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.