New experience

No pictures to prove it (couldn't find my camera when I looked for it at the last minute), but Mark and I went snowshoeing for the first time ever today. We went part way up the Lake Blanche trail up Big Cottonwood canyon. It was really beautiful--clear air (which during all these inversions we don't see often down in the valley) and really light snow for a little bit. Didn't make it all the way to the lake, but I probably wouldn't have made it all the way down if we had gone that far! (Not as young as I used to be, and I was discovering new muscles during this process.) Mark's friend from work (Randy Romrell) and his wife took us. They're far more experienced at it, having been twice before. So what I learned about snowshoeing: those grippers on the bottom of the snowshoes really work well; one tends to work up a good sweat if dressed very warmly on the way up the trail; one tends to cool off considerably when not working so hard on the way down the trail; if the weather has cooled off meanwhile, one tends to really start to get cold on the way back down. But it was a fun enough experience that we'd both like to go again.