Easter Hiking

On a side note - the geese are back in the park strip today. Spring is well on its way!

Easter dawned bright and beautiful in Anchorage this year. Robert was up at 4:00am (jet lag) and started banging around for coffee by about 5:00am. (I went back to sleep.) At 7:00am, the pots and pans started rattling and soon I smelled sausage. Time to get up!!! I wondered downstairs about 7:30 and Robert cooked a wonderful Easter breakfast. I grabbed the last cup of coffee (from the 8 cup pot) and sat down to eat. Before finishing, Robert (who has been up for 3.5 hours and had 7 cups of coffee) was ready to go for a hike. We were on the road by 8:00am.

We went to Chugach State park, specifically the Flattop and powerline trail area, put on our jackets, grabbed the camera, put Squirt’s bear bell on him and were off. We have not been hiking in this area since the heavy snows had fallen but lots of other people had so the trail was fairly easy to follow plus we had the handheld GPS with us.

Since it is still below freezing in the higher elevations at night, there was a nice crusty ice layer on top of the snow. This made it much nicer walking for Squirt as he really doesn’t like to walk in slush. However, it was rather uncomfortable when one of us would miss the path and walk on some snow that hadn’t been packed down. There was more than one time I ended up thigh deep in snow, wondering if I was going to get out by myself? Robert couldn’t come help me as it would break under him also. Sometimes, I would be able to walk across the snow and then Robert would sink down. Of course the capper was when we were both looking at the GPS instead of paying attention to where we were walking and I walked off of the trail into a really deep drift with both feet breaking through. At least it was walking and not in the car driving off of the road. Squirt waited patiently wondering why the alpha dogs were having such a time.

I have to admit, the walk was a great idea and a very nice way to start the day.