Colorado Santa Claus sure brings different presents than Texas Santa Claus.  I mean, for all I know they’re the same guy.   All I know is I never got snowshoes for Christmas in Texas.

And I know what you’re thinking, isn’t snowshoeing just walking around with tennis rackets on your feet?  Well, yeah, pretty much but what makes it fun is snowshoes let you get places in the winter that you otherwise couldn’t or wouldn’t want to in hiking boots due to the deep snow.  And why would you want to do that?  Well there are some pretty dang beautiful things to see in the mountains in the snow. Besides that, an hour or so high stepping through deep snow is a fairly solid workout so it’s also a good way to burn off those holiday beers and cookies.

And boy did we get some deep snow!  A couple of days ago around 8 inches fell at the house.  Normally that would mean we’re headed to the mountains for a ski day, full stop, no discussion.  But with this being a holiday week COVID rules apply and we didn’t really want to face the likely crowds at Monarch so we decided to try out our new presents instead. 

But where?  There are lots of trails and snowed-in county roads nearby where folks regularly ski and snowshoe but the Colorado Avalanche Information Center was issuing a flashing red avalanche warning for all of the central and southern mountains so maybe it would be wise to stick to something less prone to kill us. So local trails it is!

And if anyone knows anything about tracking wildlife, here’s a puzzle for you. Crossing the trail we were on was this large animal track (hiking pole for scale).

I’m learning to identify animal tracks but this one stumped me. Each of the tracks were the same three imprints above and each one was 10 – 15 feet from the previous one. The pic below is standing at one print showing the next one in line.

Whatever it was it was large and it was hauling ass! Mountain kangaroo?

So I think we’re going to enjoy our new Christmas presents. Another reason to get out in the snow!