Snowy Cathance

I was originally planning to get up and run at my normal hour so that in the time between dropping the car off for service after getting Sam to school and heading to Portland to see Dr. Jamie at lunchtime I could get stuff done around the house. But you know what? Running in the daylight is way more appealing than cleaning and printing things off for tax time.  So when the alarm went off at o-dark-thirty, I shut it off and went back to sleep. And then after I dropped Sam at school and the car at Lee's, I headed out for my run from there. Luckily, the car place is right across the street so it's easy to run from there and then head home, get ready and walk back across the street :)

I hit the powerlines first, following some ATV and fat bike tracks. These stopped across the street at the top of the hill, so I took the road up to the Quarry and hit the trails there. The trails went from semi-packed along the first part of the river to lightly tracked by one snowshoer along the Heath and one hiker once I took the Rapids Loop to no tracks in a few parts where the hiker had taken his own route and strayed from the trail. This made for slow going, but it was beautiful out there. The river was roaring and had flooded its banks in a few spots. There were some incredible icicles stuck to the trees along the river's banks, and a number of animal tracks - snowshoe hare, deer, mouse. I turned up onto the back dirt road and then ran back up over Mt. A., the backside of which had been groomed by the guy who grooms the fields and a few of the golf holes for xc skiing. Very soft and thin, but groomed. Ended up with a nice 6.5 miles for the morning.

Winter Heath

Icicles

The roaring Cathance

Untracked