A lesson in winter

Here's the next installment of my Excursions column ...

When Karen Colcough and I go out for a day in the mountains, we don’t go skiing, biking or hiking – we go adventuring.
Perhaps it’s a sign that friends no longer send us off with wishes for a fun day.
Instead, as we set off for Sleeping Indian Thursday, we got: “Good luck,” from one friend, and “when do I call the cavalry?” from yet another.
I’ve never been up the iconic mountain before, but decided I wanted to go sometime during fall – when the days were long, the skies were blue and the ground still sprouted green.
As each weekend came and then went, filled by activities other than ascending Sleeping Indian, the days shortened, the skies greyed and snow drifted over the ground.
But since Karen and I were adventuring, and not hiking, the change in weather hardly seemed relevant as we rumbled down the Elk Refuge road toward what we hoped would be a trailhead.
Karen maneuvered her Subaru over a road built for high-clearance trucks until we reached a steep, unmanageable hill and were forced on to our feet.
Only a few minutes after we began walking, we came to a fork in the road. The map seemed to indicate one way, but Karen – who had been up the mountain once before – seemed to remember going the other way.
“I’m OK with going this way, even if the mountain is over there,” she said, pointing the opposite direction toward the peak.
I laughed at the absurdity of the statement, and then willingly followed her lead – after all, that’s what adventuring is all about.
We wound over paths stomped down by hunters that eventually turned into elk trails.
After about an hour, it was evident we had altogether missed the real trail leading up the south side of Sleeping Indian. But studying the map revealed that if we continued to climb up, we would eventually crest the mountain’s broad shoulder.
We linked our way through the woods and around rocky precipices, climbing toward the peak we periodically glimpsed through gray and grimacing clouds.
A few hours later, post holing in knee-deep snow, breathing damp air, we broke free from tree line.
“I hope we get some more wind,” Karen commented.
I had a kite strapped to the side of my backpack that we wanted to fly in the mountain’s gently sloping, wide-open flanks.
Little did we know…
As we pressed on, late-fall conditions turned to a mid-January type of blizzard. Whipping wind and thick snow battered my nose and cheeks. My fingers went numb as I pulled on all five layers I had brought with me.
Karen and I convened on an exposed ridge and I adamantly voiced my opinion: time to turn around.
Karen was suffering from mild hypothermia herself, and I didn’t have to do much convincing.
We retreated swiftly and carefully. The cloud ceiling had lowered, leaving us in a void of soft white, and the wind had nearly covered the tracks we made just a few minutes prior. Using a rock outcropping to keep our bearings, we found our way back to tree line.
Crouching on a foam pad in a thicket of trees, I shoveled cold spaghetti into my mouth while, while Karen put on extra layers and got out her expeditions mittens for me to wear.
A few minutes without moving and were chilled to the core. My hands were rendered useless, so much so that I couldn’t buckle my backpack.
We gathered up, got hiking, and armed with the expedition mittens, my fingers began to tingle the satisfying and painful way fingers tingle were they unthaw from a deep freeze.
Soon I had enough movement in my hands to unwrap a chocolate bar.
“How many people can say they literally need chocolate?” I said to Karen jokingly, as we savagely devoured the hazelnut milk chocolate.
We retraced our footsteps over hills.
Fortunately, Karen was hiking with poles, and in the fading evening light, we used her pole plants to distinguish our trail from elk trails. We had also, wisely, drawn arrows in the snow at indecipherable forks to point our way.
Soon the last light of day disappeared and our vision narrowed into the beam from our headlamps. Stars sprinkled overhead and an orange crescent moon drifted in and out of clouds.
Spurred on by gravity and cold, we found our way down, arriving to the car and an ice-cold beer at 7:30 p.m.
After successfully four-wheeling our way back to the graded and flat elk refuge road, we called our skeptics, er, friends, to let them know that another Karen and Amy adventure had drawn to a safe and happy conclusion.