“Merry and bright” is fun, but I also appreciate the “clean and crisp” of a new year — especially when a restful quiet settles over everything in a thick blanket of snow.
Well, I enjoy the quiet until I head to gym, anyway. That place is anything but chill during these early months. Resolutions to get in shape are admirable; I just wish everyone wasn’t making them all at the same time. After the holidays I was dreading returning to the place where I had seen two people trying to use the same exercise bike. Then I looked out the window.
There wasn’t much snow on the ground, but it would be enough to ski on.
I’m an alpine skier (or, as nordic skiers have called me, “lift dependent”), but I remember from my days as a free-heeler that nothing is a better workout that cross-country skiing. While competing in the Olympic biathlon, cross-country athletes will race along at speeds upwards of 8 mph and burn about 900 calories an hour. Even at a casual cruising speed of 2.5 mph, cross-country skiing burns about 400 calories an hour, according to a calorie chart put out by Snowsports Industries America.
But I had a problem: My super-skinny skis are still in the barn at my parent’s house in the foothills outside of Loveland. (When there was snow and no time to head up Interstate 70, we would skate around the meadows nearby.) Fort Collins City Park was the destination my daughter and I had in mind when we bundled up and headed out to rent some gear at a nearby sporting goods store. (During a snowy winter, nordic skiers make tracks on local golf courses and parks, providing a convenient workout.) But we weren’t the first people with the idea, and there weren’t any cross-country skis left at Jax.
Luckily my 10-year-old spotted the snowshoes. We wouldn’t be covering the same distances, but snowshoeing requires no previous experience and allows you to travel through terrain that may be unsuitable for skis. It also burns roughly 500 calories an hour — about the same as putting in the highest level of effort on a downhill resort slope.
We had a winner. Now all we needed was some snow.
Racing an early-setting sun, we headed up the Poudre Canyon to a different city park. Gateway Natural Area is on the site of the city’s old water filtration plant. It’s now a grassy picnic area, where the North Fork of the Poudre River joins the main Poudre River, with a network of trails.
The city waves the usual $6 parking fee here in the winter months, and the park was empty except for a couple fishermen braving the cold water. Neve and I enjoyed clomping along the grassy areas and watching ducks on the sections of the river not yet covered with ice, but we were short on both daylight and snow.
The next morning we headed back up the canyon in search of a snowshoeable amount of snow. Our efforts were rewarded on Cameron Pass, where several feet of snow and an empty parking lot greeted us.
While the Blue Lake Trail was pretty packed down, we could sink our snowshoes into deep powder everywhere else. Neve and I did just that, enjoying the fresh air, the exercise and most of all the scenery of frosted trees and peaks.
After about an hour, we made our way across an unbroken meadow of snow to sit on a fallen tree and share a piece of apple pie. We asked ourselves why we give up our hiking habit in the winter and decided we should buy snowshoes.
Mostly we soaked up the silence, which was only briefly interrupted by the gentle pouf of snow falling from the trees to the ground below.
Neither one of us thought about how much pie we had eaten. After all, it would only take us about a half hour on the trail to work it off.
[Read More …]
No comments:
Post a Comment