Well, they said it would eventually come and it finally did. It snowed all day yesterday and, even though we didn’t get as much as was predicted, we woke to a beautiful sunny winter wonderland today. If you live in places like Wisconsin where winter means WINTER, you either have to get out in it and have fun or you become an old curmudgeon. So, in our continuing attempts to avoid curmudgeonry, Kathy and I took our new cross-country skis out for a test run this afternoon.
Our new skis are waxless. The first thing you’re supposed to do with waxless skis is wax them (I’m not making this up), so that’s what we did. Then we walked down to Lake Mendota. We didn’t want the challenge of hills while getting the feel for new equipment. Lake Mendota tends to be pretty flat in the winter. With a covering of 5 or 6 inches of very fluffy powder it was just begging to be skied upon. A couple of other skiers were already on the lake. We took advantage of their presence by skiing in their tracks, thus avoiding the need to break trail, which requires a bit more effort. One man skied by with his dog frolicking alongside in the snow.
While skiing we came across a few places where the soft smooth snow was replaced by very large crystals of ice. I stopped and tried to get a few photos. It was hard to capture the scene very clearly because the icy crystals glittered brightly in the sun. I’m not sure what caused this. In one spot I noticed what I thought might have been the remains of an ice fishing hole. Maybe this allowed some water to spill out on the ice and flash freeze in the very cold air. (I don’t know what the overnight low was but it was 3 degrees when I got up.)
Even though the temperature was only in the mid-teens, the sun was bright and there was no wind, so, all in all it was a perfect winter day.
