PERFECTLY FINE DAY FOR SNOWSHOEING

I complain about the winter sometimes.  It makes my already dry skin itch and crack and hurt and bleed.  The winter is, to be frank, painful.  But, as great minds have been quoted saying, "Beauty is painful."  Despite the physical discomfort associated with winter here in New England, it is beautiful beyond words sometimes.

Today is one of those days.

After more than a week in the deep-freeze (could be two weeks, could be two years at this point; my brain is frozen solid), temperatures break and we are back in a more seasonable pattern with daytime temps in the mid-to-high thirties.  When a co-worker stops in to ask me if I want to go snowshoeing after work in a day or two, I immediately respond affirmatively.

I am slightly concerned as this co-worker and I have snowshoed once before as a storm rolled in and covered us with fat, heavy snowflakes.  I used to be a semi-athletic person, but she is a super-athletic person, and I huffed and puffed and sweated that first trip out trying to keep up with her.  This thought, though, does not stop me from agreeing to this mid-week trek. 

I am no quitter.  Plus, I hate admitting defeat.

The sun is setting slowly by the time we strap on our snowshoes to hit the trail.  We have about an hour of daylight left, and I worry again about being able to keep up with my younger counterpart.  If I blow out a hip or a knee or suffer a myocardial infarction or just plain die of old age out in the woods, she could be a few football-field lengths ahead of me and might not notice I'm missing until tomorrow at work when I don't show up.

To her credit, she sets a good pace; to my credit, I keep up and barely break a sweat.  We are out in the woods for over an hour, closer to an hour and a half, and we've passed stone walls, old foundations, a couple of bogs, and the backside of a power plant.  We've forged a couple of streams and balanced across slim wooden access paths that show clear signs of people who didn't know the trail and stepped deep into the groundwater, probably up to their thighs by the looks of the tracks.

It's Jack London's To Build a Fire, and I'm wondering if those errant greenhorn snowshoers before us felt the same frigid tinge of regret as did London's narrator.

We circumnavigate the trails, only re-crossing our steps near the end on our way back to the main road.  The sunset through the trees, along the bogs, and shimmering across the tree-laden snow is stunning. 

My friend apologizes about the impending dim conditions and the rapid loss of sunlight, but I assure her that this is not my first winter rodeo into the woods.  I grew up  surrounded by acres of woods, and my sister and I would downhill ski ... through the trees ... at night.  (We didn't know such a thing as cross-country skis existed, so we improvised.)  I know that as long as there is snow on the ground, even in darkness I can navigate through the woods from the color contrast of ground versus solid object.

Turns out I needn't have been concerned about keeping up at all.  I'm quite sure my coworker has restrained herself for my benefit.  She probably doesn't want to have to haul my dead carcass out of the woods any more than I would want her to have to.  The snow is suffering a bit from the sudden temperature changes of sub-zero to unseasonably warm (it will be over 60 degrees on Friday), so a fresh coating of powder would be ideal, but, in an imperfect world, today is a perfectly fine day for snowshoeing.