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Saturday, April 25, 2009

Winter Wonderland





I was hanging out with Mattie (and a bunch of other people last night) and it came to my attention I have been delinquent in posting for recent events. Well, here is one I missed that people were interested.

The end of February, I went on a backpacking-snowshoeing overnighter at Nordhouse Dunes. It was a lot of fun. In the day it was sunny enough to run around. night was really cold, but I was prepared. It got down to about 3 degrees, before the wind chill. We were a ways back in the woods, that helped to. On the day we left the air was still less than ten and the snow was moving horizontally. My friends water filter was frozen so we decided to head back and not linger much that day.

The ice formations on the shore were a lot of fun to explore the day we came in. We spent a while hiking up and down the shore. watching the waves and floating ice chunks. With that wind at night, a lot of waves came. It was eerie when we woke up the next morning and large chunks of ice, like the size of a small home, completely disappeared. The sunset over the lake was a great site as well. The whole trip was great. I felt like a pioneer, charting new lands in an forbidden landscape. Not much was around. We saw two bald eagles on the trip. One flew over-head. Another was on the way out. It was perched in a tree. We approached enough to make it nervous and he took off. The way the bird was able to effortlessly navigate the bare tree branches with it's massive 7ft wingspan was impressive to say the least. Otherwise it was really quiet as far as any life forms were concerned. Best part of all, there were zero bugs.

Well, that is the highlights of my adventure. Here are my pictures.



3 comments:

Debra said...

Beautiful! Almost makes me want to try it. But I discovered long ago that I am a summer person....

Ben said...

Looks like fun. Did you go for a dip?
Where are the Nordhouse Dunes?

Reuben said...

The dunes are north of Ludington