sunday on the high rim

Not my 1st time snowshoeing on the beaver lake part of the High Rim trail, but my 1st time going south instead of North. Tom and i put on the snowshoes and proceeded into a foot of fresh powder. so sweet.

tom crossing the bridge. aka the fallen log with a railing.




the coolest thing was these cinnamon bun looking things. wet sticky snow rolling down the hill. biggest one was a foot across.


1st tracks. walking was risking falling snow from the trees down your back.


creek under the "bridge"






after crossing the road. into the gaping maw. pretty dark and cool in there. rainy even.

the ribs at the end of the day.

a little saturday mission

so we went for a little drive with mike lau. Got stuck at the postil rec site. some guy in a trooper pulled us out. i gave him a beer. then we got stuck again. dug ourselves out.

after that humbling experience we took a little casual spin up postil to our favourite firewood spot and had a fire. good times as usual.


the tow strap still out. might need it again, so why bother putting it away?

the trail was pretty snowed over, so we played it really really safe and stopped earlier than usual. didn't want to do any more truck digging that day.

while we were up there, a 1969 mustang gt500 convertible drove by. can't believe we didn't have to pull it out.

more to come. i promise.

as if yesterday wasn't adventure enough...

so yesterday just wasn't enough. tom and i headed out today up to beaver lake. we were supposed to meet mike there, but we met him in the ditch on the road instead. it's all good, we all made it up and back down.

bedises the blizzard conditions on the way up, our first problem was that someone had plowed the road into beaver lake forestry site closed. 4wd lo took care of that.

since we were the first ones to drive through the snowbank, we had first tracks on some minty nice powder.this was the same powder that we'd have to dig the 4runner out of on the way out. 2 guys and 2 shovels sure can move a lot of snow when getting home depends on it. no pics of the digging. hands too cold.

so we got to the site and found deep deep powder everywhere. and a family of 7 tenting out?? yup. we cleared a picnic table, lit the fire and proceeded to whip up some of the best ribs ever.

while the ribs were cooking, the sky cleared off and besides the 2 inches of snow on the truck, there was no sign of the white out conditions that we drove up in. in fact, we walked out onto the ice and snagged these sweet shots...








another sweet trip. good thing we had shovels and a toe strap. boys and girls, don't leave home without them.

chute lake ice fishing and fire

friday i finished work at noon. i earned it after putting in 2 long days on wednesday and thursday. I picked up mike and we headed up to chute lake to meet ian and jesse. we (read "i")thought it might be cool to try the same route up as we took on the toy run in november. we had 1st track most of the way up.


until here. we just could not get up the steep hill in 18 inches of freshish snow. the only tracks we made past here were boot tracks.

so, we turned around, went back down and then went up gillard FSR. not too bad. then along the KVR to chute late, where jesse and ian and 3 dogs were already waiting for us. so was a fire.


we made some hole in the ice and promptly went back to the fire, checking on our hooks hourly.

it was a great trip. even though, on the way out i got stuck in a snowy ditch and, in the process of getting pulled out by ian, 1/2 tore off the front bumper, 3/4 tore off the passanger side mirror, and 100% dented the front fender. pics of that to follow.

and no, we didn't catch any fish.

you don't need fish to have a good time

now armed with an ice auger, tom and i decided it was time to do 2 things.
1) use the ice auger
2) use the 4wd lo range on the 4runner

to accomplish these 2 things, we headed up to james lake via bata rd. we had 1st tracks all the way up.

the road crosses the high rim trail and a creek simultaneously. here. see?


once we got up to the lake, we did a little exploring around and found this and many other large tractors.

tom whipping up some hot dogs with bbq sauce.

and yes, we did use the auger. the 2 small black dots on the ice behind tom are our holes.

no we did not catch anything. maybe it was the fact that we only checked to hooks twice in 5 hours. maybe its that we don't know how to fish, and maybe its that we just don't really care. you don't need fish to have a good time.