestle through the door. The girls did the decorating and it looks really good. Last year at this time we were trying to move in to the house and I had to grab a tree on my own—not exactly in keeping with the family tradition. I found an ugly pinyon along the road near Escalante and threw it on top of one of my loads. We brought it with us to Grandma and Grandpa's house and the girls did a nice job with it, but this year's version is way better. With all due respect to the lowly pinyon, I think I'm sold on the true fir at Christmas time. Now, I'm going to call this one a subalpine fir (Abies bifolia), but someone could convince me that it should properly be called a western subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa). The taxonomy of the three (or four) subspecies/varieties has me a bit confused. (It is tough to see the leaves in this picture, but there is a specimen just to the right of Ellen.)

Skiing the Homestead

The Homestead received only about three to five inches of snow out of our latest storm. But, the girls felt like that was a sufficient base for setting track. There was a good straight-away along the north side of the property, a turn around the garden, and a small down-hill run in the orchard. Soldier Hollow? Who needs it? Of course, the southern Utah sun may have something to say about the long-term success of our Nordic resort.