Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Weaving through the Trees

My "4 foot tall poles" planted in the deep snow
just off the side of the trail. Only about 1 foot of
the pole is above snow.
Today's skijoring outing was an excursion on some of our "private trails" - the paths not published in any of the guides. You have to know the backcountry to know your way.

Since these are "paths less traveled", the trail was typically narrow and weaving through heavily wooded forest. About 1/2 the way the trail was "2 Huskies wide" for Max & Zorro to skijor side by side. The other 1/2 was on trails only about "1 Husky wide", so Max & Zorro had to go single file and alternated taking the lead. If you tried "side by side", then one would be off the primary trail and in 2-4 feet of snow (and, thus, unable to keep pace with the one on the trail).

The outing covered about 6.2 miles and climbed about 1250 feet, winding through the trees on Baldy Mountain. Since the trail was rarely more than "2 Huskies wide", at best, we did not hit any typical sprint speeds. This was caution by the human, the Siberians were perfectly willing to open up the throttle and sprint through the trees - the cautious human was unwilling to put the skis parallel and fly through such tight terrain...

Vital Stats: 6.2 miles; 94m total time; 84m skijoring time; 16 MPH top speed; 1250 feet of elevation gain.

We could continue on the established trail ahead, or.....
Or, we could hang a right into the deep snow off the trail and blaze our
own path following those snowshoe hare tracks just in front of us! Bunny!!!

Notice how deep the snow is in this path started by Max. The vote was 2-to-1
to "follow the Bunny tracks"; but I used my veto power to overturn this decision.
We just emerged from a "1 Husky wide" section of trail in the trees and are
resetting ourselves to "side by side" before continuing on.

No comments:

Post a Comment