Like Walking in Deep Sand

It was a glorious sunny morning, so my husband and I decided to forego our indoor ice skating plans and instead head for the woods.  We weren't in the mood for too much company out there, which means we headed to Baltimore Woods.  I had hoped they would be renting snow shoes since my husband doesn't have any, but their office is closed on Sundays.  So, in solidarity, I agreed to walk with him instead of snow shoeing myself.

Ow.  We did not get as much snow here as folks in New England, but there is probably about a foot on the ground at Baltimore Woods. And while it's been traveled and packed down some, it's still fairly deep and squashy. It turns out that walking in such stuff is a lot like walking on a beach through deep soft sand. Your feet kind of slide out every which way, and it's absurdly laborious. I WORKED for the three miles we walked!  Given that I went sledding on Saturday and can barely move my arms after all the effort to keep myself on the inner tube, I figure by tomorrow every inch of me will be in agony.

But I admit it was absolutely delicious to be out in sunshine today.  It was warm enough that all I needed was a light jacket, and at times that was too much.   For the first time in months I was really in the mood to use my camera, because there's little that gives better contrast than sunshine in winter.  I simply love all the shadows on the snow, contrasted with the almost blinding whiteness.  The textures of the snow are amazing too.

I also love how incredibly intense the few flashes of color are.  My eye just gets grabbed by the little bits of color, because they seem magnified by being surrounded by whiteness.

 

Anyway, it was a lovely if laborious walk, with good company and my trusty camera.  Sunshine, it was so nice to see you!

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The Amazing Elasticity of Snow

It was warm Saturday - several degrees above freezing.  The sun was out, and there was virtually no wind.  I was so warm snowshoeing that I was happily sweating wearing only old overall leggings that work great for cross country skiing or snowshoing, a super lightweight moisture-wicking shirt, and an unzipped low-tech Barbie-pink fleece that everyone picks on me for.  (It IS incredibly bubblegum).  Hat and mittens were stuffed in my camera case.

Temperature perception varies dramatically, though, I admit.  I snowshoed past one woman swathed to the eyeballs, wearing a calf-length puffy down coat with its hood up over a hat, a huge scarf, mittens, fluffy boots, and insulated pants.  She made me hot just to look at, and I'm usually cold!

I don't know if they're any more impartial at judging winter temperatures, but it was warm enough that there were bugs out flying around in a beam of sunlight, which surprised me.  I know there are a number of varieties of bugs that like it cold, but I'm not used to seeing anything flying in swarms in the winter.  Only a couple showed up in the photo, but there were several dozen of them:

It was, of course, also warm enough to melt some snow.  While wandering along, I spotted the following:

It looks to me like that strip of snow used to lie along the vine, and had slithered around and draped itself off it by the time I came by.  It immediately called to mind an incredible snow swath that once graced the railing of the deck at our old townhouse.  We'd had a big lake effect snowstorm followed by several days with highs slightly above freezing, and the snow on the railing gracefully slid off the edge and stretched itself downward in an unsupported arc:

Honest - it wasn't formed around a garland or string of Christmas lights or anything - that's 100% snow. Here's another view:

It stayed like that for several days, creeping ever so slowly downward.  Eventually it rained, and the snow ribbon was sadly no more.  Cool though, huh?

Honestly, everything about snow seems odd to me if I think about it hard enough.  The very idea of the landscape being covered in all that stuff seems strange.  It's like how a familiar word can suddenly seem spelled wrong if one thinks about it too hard.  I may be mighty used to snow, but it still surprises me sometimes.

If I had to guess, I would say the snow bending off branches and railings happens most often when the snowfall has come down as big fluffy flakes rather than granules or graupel.  Those pretty flakes with all their little jags and points wind up becoming interlocked as they fall and compress.  Then when it gets warm and they start to melt, they still hang together and melt as a mass rather than just as individual flakes, giving the clump of interlocked flakes the ability to droop, fold, hang and stretch.  Any snow scientists out there who can confirm my guesswork?  Anybody ever quantifiably measured the elasticity of snow?  I bet someone has...

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Scrrrunching through the woods

This past weekend was nearly as crammed full of obligations as the prior weekend (and next weekend isn't looking any better).  However, I made it a priority to get outside for a brief snowshoeing trip on Saturday by telling myself it was officially on my "must do" list so I'd have something to blog about.

That, my friends, is one of the reasons I like keeping this blog.  It helps me prioritize getting outside even when it seems impossible.  My best friend teases me that I can justify just about anything if I work at it. She's so right!

My husband (God bless the man!) decided he'd rather stay home and put away the Christmas tree and clean the house than frolic in the great outdoors, so I left him in charge of the fur and took advantage of the rare opportunity to play somewhere that dogs are not allowed.  Usually if we're heading outdoors the hounds have to come too because a) I feel too guilty leaving them inside when I'm out having fun, and b) I don't feel like torturing myself unnecessarily by allowing them to build up too much pent up energy.

One of my very favorite places to play in the woods is a place called Baltimore Woods.  Dogs aren't allowed there, so I don't get there very often anymore despite that it's quite close to home.  I miss it.  I have been going to Baltimore Woods in all seasons since I was a kid and love it.  It's never too crowded, is a nice mix of wood and field and stream and pond, makes for good birding and wildlife spotting, and is by far the best place I know of to look for spring wildflowers.  They have wonderful nature education programming, too.

The terrain at Baltimore Woods is pretty rugged as it's centered around a deep gorge on lots of cool glacial geology.  Skiing isn't allowed there - for a darn good reason.  I have been cross-country skiing since I was 2, and while I'm no ski racer or remarkable talent on them, I am extremely comfortable on skis.  But you couldn't pay me any amount of money to try to cross country ski down this:

If you managed to avoid the trees in the first few big sweeping turns, you wouldn't likely manage to avoid them in the much steeper switchbacks at the bottom, and if you did manage to avoid the trees, you'd end up (bump bump bump kersplunk!) in a frigid stream at the bottom.

No thanks.  There were two foolhardy individuals (male, roughly 20) putting on skis just as I was leaving.  I hope no ambulances were involved.  It pays to read the rules - sometimes they exist for good reason.

Anyway, I have been hoping since I bought my snowshoes that Baltimore Woods would be steep enough for me to use the MSR's "Televator Heel Lifter" feature.  It turns out that it's mighty hard to take pictures of one's own heels - here's the best I could manage:

See that lighter gray tab under my tan boot heel?  It's on a black metal bar.  That's the Televator doohickie, which is basically just a bar that lifts up under the heel. Instead of resting on the bottom of the snowshoe, the heel rests on the elevated bar so that your foot is much more level while climbing steep terrain.  It reduces calf strain. Worked like a charm coming back up that gorge! Then I had a heck of a time getting them back down. Not only is the angle wrong for photography of one's own heel, but it's also wrong for grabbing a tab and pulling backward and down while wearing the snowshoes.  Ah well.  Fun toy anyway.

Technically it wasn't snowy enough to need snowshoes on Saturday - curse this above-32 spell.  I could have walked quite comfortably without them most of the way.  But they're new, provide good traction, and my boots don't have a cool Televator feature that I was dying to try out.  So I snowshoed.  The disadvantage was that they're noisy as heck on the kind of heavy damp icy snow we presently have.  The SCRRRUNCH SCRRRUNCH SCRRRUNCH SCRRRUNCH of my footfalls certainly scared off any wildlife I might otherwise have crept up on.

There are only about 6 miles of trails at Baltimore Woods, and I usually take the longest perimeter trail just to get some distance in.  I think perhaps the many different habitats the trail passes through are part of why I like Baltimore Woods so much.  I made my way down to the bottom of the gorge, then worked my way back up on the other side through deciduous woods, and along the edge of some open fields.  It passes through a long-abandoned sand pit that makes for good bird watching, although only chickadees serenaded me there on Saturday:

And then it winds along the edge of some farm fields.

I distinctly recall once seeing three baby raccoons hiding up a tree on the edge of the farm field.  It was my husband's first trip there perhaps 5 years ago, and it predated my camera-toting days.  But we played peek-a-boo with those fuzzy baby raccoons for a good 10 minutes because they were so irresistibly cute, and they firmly believed that if they couldn't see us, we couldn't see them.  I think of them every time I pass through here - I even remember the exact tree they were in.

Eventually the trail winds its way back through the woods and up and down the sides of the gorges again, and past a pond.  The pond is great for duck/heron/turtle/frog watching in warmer seasons.

Then I scrrrunched along through more woods, across a stream, and back on up the really steep side of the gorge with my Televators in action and back to the car.  It wasn't a long walk but those hills make for good exercise.  I certainly felt infinitely better for a few hours in the delicious sunshine and fresh air.

I need to make a point of getting to Baltimore Woods more often.  Come spring, I will make a point of coming back so I can post a whole bunch of wildflower pictures.  What a long way off that seems!

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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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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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Expensive Blog Post

Can you identify these tracks?

That's right, you guessed it, a full grown human in SNOWSHOES!

That's me standing in my back yard, looking like a dork.  I bought these on the way home from work and was walking around out there in my dress pants, which by this time weighed about 10 lbs per pant leg.  I was too excited to try them to bother putting on something more reasonable first.

My husband's comment was that this was going to be a very expensive blog post.  Let's just say I didn't get the cheapest snowshoes available because I wanted durability and some versatility to be able to do climbing in them.  They're MSRs, which I have had several people recommend (including some of my faithful blog followers - thanks!).  Based on the recommendations and a whole lot of reading of reviews, they seem to get consistently high ratings for all the categories I was most concerned about.  And so far, so good.

I did not pick up tails for them, but I'm clearly going to need some since I sank a lot into the fluffy stuff that's outside at the moment.  Looking at the weight ratings on them, I technically squeak into the range for walking in them without tails... so long as I'm naked and the snow isn't fluffy and over 30" deep.  If I ever plan on carrying a pack with them I'll likely need the extra length.  More than 30" of fluffy snow isn't terribly common around Syracuse, but perhaps up on Tug Hill I'll find some snow that's that delicious.

I also do not yet have proper snowshoeing boots.  I could barely bring myself to buy the shoes and poles, despite all the generous contributions toward the snowshoe fund.  I'll try a short trip this weekend in my heaviest duty hiking boots and warm wooly socks to see how it goes.  The insulated boots are still on the wish list, and will have to remain there for a few more pay periods, anyway.

Here are Wednesday and Lucy sniffing warily at my new toys:

Okay weather - do your worst.  I need some snow!!!

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