March skiing

Friday March 27 I went cross country skiing with Joyce, Kendra and Greg. The end of March is getting late in the season to be skiing but there was still plenty of snow in the foothills where we skied. Which was... on the way to Jewel Basin in the Swan Range.

The snow was crunchy and a little slick but still decent for skiing. We had old ski tracks to follow and I found they were a touch narrow. At times I could feel the crunchy snow rub the sides of my shoes. When I wasn't in the tracks sometimes that worked well if I was able to make new tracks, and other times not so good as I skittered across the top of the hard snow that was wavy from drifting. The temperature this day barely got above freezing so the snow remained hard all day.

Even though it was near where Greg and Kendra live, they hadn't skied there. In the past they had just noticed cars with some skis parked along the road to Camp Misery. When we arrived there were no cars (after all this was a week day) and the parking area was a large lightly frozen water puddle. We didn't see tracks or an obvious place to ski to the south of the road so we drove onward. And upward.

The road went upward and had more and more snow as we continued onward. Pickups had driven this when the weather was warmer and the single lane road had wheel ruts. Joyce's car is a two-wheel drive and not so high, so we decided to turn around when we came to a small area with enough room to do so.

Back at the "water puddle" we checked the north side of the road and saw a gate and ski tracks. We got our skis on and away we went.

The area is state land that had been partially logged. We followed a large loop in a clockwise manner. The terrain was mainly flat with a few hills that we had to go down. Carefully, as the snow did not allow for snowplowing or steering.

Here part of the snow melted and I had to thread my way along this bank to get down to Greg and Kendra below.



Even though the old ski tracks did not go into side trails we went down a couple of them and discovered: dead ends.

Greg and Kendra's dog, Max, joined us. Max would also lead the way even though I skied in the lead and Greg and Kendra were further behind me.

For some strange reason we ran across several child toys along the way partially buried in the snow.

The 'return' part was south along the road and we decided to take a side trail (that had ski tracks) away from the road. This side trail led us around and back into the north side of the loop. We had to backtrack most of the way towards the road until we got to new growth where we had room to ski through the trees.  We made our own trail until we reconnected to the outer loop trail.

Along the way one of Joyce's ski poles broke. I suggested breaking a length of a dead branch and she used that to help her ski back to the car. Here Joyce is holding her good and bad ski poles in her right hand and the branch in her left.



We skied for two hours and twenty minutes so I estimate we had skied four miles.

After we finished skiing we returned to Greg and Kendra's home for a delicious meal of lasagna, sandwiches, humus and conversation.

Our skiing view of the Swan Range.