Saturday 10 January
Distance: 12.2 km
Time: 3.5 hours
Avg speed: 3.5 km/h
Total distance to date: 580-ish km
Distance to go: 299-ish km
Cornfields in snow.
The problem with blogging 9 days after a run is that it’s hard to recall what happened. Remember a substance called paper on which you wrote in ink? I should resurrect that technology, at least to hold onto the thoughts before I can commit them to cyberspace. I would be a poor oral historian. I once read a book by a Northern explorer who wrote that the Inuit thought white people had terrible memories because they were constantly writing things down. In my case this is true; I am quintessentially white in this regard. I have one week, tops, before the details cloud over.
The 3.5 hours is a rough guess; it may have been four. I remember that I was moving about 3 km/h and I finished in the dark. After dark, in fact. The Bruce Trail in winter is hard enough to follow during daylight, marked as it is with white blazes on trees quilted by windblown snow. Whoever selected low-impact white did not have winter hiking in mind. Imagine yourself scanning a snow-blanketed forest of white-speckled maples and beeches for white blazes. Then imagine dwindling daylight making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the particular textural and reflective qualities of paint versus snow. The good thing about snowshoeing is you can always retrace your steps, although too much backtracking and second guessing further decrease an already abysmal average pace. I was fortunate that the trail shared a path with a snowmobile trail for the final few hundred metres out to the road at exactly the moment when dusk turned to darkness. (For mothers reading this, there was a backup plan: use my headlamp and compass to follow a westward bearing, not very far, until I intersected the road. Plus, I have resolved to end future hikes sooner.)
Ranger earned his snow stripes.
