I keep talking about post-holing but have I ever explained exactly what it is? It is when you are walking on snow and you take a step and all of a sudden your foot goes down through the snow so that it is up to your knee or hip or even your waist. I did some post-holing yesterday but only from the road behind the moomincabin to the bank overlooking the beach. I didn’t even try to go down on the beach.

Today? I post-holed all afternoon. We hiked a section of the North Country Trail near Brevort Lake. I’m not sure how many miles we hiked. My trusty old iPhone pedometer kicked the bucket with the upgrade to I dunno what, IOS7, was it? Somebody said he thought we walked six miles. I think it was more like three unless you count the seasonal road snowmo trail at the end (more about that later). I think it just felt like six miles because you didn’t know from step to step how deep into the snow you were going to end up. It was a long, slow slodge with some people on snowshoes and others (including yer fav-o-rite blahgger) in boots. Boots people did the most post-holing but snowshoers had their own problems mainly that when they post-holed (and they did), they had to pull a long, snow-laden piece of footwear out from under the snow. We made kind of a train, plowing through the snow, taking turns breaking trail. A human version of the Blough Plow? The first photooo does not really show what we were actually doing and don’t let that bare ground up ahead fool you. That was the 1%!

Were we wet at the end of all this? Did I mention it was also raining throughout this hike? Yer fav-o-rite blahgger is still drying out hours later. And she changed out of the wettest of her clothing (in the Frog Hopper) after the hike. Ever try to put on tights in the back seat of an automotive vee-hickle?

Oh yeah, the seasonal road snowmo trail? The one where we stuffed eight people into a Subaru Forester and BACKED ALL THE WAY UP IT because there wasn’t any way to turn around without sinking into the soft snow on the shoulders. It was Marilyn’s vee-hickle but the GG was driving and she kept telling him to CREEP or the taaarrrrs would spin and finally we made it outta there. I think we probably drove in reverse for maybe about a mile but it seemed more like 10. And now we have a new meaning to the term “Creeper”. And the second photooo doesn’t really show you exactly what we were actually doing but yes, there were people sitting in the “way back” of the Forester (but no dogs (this time)) and I don’t think anyone was wearing a seatbelt. So arrest us!

Annual HSS NCT dinner in St. Ignace, then a nasty drive down to Gaylord through intermittently heavy rain and wind but NO ICE — although we are ALL skittish about any kind of precipitation after our loverly polar vortex winter.

Can I just say that it is totally surreal to be post-holing along in the back woods and receive a text message asking, “Do you guys have a copy of Microsoft Office that is newer than 2004?” Well. Yes. But. I don’t have a disk. And I can’t really stop to write a text because we are all chained up doing the Blough Plow and, well, I can’t really describe what it is like out here today.

P.S. I love you Mousey and I love the surreal-ness of texts like that when I get them in the back woods, so keep ’em coming.

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