Snowy, Icy Cathance

Brrr! Winter is back, and it is cold. And windy. But I didn't run yesterday as I had planned (laziness and lack of sleep and cold temps deterred me), and since I had the afternoon free to run, well, in between first work and second work and making dinner and all that fun stuff :-), I headed out around 1:00 pm. The problem was, I drove from home to the ecology center parking lot over in Highland Green, and forgot my Garmin. Darn it! I really dislike when that happens. Before I was pregnant with Sam, I never had a Garmin and it never bothered me to not know exact distances, but now, I'm used to it and love the data. Oh well. Ryan said, just go without it and enjoy the time in the woods. So I took a deep breath and looked at the time on my phone, and headed out. It was cold all right, but luckily, out in the woods I was protected from the majority of the wind.

I ran the Heath loop first. The trees creaked and groaned in the wind. Startled a snowshoe hare, its coat white speckled with brown, and noticed some fresh Pileated Woodpecker evidence - bits of fresh bark on the ground and two big holes in the side of a tree at the edge of the trails. As I headed down along the Barnes Leap Trail, I could hear the river roaring. The ice-covered rocks looked like tan taffy beneath the flowing water. In one spot, the spray from the water had encased the lower branches of a few evergreen trees in ice. Gorgeous. The trails were fairly well packed for the most part, with soft, sugary snow atop an icy base, although as I got farther out into the trail system, there was less traffic so there was more slipping. I crossed the new bridge of the Ravine Loop and ran a small loop on the new trails over there. Much less traffic out there, but surprisingly there was a fair amount of bare (or almost bare) ground under the big pine trees. Lots of ice too. Looks like they've put in some new trail out there, so I'll definitely have to get back out there to explore when it's not so cold out and when the footing is a bit better!

Returned along the river, and finished up with 1:25 on the clock. Based on the trail system, I'm thinking I ran around 7 miles, which means it was pretty slow out there, but that singletrack is never fast, and especially not in the winter. Regardless of distance, it was nice to be out in the woods on a cold and blustery afternoon, enjoying winter's beauty and working up a sweat instead of complaining about the weather :-)