When I saw that there was a winter storm warning for Monday night, I was a bit skeptical. Living in Boise, those things tended to be rather anticlimactic. A scattering of snow that might impact the morning commute, but for the most part would disappear once the sun came out from behind the clouds.
But on Tuesday morning, I awoke to at least 6 inches of snow and it was still falling. My property was covered in delightful snow! White frosted all the mountains that I could see, which, to be fair, wasn’t many of them in the thick cloud cover.
And, as I worked through the morning in my home office, I realized that all this snow was going to melt away, and rather quickly. So I decided to use my exercise release time to go for a little snowshoe in the yard. I let my husband know I was planning on an adventure during lunch (I put my release time up against my lunch hour to give myself 90 minutes to exercise, get cleaned up, and eat). He immediately knew what I was about, and got me set up to go out the front door with a chair for putting on my shoes and a towel on the floor for when I came back all snowy.
I am very glad that my husband got snowshoes that can be adapted for wear by either of us. I mean, they’re a bit big for me, but not so big that I can’t wear them all cinched down. On his advice, I wore my long gaiters, and walked over to the garage holding trekking poles and snowshoes in my hands. The garage gave me a snow-cleared space to put the shoes on, and then I was off.
Last time I snowshoed in the yard, I just circled the house. This time I wanted to circle my whole yard, and I set off to do so, following the fencing line that comes along our driveway until I reached the inside edge of the exterior fencing. Then I made my way west to the next corner, then south, then east. On the eastern leg, I came across holes in the snow where standing water had gathered. It wasn’t even a little big frozen, I confirmed with a trekking pole.
I had to do some detouring to get around the internal fencing as I continued along in the eastern direction. We plan to take down all the internal fencing, but that project isn’t urgent. It will be ongoing, and may depend a bit on us having places to store the timber and other materials that we’ll be taking down. Going north was easy, and when I turned west again it wasn’t far back to the driveway, where I added another circuit of the house just to make sure that I got picked up by Ambrose’s camera.
According to Map My Run, I did 0.57 miles of snowshoeing, which took about 24 minutes. It definitely felt like good exercise, and I never would have dreamed in a million years that I would be able to go snowshoeing in my yard during my exercise release time. I honestly thought all the snow would melt by the afternoon, but it’s still going strong on Wednesday morning. Maybe it will hang out a bit, give me a last taste of winter before spring fully starts.
