It has become a tradition for Val and I to go for a hike on New Year’s Day. Besides having trails almost to yourself – at least for most of the morning – t’s definitely a good way to start a new year. This year we were lucky to get a couple of days of snow showers up in the mountain that added more than just a cou0ple of inches. We missed a lot of snowshoeing last year due to lack of snow and this year, to that point, it was looking even worse. The decision was easy. We grabbed our gear and headed up to the mountain finding a glorious blue sky day with almost no people in the sno-park. We had an idea of what we wanted to do which is a route we’ve done before –with slight variations caused by my navigation. The snow was a bit packed on the valley but still good for snowshoeing. We got a chance to get acclimated to the different walking movements as we approached the big hill that climbs almost straight to the ridge. We considered doing a couple of switchbacks but noticing that snow was not too deep and that we would probably get some good traction, we decided to take the direct approach and climb straight up. It was a lot of fun as long as you were looking up. Looking back down was enough to get make you feel a bit unsafe. But we pushed and soon were on the ridge with clear views of the top of the mountain and the sky lifts out of Timberline. We stopped for a bit to enjoy the view and sip some hot soup before starting our way down. As soon as we did though, the snow got softer and much better. We navigated thru trees making our way down until it got pretty sketchy due to lots of blow down. The going got a bit rough as there was no easy path to avoid all the debris on the snow. At some point we just opted for cutting thru and crossing a small creek to get back on the main trail. On the other side we saw hundreds of people that came after we did also enjoying the snow. It was indeed a good way to start the New Year
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