We had a nice sunny day mid week, so Jesse and I took an extra long hike out the back.

The blue of Georgian Bay, in the rear right of the photo, gets a little lost in the blue of the sky, but it was a spectacular view, and with the temperature hovering at 5 or 6 below zero it was just perfect for our hike.

This is a crude map of the farm. The Red Arrow in area ‘P’ shows where I was standing, and the direction I was facing, when I took the two shots above. You can see how hilly the land is in the photos, while it looks deceivingly flat on the map.

Do you see the Purple Asterisk in the corner of area ‘R’ ? That’s the back South West corner of the farm. The asterisk is the top of a very steep hill that drops several hundred feet down to were the seasonal stream is marked in the opposite corner. It is just under a mile, straight line from the asterisk back to the homestead. By way of my meandering trail, its is about a mile and a half.

In this last photo you can see what happened to my left snow shoe when I was at the Purple Asterisk on the map.

#%%**%$#@

The webbing completely disintegrated under my foot.  I tried to walk with both snow shoes off but the snow was between knee deep and hip deep and it just wasn’t about to happen.  So I Gerry-Rigged the binding on my left snow shoe so that my foot was on the toe webbing with my mid foot resting on the wood-cross bar. That worked, but only if I walked on tip-toe with that foot.

It took almost two hours to hobble home in what should have been 20 minutes or so.

Oh well, Jesse had an extra long outing, and I learned some new vocabulary.

(If I’d had my pup tent in my back pack I could have simply stayed put – today, two days later, the snow is all but gone.)