I was out cross country skiing today after church. It was a great afternoon, clear skies, light winds and warm, only -8 which is warm considering the cold week we had prior to today.
I headed out to Birdshill park where there are lots of groomed trails, most of which I’ve not skied yet, in fact I’ve only skied one other trail so far this year. With the nice weather, lots of other folks had the idea to go skiing and the paring lot was jammed. I squeezed in between a couple of cars on and angle and got my gear together and launched out on the trails.
Give my inexperience with the trails you’d think I’d take a trail map or at least pay a little attention to the map at the trail head, but oh no, I just headed out on the first trail that looked interesting. It was the Chickadee, and innocent sounding trail name. It seemed a little boring so I cut over to another trail called the Bluestem. It was a very nice trail, in and out of the woods, with lots of turns and a few gentle hills. In fact there were lots of turns and switchbacks. While I have a good sense of direction, after a while I really didn’t know where I was, which direction the parking lot was in, or how far away I was. After a while I was keeping an eye on the sun, watching it go down and wondering if I’d get out of here before nightfall.
I was really kind of stuck on this trail. Not knowing where I was, all I could do was to keep on going and follow the trail markers. After a while I started putting my initials in the snow back just in case I was looping around in an endless loop, or perhaps the rescue party could use them to recover me frozen body. Any way I just kept on going knowing that sooner or later I’d go by the parking lot as all these trails are loops, unless I made some sort of mistake.
Once I was pack at the parking lot I looked at the trail map and I’d managed to get onto the longest trail in the system, 14km, so it was a good workout for the afternoon.