December 12, 2009
Good news and bad news. First the bad news. I goofed with my camera again so I don't have pictures. The good news is that a major snowstorm hit the area on Wednesday and now it is finally time to go play in the snow. I met Georg in the parking lot at 7:45 a.m. By 8:00 a.m. we were off.
We walked through the tunnel under the highway and then through the campground. We came to the trailhead for the Lonesome Lake Trail. It was clear that this section of the trail had been somewhat broken out but that a couple of inches of new snow had fallen on top. We put our snowshoes on and headed up to the hut.
We reached the hut. That's where all the tracks stopped. No one had broken out the Fishin' Jimmy Trail. We could hear a lot of commotion inside. Apparently they were all waiting for us to come by and break trail. Georg took off and I followed in his footsteps. He went a long way breaking trail but I finally got my turn. At the end of my turn I stopped and decided to put my snowshoe extentions on. Georg continued and although he was breaking trail, I had to work hard to catch up to him.
I got another turn breaking trail when I realized my snowshoe was broken. My foot was moving around way more than it should be. The snowshoe wasn't unusable - yet. We did try to fix it with a zip-tie but it didn't hold. Georg took over breaking trail again. Up we headed to the top of North Kinsman. Georg didn't stop for a second. He just kept right on going over to South Kinsman. It was a bit nippy on South Kinsman so we didn't linger. We did time it just right however. There was a break in the clouds and we had a nice view.
We headed back to North Kinsman before beginning the descent. About a mile down from the summit, my snowshoe finally broke. Looks like I'll be hopping out on one foot. No, it wasn't that bad. A couple groups of hikers had followed behind us today. The trail was now very packed down. Most of the hikers today were not wearing snowshoes so I wasn't too concerned about the occasional posthole that I made.
Georg said that I should start a new list. Try to do all 48 four-thousand footers with one snowshoe.
By the time we returned to the hut I decided it would be best to take off the other shoe. The trail the rest of the way was really packed down now and snowshoes really were not needed. We got back to our vehicles at 1:45 p.m.
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