French Creek

Great shot of Jack & Rudy flying along the spring crust in a vast meadow over French Creek!

Whee! Zoom! What more needs to be said :)

If you've followed along past years and into this year, you learned the following: French Gulch used to be one Max, Zorro and my favorite skijor trails. Great terrain with lots of moose sightings along the way. But, unfortunately, French Gulch succumbed to development and is no longer a cross country ski trail. So, we took that trail out of Jack, Rudy and my options this season.

But, one thing the development cannot take away? French Creek itself! There are various open meadows in the gulch that house French Creek. In Spring, we get a nice crust over some of these meadows and, thus, Jack, Rudy and I can skijor the crust over French Creek. This is what you see in the first photo above. Amazing to think that in 1-2 months that photo will be a moose populated wetland with a fast flowing French Creek going through it!

Well, not too hard to believe as the creek is already poking through:

"Creek - time to turnaround!" declares smart Rudy.
"Yep, reverse!" agrees happy Jack.

We were having so much fun skijoring around this first meadow that we made 5 passes across and around the crust. Each time we hit exposed creek, we turned and did another lap.

Come along for our final pass across the crust over French Creek. As the video concludes, we come to the end of the meadow and Jack & Rudy slow beautifully to follow my verbal instructions to navigate (left, right, left, right) back onto the main trail. Such great skijor partners!

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

What is the main trail? Well the path up and back down to Sally Barber Mine. Up and down means the human needs to turn the skis around at one point. Yep, turnaround, roll around :)

Human starting to turnaround at Sally Barber Mine.
Kids starting to roll around at Sally Barber Mine :)

Human turned around, kids upright again, time to cruise on down the Sally Barber Mine Trail:

Zipping along we go.

We were way ahead of schedule to meet up with Zorro and Nancy. So, what to do when we got back down from the mine? Well, make three more laps around that spring crust meadow over French Creek. Wheeee!

Jack & Rudy having a blast going every which way
on the crust over French Creek!

Fun, fun outing this morning. Let's tell elder Zorro all about it:

Focused, happy and fun trio for 'end of run' treats.

You may be able to steal French Gulch from us via development, but you cannot take the creek from us! 6.8 miles traveled with 500 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 20 MPH

2020/2021 Season to Date: 133 days on the trails covering 1087.0 miles with 91,100 feet of elevation climbed.