It has been cold lately. Not the bone hurting cold that I’ve seen in the past working in Alaska, but a damp, relentless chill. The kind that makes your hands and feet hurt when you are just sitting around. And I have been doing a lot of that lately. Sitting in front of a computer screen, plugging away at my day. The beginning of winter tends to be like this. Just enough warm days to make you want to hole up indoors on the rest of them. And once that habit starts, it is hard to break. But I finally got myself to go outside.
When my son was quite young, he was enrolled in a preschool about a 20-minute drive away. It also happened to be located close to some great trails, perfect for an hour or two hike before getting the sedentary part of my day started. I would head up there with the dog, sun, rain, snow or cold, 3 days a week. Then he started school on a regular schedule an easy walk from the house, and I stopped hiking regularly. During most of the winter it would be on snowshoes. And that was my goal today. Get out and hit the trails in the snow, drag the dogs up the mountain and work up a good sweat. Check, check and check. A three-mile loop to 1300’ on Mount Megunticook, to a rocky overlook of the lake of the same name, all frozen in splendor. As I went up the footprints dwindled. Only one person and their dog had taken the scenic trail fork, and once I got to the ridge trail turnoff, I was alone in virgin powder. Up to this point the snowshoes had seemed overkill, but they paid dividends now.
The mix of deep powder and sheer ice on the ridge would have been treacherous without them. The trail down from there to Maiden’s cliff was a slipping and sliding adventure. At a jog most of the way, there were a few spots of “sit down and slide,” once with a dog sitting on my snowshoes as we tobogganed downhill. All in all, it reminded me that getting outside is always the right choice, no matter what the weather is doing.
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