snowshoe ADVENTURE

Yesterday Mike, Chad and I go to spend a nice hour in the woods to earn our little signature for snowshoeing on our B Fit 4 Life corporate challenge cards.  ~ after all it's almost the end of January and we had nothing on the card done.  And...it finally snowed.

We are all dressed for the adventure, get our free snowshoe rental (a $5 value) and were told...follow the snowshoe path...make sure you go through the woods and stay off the cross country ski path.  This makes sense to us.  We leave the lodge and start through the heavily traveled path made by the snowshoers who had gone before.  Mike complains about being out in the cold.  Chad's snowshoes are leaning in ~ causing some ankle malfunctions...and I have great difficulty going over sticks.  {Those sticks just kind of reached out and tried to make me fall down...but I don't fall down, so they were unsuccessful sneaky sticks.}

We are getting pretty good at going up and down hills so when I see a trail marked "most difficult", we decide to head down that path.  It's the road less taken, but we were ready for the black diamond snowshoeing.  

All was going well...except we stopped seeing the little snowshoe trail markers...and then we see a sign, about a restricted area... and we pass by these beautiful ledges ~ with signs warning us to leave nature alone as the ledges are a delicate natural area.  We are getting tired and we are ready to be done.  We see a building in the distance and think we've completed the circle, but we were wrong.  Instead of being back at start we see an unfamiliar shelter and a sign for route 306...This is when I decide to pull out the map.

Here's the Map to Chapin Forest Reservation:

Yep, we started at the parking lot on the left, followed the red trail (through the woods) and then did NOT take the left turn to complete the snowshoe circle.  We continued on the purple path, past the Chapin Ledges, and all the way to the Ledges shelter...a LONG way from home...
Three highly educated people, unable (or unwilling) to consult a map.
Of course we can' t figure out a solution...so we have to ask.  The skier says we have to go back from which we came.  Just to be safe we followed the cross country ski trail back.  It was a long way back.  At one point Chad asked a skier coming toward us if we were close to Pine Lodge, she looked at us funny and said, "uhhh, no."  And she was right.
Lessons to be learned...oh, I probably won't learn them anyway.  It was a fun adventure (since the blizzard didn't come and we didn't have to set up shelter for the night and forage the woods for food, or even get out the cell phone and call for help.)



Lost in the woods on snowshoes...an adventure for sure.