For Christmas, I bought Katherine some snowshoes. I didn't have a pair either, so also for Christmas, I bought her a pair of snowshoes for me (lucky me). Every weekend since then we've talked about snowshoeing but have never gone until today. We picked out a spot in Rocky Mountain National Park that's only a little over an hour drive away. But before we left, I checked the Rocky Mountain National Park cameras at the entrance we usually drive into the park at and found no snow. It's the middle of winter and the Eastern side of Rocky Mountain National Park doesn't have enough snow for snowshoeing. I did find some cameras that told us to drive to the Western side of Rocky Mountain National Park (an extra hour) if we wanted to snowshoe.

Not really wanting to drive that far, I started thinking... A few years ago I went snowshoeing with Colorado State University. I started looking back through my blog and found a snowshoeing trip to Zimmerman Lake in 2012. It looked to be about the same distance West as where we would have to go in Rocky Mountain National Park, and it was just under 2 hours away, so I figured that would be our destination.

We started driving towards Poudre Canyon a little after 11 am. It was 65 degrees outside and only a few little patches of snow were lingering in the shade. We figured that there had to be snow that high in altitude (around 10,000 feet) so we kept driving. First, 1 hour passed by, then an hour and a half, and still very little snow with less than 30 minutes to our destination. We were getting concerned that we were going to go mudding and not snowshoeing! About 5 miles from the parking lot, the amount of snow on the side of the road and ground started to pick up. Maybe there's some hope after all... We got to the parking lot, got out of the car, and there was enough snow to snowshoe!

We got dressed and put on our snowshoes and started on the 2.7-mile round trip loop that takes you out to and around Zimmerman lake. We soon realized we were way overdressed. It was in the low 40's outside and we had all our winter gear on. We quickly unzipped our coats and felt the breeze cool us down (which was ironic because we decided not to go snowshoeing all the previous weekends because of the high wind gusts, and this weekends expected wind was no different).

The 867 vertical feet in elevation gain doesn't sound like much, but it was killer. Summer Noah and Katie would have laughed at our performance for this hike with how many times we had to stop and catch our breath, but we have to start somewhere for the hiking season. At least we had (what I would consider) a respectable time of an hour and a half for the entire 2.7 miles round trip.

Happy Pi day! It's March 14th, or 3.14 - the first 3 digits of pi. I made 2 apple pies, one for my work and one for Katie's.