May POW

Breaking trail in over a foot of new snow on May 18th! Mid May POW Day!!!

Powering through 12+ inches of fresh snow on the French Gulch Trail. What a May treat!

Consider the following... The terrain you see in every photo today had NO snow a little over 12 hours ago! We woke to find a ton of new snow out the window. The super May storm that was forecast really came. Oh boy. With this much new snow, we decided to return to one of our favorite trails: French Gulch. It was April 29th the last time there was enough snow to skijor French Gulch yet we were able to return to this trail today! Yay!

As we were driving to the trailhead, we found the county road (just outside the town limits) had yet to be plowed. So we hopped out of the jeep and proceeded to skijor up the road until getting to the French Gulch trailhead and continuing up the actual trail. As luck would have it, someone had driven the road a few hours before we started. As a result, we were laying fresh tracks in a couple inches of snow for the beginning and end of the outing:

Look closely and you can see Max & Zorro are each in a tire track as we are laying fresh
tracks in a few inches to start the day.

We are happy to report that it was dumping snow all morning long. Every 1-3 minutes I would wipe the GoPro clear of snow only to have it get covered again within a minute or two. As a result, most of today's GoPro footage looks like the following:

Blurred by snow collecting on the camera. All you can see of Max is his back feet. Zorro is
a little more visible but a few seconds later and he was missing in the blurs too.

Today's fun outing went as follows: (1) lay fresh tracks in tire tracks up French Gulch Road to the trailhead; (2) arrive at the trailhead to find 12+ inches of fresh snow and break trail up the gulch for a bit; (3) turnaround and jog back in the trail we set until getting back to the road and following the tire tracks again.

I just wiped the camera clear to get this clip of us jogging in the track we set:

Jogging along in the trail we carved. Fun day!

A fun day of jogging in snow filled tire tracks and then breaking trail: 7.2 miles traveled with 700 feet of elevation climbed.

2016/2017 Season to Date: 157 days on the trails covering 1312.6 miles with 138,900 feet of elevation climbed.