85 minutes
easy to hard effort
10:15 am - sunny and crazy windy - wow - today was quite the experience - from the house, headed up through Bear Mountain Park, up fire road, south on the Mesa Trail to South Shanahan Trail, turned around and back the same way - with the sunshine it felt pretty warm, but the wind was wild - some parts of the trail (especially fire road) were completely exposed, but the wind was moving the snow to other places - once south of the Fern Canyon Trail on the Mesa I was breaking trail though deep snow - in some spots the drifts (more like filled-in gullies) were up to my hips - it was a ton of work, but a total blast - if I didn't know the Mesa Trail so well it would have been very easy to get far off the trail - turned around at the junction with the South Shanahan Trail at 48:30, and immediately I was re-breaking trail (the wind was covering up my footprints that quickly) - coming down through all of that snow was super fun (sliding and shoe-skiing, plunging deep into the snow and falling face first into it) - I was pretty tired when I got home - I probably would have been better off on skis today, but that would have just been a fun ski - today was an adventure!
