Obsession

I've noticed something about having snowshoes:  they are making me obsessive about how much snow we have on the ground. 

When I went for my snowshoeing jaunt on Sunday morning we had 17" of über-fluffy snow on the ground.  Despite its having snowed for days straight, and my having shoveled about 10 more inches out of my driveway over the course of the last 4 days, my sophisticated snow-o-meter now reads... (drumroll please)...

17". 

Sigh.

It did get up above 21" at one point.  I shouldn't complain because I'm sure having it compact itself like that is going to make it much easier for me to snowshoe come Saturday morning.  And at least Syracuse is now in the lead in the competition for the golden snowball, coming in at 51.7", easily trumping Buffalo's 44.2". 

Some people around here follow Syracuse University Basketball.  I follow the snowfall, cheering on the gray clouds when they give me the good white stuff and sulking when we get behind in the golden snowball competition.  But then, I've always known I don't quite run with the rest of the herd.

Then again, it looks like I'm not alone.  On the golden snowball site appears the following post, dated January 4th:

Defending Snow Champ Syracuse Sleds into The Lead

Da Cuse is in the Igloo, err house. Syracuse has finally for the first time this season taken the lead in the Golden Snowball contest. You know it's a good snow race when Syracuse was near the bottom most of the season and at the bottom at one point. Can they hold on to the top spot til the finish. Nah! Not the way the season has been going so far. I expect several more lead changes :)

...

GO CUSE!!!!
 
Looks like I have some company.  :)

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Ooops... thud!

I love this picture:

(I found it, and the other photos in this post, at http://actinglikeanimals.com/)

In fact, I think I might want a print of it up on my office wall.  First of all, it's outstanding wildlife photography. Mad props to whoever captured this moment.  But secondly, the poor fox's overt lack of coordination makes me feel like I am not alone.  Not everyone can be graceful all the time.  In fact, some of us experience lots of these moments. 

The question I am left with is, do foxes feel embarrassment?  My dogs do not appear to, but they're complete idiots.  Our old dog used to act embarrassed every spring when we gave him a haircut, as if he felt naked.  He'd hide for about 24 hours afterward, even from my father who was just about his most favorite person ever.  Thankfully he'd get over it.  My cats certainly seem to get embarrassed when they, say, fall off a shelf and land in the dogs' water bowl. 

Well, I take that back - one of my cats is too dense and loopy to exhibit any sign of embarrassment, ever.  She's just Not Quite Right.  By way of example, a couple of nights ago I shouted frantically down the stairs to my husband that it smelled like something had caught on fire.  He replied calmly that, no, no one was on fire, but Sneakers had casually rested her tail against the glass on the wood stove door for a few moments and what I smelled was her singed fur.

Apparently Sneakers never appeared to notice anything was wrong, and casually wandered off with her usual vacuous expression.  Her tail was sort of crunchy at the tip for a day or so, but didn't appear to be painful, which is good.  But dang, what part of 300+ degrees radiating off its surface failed to communicate "too hot to touch" to that silly cat?  My cousin's response to that story was "Some animals never really get it.  In nature, they call it survival of the fittest."  That about sums up Sneakers.  She's a competitor for the feline Darwin Awards.

Anyway, she's the one who falls off things all the time and never, ever demonstrates an iota of embarrassment. 

So, to summarize, my limited experience leads me to guess that perhaps some foxes - like some cats, dogs, and humans - get embarrassed, while some are just too dense (or gracious) to exhibit embarrassment.  Perhaps the photographer could tell us which category this fellow "fell" into (pardon the pun).

That web site, by the way, has other wonderfully humorous animal photos.  A few of my favorites:

Awesome.

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On colors in the snow

I love what snow does to the landscape and to the way my eyes and mind perceive.  Snow is the ultimate equalizer, turning all the variations in the terrain to vague swells, obscuring the small plants, and silencing most of the sounds.  All of a sudden I notice details in texture, like all the ridges in the tree bark and the way tree branches look like scribbles on white paper.  What textures and patterns there are become so much more pronounced in a world with very little texture other than soft white mounds.

Likewise with colors.  It's incredible to me how red or blue a berry can be, or how orange a leaf or branch.

My snowshoe stroll on Sunday showed up the colors particularly brilliantly because the sky was so leaden.  Even the shadows on the snow were just plain gray, and shadows are very seldom gray even on snow.  On Sunday there just wasn't enough light for the snow shadows to reflect back colors from the sky or the bark or the underbrush. 

As an aside, I recommend spending some time gazing at and contemplating the colors of shadows. There's far more to them than you might think.  Find the blues, purples, greens and umbers. There's a trick to getting your eyes to see the colors, kind of like those magic eye images that you have to stare at until you spot the three-dimensional image hidden in it.  It's like you have to teach your eyes and mind the technique of seeing the shadows in a completely different way.

On Sunday, surrounded by monochrome, the flashes of color in the plants leapt right out at me.

It was so hushed and snowy that for the first 2/3 of the walk I saw nary another creature.  Eventually the chickadees piped up, calling in the trees, and sending soft plumes of snow floating to the ground as they landed on the branches above my head.  Their calls and the creaking of trees blowing in the wind were as striking in the silence as the colors were in the white.

The only other creature I saw out there at all was a brown creeper, which I didn't even know was in this area this time of year.  My trusty Peterson's guide and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology site say they do remain around here, though it was my first time spotting one in winter.  Unfortunately, I didn't get my camera out of its case fast enough to snap his picture.  I guess that's one of the hazards of trying to do photography in driving and blowing snow - protect the camera from moisture?  Or have it handy for a fleeting shot?  I leaned toward the former, apparently, and still wound up with snow spots on photos. 

But never mind.  I got to carry the memory of the colors and the wind and the swift flits of the birds back home with me, refreshed as though I had meditated for an hour in the snow.

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Brief Snowshoe Review

It had been another packed holiday weekend, with my father-in-law visiting from South Carolina, a family wedding to attend, and all sorts of other attendant chaos.  It was actually a wonderful four-day weekend, but too packed to find time outdoors.  Thus, by the time I woke up on Sunday morning I was positively itching to steal a few minutes for snowshoe testing before the rest of the day's plans began in earnest.

I got up at the crack of dawn and in -7 wind chill, with my bleary-eyed husband groggily asking what on earth I was doing up at that hour.  I donned layer upon layer and bravely ventured forth.  Here's what my high tech snow measure read:

It was 17" of the fluffiest snow conceivable.  The streets hadn't really been plowed,

so I just wore the snowshoes as I goose stepped, wobbled, shuffled and occasionally flailed my way to the trailhead for the Erie Canal path.

Getting used to walking in snowshoes can't be particularly pretty, although had there been anyone else out I am certain I would have provided him or her with a few moments of high comedy.

When I got to the trailhead, I was pleased to find no snowmobiles had beaten me out.  I generally figure the first hours of weak, pale, winter morning light are my best bet for avoiding the motorized vehicles that seem to be always driven by night owls.  Only trouble was, I hadn't reckoned on how the trailhead might look without a trail having been broken by some of those motorized vehicles:

Yoikes.  That horizontal beam that can just be seen over the snow is about 6 1/2 feet high, and is a gate intended to prevent cars from driving down the path.  I stood still and gawked for a beat, and then clumped right on up and over that massive mound.  My descent down the back side of the pile was a graceless slither, a split, and a bump.  But the reward was quite lovely and Narnia-esque:

I trekked about for perhaps an hour snapping pictures, some of which I'll share in another post.  I got good and frozen, and took a general measure of my gear thusly:

• It cannot be best to evaluate one's snowshoes in this kind of absurdly fluffy snow.  They don't do a whole lot of good, aside from beating down the snow around where you're about to step, and preventing you from sinking in to the hip in that big old mound of snow at the trailhead.  This jury is still out on the effectiveness of my MSR's in keeping me from disappearing up to my neck at an inopportune moment.  I believe tails are going to be very necessary.  Further updates shall undoubtedly follow once I find some varied conditions.

• Likewise, this jury is still out on the bindings.  Once I get the infernal things on they are perfect in every way - completely secure and comfortable.  But getting the little metal tooth into the little hole in the plastic in the first place is a talent that thus far eludes me.  I will be an exceedingly happy camper if I can learn to master the art of fastening the bindings without removing my mittens.  Brrr.  

• I need insulated boots.  At least I do when it's only 9 degrees out with wicked, whipping winds.  So much for trying to save money on them - wool socks and hiking boots can only do so much.

• Thank goodness for the person who first thought of snowshoeing with poles.  Once I develop the knack of walking in snowshoes so I no longer repeatedly step on the left shoe with the right one I will undoubtedly need them less, but Miss Grace here is going to be eternally reliant on poles to some degree in order to remain continuously upright.

• Equally thank goodness for the person who invented gaiters.  Love them, love them, love them.

• My new Auclair mittens rock.  I picked them up at Wear On Earth in Potsdam, NY last time I was up there.  (Great store, by the way).  I grabbed them because I've never been satisfied with the Scott skiing mittens I had for extremely cold weather like Sunday's.  The Scotts had glove fingers inside the mittens.  Query: what is the purpose?  If one cannot separate one's fingers because they are all stuffed inside a mitten, what's the point of having them separated inside the mitten by glove fingers?  All those things did for me was allow any individual finger to get icy, and prevent me from warming it back up by sharing heat with the other fingers.  Not sure why I bought them.  Maybe it's just me and my Raynaud's that makes them impractical.  Regardless, the Auclair mittens are honkin' warm, waterproof, fuzzy inside, and windproof.  They're also blindingly reflective.  They're probably too warm to be good for weather above about 19 degrees, but perfect for the wicked days like Sunday.

• Contact lenses rock.  That may seem like an odd observation in a commentary on outdoors gear, but if I had been wearing my glasses I would have been in serious need of windshield wipers.  Now if only I can find some kind of snow and rain repelling spell for the camera lens...

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