Fresh Tracks on New Years Eve

Today we got another dump of snow: bad for travelling but fun for playing outside! Kai got some more toboggan time and I got to use my winter running gear again. I headed for the Landlocked Forest near our house with my new winter runners and my Yak Tracks. There is a good bit of snow on the ground, enough that I passed a cross country skier on one of the city streets. There were no tracks at all in the forest, other than those belonging to little forest critters, so I got to make fresh tracks. It is a good thing I've ridden my mountain bike in these parts quite a bit, otherwise the trail would have been hard to make out. 

Normally running through deep snow with roots and rocks hiding just underneath isn't my idea of an optimal workout but today not only did I have my helpful post-Christmas footwear, I was also sporting a new Ipod Shuffle loaded with tunes carefully picked out by my younger and infinitely more hip brother and sister-in-law-to-be.  As I loped like a whitetail deer through the wintery forest (har har), I felt a pang of guilt. I was rocking out in this serene, ethereal environment instead of listening to the sound of a beautiful winter forest - which is most often, silence. Then I glanced over at the freeway running alongside my little forest and I remembered that I am in Massachusetts. Not that this is a bad thing, but my wilderness run was merely an illusion. Wearing my Ipod helped to keep it that way. That was until I passed by a section of trail that ran right along a steep embankment with the freeway directly on top. I noticed a ton of small, loose boulders that I had never seen there before. My foot hit one of them and it broke apart. That is when I realized that they were actually giant ice balls that had fallen down from the freeway above. I shuddered for a moment, remembering my avalanche safety course of many years ago and realized I had put myself in a danger zone. I can see the headlines now in the Bedford Minuteman "Crazy Canuck found buried in avalanche of winter highway debris while running in the Landlocked Forest." Yikes!

Fueled by my will to survive I made it safely out of the forest and back home without incident: no run-ins with a herd of inhospitable deer, or sabre-toothed squirrels,  no near drowning in swollen creeks and no being knocked unconscious by avalanching ice balls. When I got home Greg asked me how my run was. To which I replied, "oh, fine." 

Now I need to use my imagination to dream up something exciting for our New Year's Eve celebrations because at the moment it is looking like Kai stands a better chance of making midnight than we do!!!