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I had hoped to start the New year by hiking up Basset Peak in the Chircahuas. The planning was in place, and Nathen had agreed to accompany me, but at the last minute, Barbara became consumed by misgivings about me driving through Tucson only four hours after the arrival of the New Year. As all happily married men know, scorning your wife's judgment (particularly when it is fallacious) is a really bad idea--rife with dire consequences...
(Note from Barbara: I was worried about him driving in the dark coming back. His car headlights are horrible!) |
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...so, I canceled with Nathen (I suspect he wasn't exactly crushed--the plane wreck would undoubtedly be snow covered and therefore difficult to find), and instead hiked a few miles (4.25 to give a precise estimate) up the Oracle Ridge Trail. |
| It has been decades (literally) since I hiked in the snow, but it is still kind of neat to look back and see your footprints following you. |
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The depth of the snow varied with elevation and direction of the slope face. The deepest powder I encountered came about to the top of my boots. I estimated it to be about six inches. |
| I tend to think of fresh snow as being all fluffy and soft, but I encountered some notable exceptions. |
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One of the down sides to hiking in the snow is there isn't any place to sit down and rest. There isn't even any place to put down your pack while you rummage through it looking for water. The up side is that you don't need much water, and a mouth full of snow will hold you for quite a while. Hiking that trail in the summer, that same mouth full of snow would be a highly prized commodity. |
| Portions of the trail are accessible by vehicles, and all these sections showed multiple passes, perhaps by 4-wheelers or possibly a wide tired truck. Given that I started hiking only 14 hours after the snowfall ceased, I was surprised by the abundance of vehicle tracks. |
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In places not accessible by vehicles, I identified tracks from rabbit, deer, coyote, skunk, and possibly mouse/rat. There were also some light scratches that I would have attributed to lizard--if I didn't know reptiles don't do snow... |
| There were vistas with the snow covering the hills, but it was obvious that I wasn't much above the snow line, and the snow didn't extend very far away from the mountain. |
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In fact, the north and east facing slopes were quite apparent. They were white, while the west and south facing slopes were brown... |
| In total, it was a trip down memory lane and as such, was quite enjoyable. My feet were wet and cold (and remained so for several hours after I returned home), but at least they didn't go numb. Given my refreshed memory, there is a significant probability that, in the absence of catastrophic events, this will be my last snow hike. |
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