My first day-time snowshoeing experience was rather unique. A group event had been planned (by the creator, CEO, CFO, president, editor, and publisher or our favorite magazine covering recreation in the Sierras) with no way of knowing the weather on the date chosen. Attendees met in a sno-park in light drizzling rain with a light gusting wind…being outside felt like the Earth had a cold and we were in the path of a sneeze. Those present hunkered down in their vehicles, waiting for the appointed time and for everyone who was going to show up to do so. This down-time apparently led to the nearly unanimous conclusion that this was a _miserable_ day. I say “nearly” because there was one who did not see the weather as a deterrent. That one was our beloved magazine creator…and my ride. So guess what pair was going snowshoeing as everyone else was making their way back out to the highway? <Disclaimer: I do not make it difficult to be talked into various adventures. However, for the sake of narrative tension, it is helpful to portray myself as under some sort of duress.>
Donning our snowshoes, we plunged into the bleak, wintry, Earth-mucus swirling around us. As we progressed, the weather either got somewhat better…or I was just so distracted by the different ways snowshoes make you move, aches in muscles that hiking doesn’t prepare you for, or the recurring reminders not to tread on weak snow-bridges spanning the river. After maybe an hour, and a number of rests that my guide patiently endured, we headed back to the The Adventuremobile and headed home from my first ever snowshoe adventure. (The Adventuremobile was a blue Chevy Avalanche Z71 Vortec predecessor to the current day red Z71 Avalanche BRT (Big Red Truck). Eat your heart out Auburn and Gardnerville gas station patrons—an inside short story for another day.)
Night Snowshoe Invite
It was not long after this that I received an invitation to a nighttime snowshoeing event in anticipation of a wolf-supermoon. “Event” may be a generous description as it was only three people. Heading out for a cold night in the mountains at 9pm was apparently not high on the priority list of many others who were comfortably snuggled in for the evening. When picking a time for a moonlit adventure, one has to make sure that the moon will have risen over any mountains in the region. It does feel strange getting ready for an outing so late. So…opposite of planning to be “out” _before_ it gets dark.
Starting out, one of the things that struck me was just how quiet it was. Parked just off the highway, one is used to hearing at least a few cars coming, passing, and heading away. But that night, at that hour, the road was very quiet. Even birds and other animal sounds are not present as they are largely nestled in for the night. Only the nocturnal animals are awake, silently observing from hidden locations, making a decision on whether or not we were valid prey. Occasionally, we would hear an owl, keeping any eye out for any rodents lacking caution.
Cresting the roadside snowplow berm, the surrealism of the environment became striking as our eyes began adjusting to nightvision in the absence of any artificial lights. At first, I thought that everything was just grayscale, but I began to realize that the trees had the tiniest hint of green…like grayscale, but with a slight color overlay. It was a full moon after all, so there was a fair amount of light. It just wasn’t enough to fully enable color vision…but was soooo close. Being old enough to remember black and white television and photos, full grayscale is not “odd”. But grayscale with 10% color is different enough to make the landscape seem otherworldly. Add that to the silence broken only by your own breathing…wow!
It becomes easy to let your imagination run wild. On this trip, we found ourselves on the side of of gentle rise looking down into a meadow that just happened to have two roughly parallel rows of pine trees. The open end of the rows faced us, running down the middle of the otherwise featureless clearing. …Was it a runway for alien spacecraft? <cue the X-files music>. ,,,Had we stumbled upon a clandestine WWII landing strip. While obviously “no” to both such imaginings, a mental image was imprinted that I can recall to this day.
A more recent night trip ended up being very foggy. It was not hard to create your own fright-night imaginings in your head…at any moment, pairs of red eyes might appear out of the fog as eldritch wolves approached, sensing our warm-blood presence…or, the roiling billows of fog might actually be frost giants coalescing out of the miasma. Has this writer’s mind been exposed to too many fantasy/science fiction stories?…yeah, probably. But it doesn’t help when our guide and organizer, remarks on how isolated and alone our group is, commenting on how we are the only 6 souls there. The problem: there were 7 of us!…now looking at each other suspiciously, wondering which of us was the soulless minion of the dark realms. <This was later sorted out as one of the young ladies with us admitted that her father was the soulless one…which was fortunate for me… As the only member of the group without an accompanying family member, I was the obvious first choice.>
Returning back to reality… In writing this article, there are a number of practical things that I could have written about night snowshoeing: planning around a full moon, planning for cold, being more isolated from humanity than during the day, how familiar places can look disorientingly different in the dark, weather, icy roads, making sure you leave home with your soul… But many of these are the same considerations you’d have for snowshoeing during the day. It is going to be dark—bring lights! Though you won’t see them, animals will still be about. While writing this article, I was reminded of another snowshoe trip where fresh bear tracks crossed our previous path that had not been there on the way in. However, as I thought about what I wanted to write, I decided to focus on how the world looks and feels so different from what we are used to during the day. I told you some of my experiences…I want to encourage you to go and see what _you_ see. What is your imagination going to make out of your isolation…the unfamiliar, and sometimes eerie, landscape. Go! Try it! Find out!
One final thing you will experience, weather permitting… Being under the stars in this unusual environment is strikingly beautiful—yet one more reason to go! So do I have pictures of this?… Well… Until more recently, I did not have a camera that would give anything other than a black screen in such low light. So, no. No alien runway to show. Even the friend I went with lost his image files of the trip…so, lost. How about the fog, frost giants, and lost souls? Yes…but,…the cameras used were so “smart” that they corrected for the low light and the images look largely like during the day…no fog, no eeriness.
We do have some photos that capture the difference of the landscape from what it is during the day and some showing the beauty of the stars. But much of the experience I wished to convey was not available in photographs, so I hope that you will be forgiving of my wordiness describing my perceptions. A picture is worth a thousand words…so at about 1300 words, I’ve given you about a picture and a third.
My final words: Go! Just Go!
