Snowshoeing!

Today Darryl and I headed out back again to do some snowshoeing. This was just my second time - my first time snowshoeing was yesterday! It's a wonderful, peaceful and beautiful way to get some exercise. Yesterday we met my neighbors Bob and Pam and their daughter Morgan along with their two Great Danes, Sapphire and Nitro. Great dogs! Our walks to the quarry in the summer and fall were nice - and in the wrong direction. Darryl found a shortcut when he explored with his snowshoes on his own when he first arrived to ride out this last snowstorm (he was able to drive down his driveway without a plow, just not back up!).

So here are a few shots of today's adventure.

First, the quarrry. That's me, waaaaaaay in the distance:

It's so cool out in the forest. Virgin snow, save for the occasional deer, fox, rabbit or other tracks of the creatures with which we share this land. The trees all have their unique footprint as well, especially after they've been doused with several inches of snow:

As we walked through the woods we came along some things that were now only vaguely familiar from when we'd passed them in the summertime. This shortcut that Darryl found to the quarry allows us to bypass one of my least favorite things about the other way to get there: the other shortcut, a steep, rocky way to get back to the path down at the bottom of the quarry (Darryl's new way gets us to the top of the quarry without all the harder climbing). That steep path is still steep, but you'd never know there were rocks there, too, with the blanket of snow now covering them.

This is the sky through the trees today after two days of snow:

And then we finished our snowshoeing and got back to the house. We took a stroll to the front to get another look at how pretty my house looks in the snow (I did spend time this afternoon shoveling snow off of the porch. It really wouldn't do for the front porch to crash under the weight of snow and ice!):






And then Darryl found my mailbox on the ground. This seemed to always happen in South Jersey whenever we had infrequent snowfalls. I attributed that to the fact that they got so little snow there that they would forget how to run the snowplows. I guess that wasn't the issue. I noticed that my neighbor down the street whose mailbox was even farther out to the street than mine didn't get hit. Dana and I are probably going to get a bunch of bungie cords and wrap them around the post in an inexpensive attempt to get the mailbox to last through the winter. What we'll do in the spring is the question.


So that is today's post. Stay warm - it seems the whole country has been hit with some of this cold. I don't mind it, but I've had complaints from a lot of people who are not enjoying their winter weather. I don't have much sympathy, but then again, I like all this snow! Ciao.