I didn't think I could do it.

Other than a blister, for which I acquired a one inch wide band-aid, I was remarkably pain free this morning. Of course the dose of Ibuprofen last night and again at 6:00 AM this morning might have had something to do with it. Even the blister didn't really hurt, I just didn't want it to get worse, or affect my skiing. While the location of the blister may have prevented me from skiing, it wasn't about to affect it. I'm just not that good.

Today we did all the blue, including redoing the blue we did yesterday. Since that only took until slightly after lunch, only because we decided to eat lunch at the Bjorn Loppet hut and that put us a good half an hour from the trail head, we decided to finish up by snowshoeing. It was only after my daughter talked me into this that she suggested we snowshoe one of the black diamond trails, Equipe. At the X-country center where we traded in our skis for snowshoes, we learned that the round trip of Equipe was three miles. Of course, there were some snowshoe only trails that we also had to go on.

See the pictures associated with this blog entry in my Kodak Gallery.

The first one was about a mile out and back. Fortunately we had someone else's snowshoeing tracks to follow. If there isn't a groomed ski trail, where the trail would have been is marked in some way thus far inscrutable to me. This snow shoe only trail started and ended right at the Equipe start, so we were quickly on the black diamond probably moving faster than if we had been on skis.

The scenery was worth it. At a far point we came upon one of the warming huts, very much like the one we ate lunch at. While I believe I could have skied this trail, I was glad to be on snowshoes.

We got back to a main cross trails at 4:10 PM, too early to stop and too late to do anything major. So, we decided to go as far as we could on yet another snowshoe only trail and turn around by 4:30 PM when the trails officially closed. (When we picked up the snowshoes, we learned that the rental place stayed open until 5:00 PM.) Again we followed someone else's snowshoe prints. This time they led to a beautiful stream and turned around. At this point we knew that they had gotten somewhat off trail but we didn't mind. It was a beautiful spot.

Tomorrow hopefully won't merit a blog entry. We are just heading home for me to find out if I have jury duty and my daughter to pick up my truck for her moving next month. I hope nothing exciting happens.