Sunday Funday

A Sunday Funday cruising on hard top crust and weaving through the forest.

One of the two open meadows we encountered where the top layer of "snow crust" was hard
enough to support us jogging back & forth across the meadow. Wheeee!

Despite that great photo above, it is Spring and much of the "all day sun exposed" terrain is starting to degrade. You get a few treats at upper elevations like the photo above; but we spent most of the day touring trails in the forest as the shade from trees has kept the snow intact.

Trotting along peacefully on a somewhat narrow but very shade protected side trail.

Of course, whenever the trail was wide enough (and snowpack good enough), we open up the throttle to zoom along:

Zoom, zoom, zoom - what a nice straightaway to uncork the Siberian engines!

With the nice "top crust", we were able to get creative on what would have been sketchy sections of trail. Note in the photo below the trail is actually to our right, next to the exposed dirt; but the shoulder crust is hard enough that we can run off the trail in the more shaded terrain - woo hoo!

Zipping along the shoulder to avoid the intermittent dirt on the real trail.

Finally, the following photo is the most impressive from the day... Max & Zorro really understand the concept of skis and preserving the human for another day. Whenever we encounter impassable terrain, they automatically stop without a word spoken from me. Below you see a swath of dirt across the trail that skis cannot traverse. They have both stopped without me having to say anything as they look back to let me know the terrain is bad and await guidance from me on how to continue. Of course when we first started skijoring years ago, they did not understand the concept of un-skiable terrain (and I would have to give a command to "stop"); but they are experts now and completely understand the whole concept of skis & terrain! Such smart boys!

"Aaahh - toes on dirt! Halt, halt!!!" says smart little Zorro.
"Cannot continue, what shall we do?" asks lead dog Max.

A peaceful Sunday Funday jogging around the forest: 7.9 miles with 900 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 18 MPH.

2014/2015 Season to Date: 121 days on the trails covering 1044.9 miles with 110,350 feet of elevation climbed.