Icy Winter Walk
Time to get out with the dogs. Temperature minus 14 degrees celcius. Winds gusting to 15 mph. Sun's out, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, you might find rotten teeth. So we haul out our gear, get everything ready. Don't want to keep the poor little dogs waiting on us too long, geared up in their hated equipment. We partially dress ourselves: long johns, check; wooly socks, check; headgear and heavy mittens at the ready; check. On to the dogs. Riley is biddable, comes when he's called, even though he knows what's up. Button is altogether another story. She cringes, tries to hide. Not because she doesn't want to get out into the ravine and roam about sniffing the wind and all those delicious pee-popsicles awaiting her avid attention. Because she knows she won't be happily hoofing it but plodding along, that's why.
When it's this cold, plus the wind, never mind the sun, it's cold, cold. The street leading to the ravine has been heavily salted. When dogs' paws come in contact with that street salt, then march along in the ravine trodding on snow and ice the result is cruel discomfort. Our dogs need not worry, in any event, because when it's this cold they've got to wear booties, otherwise they wouldn't be even plodding along, we'd have to carry them. Their feet are so small (matching their bodies, of course) that they simply cannot take prolonged exposure to the cold. So it's on with their winter coats (Button has a hood on hers which she heartily detests; she much prefers the heavy wool sweater she can get along with when it isn't quite this cold. Riley has to wear two coats since he's smaller and feels the cold more acutely) and then their boots. I'd given them both haircuts two days earlier so they're less winter-shaggy than usual, which means the boots have more wriggle-room. Good news for them, bad for us, as we know we'll have to keep "adjusting" them throughout our walk. Damn.
But we're finally out. We've got it down to a fine art. And we carry them over to the ravine, the few yards up the street from where our house is to ensure their leather-bottomed boots don't get full of salt and end up deteriorating. At the entrance to the ravine they're dumped and they begin to plod along the narrow ice-bound path toward the long hill which we'll descend to drop into the ravine. Even the snowpack is completely ice-crusted. We've got our cleats clamped over our boots, otherwise we'd be doing one long slide down the hill. We hear the screws in the cleats clamping through the ice, and feel sure-footed thanks to them. Button and Riley pick their way carefully around the ice patches alongside the bits of snow clinging to the ice, to keep from slithering.
Riley, our little bumptious male, doesn't mind the occasional slide, but Button, our smart little ladydog considers any slides she hasn't herself deliberately engineered to be an assault on her dignity, and she hates them with a fine passion. Once down the long hill, though, they hit their stride and skip along. Literally. Skip, that is; poodles do have a tendency to skip along from time to time on one hind leg, raising the other jauntily in the air as they proceed.
Despite the cold, we see first a tiny red squirrel racing along the frozen snow between trees, then a black squirrel high up on the trunk of a large old pine, and finally a grey squirrel leaping its way overhead from one tree to another. If our little dogs weren't in plodding mode, they'd leap to attention and make every effort to head off at least one of the squirrels, but they know the effort would be wasted in a futile attempt to keep upright on the frozen landscape.
During the first part of our walk we'd heard a concatenation of crows somewhere out over to the far left of the ravine. They sound almost like spring mobbing, when they're all excited about the change of seasons and get together to boast among themselves about having endured yet another miserable winter and lived to tell about it. And we also hear, in the far distance, much later in our walk, the unmistakable high, hoarse cry of a raven. We pass a long-dead white birch whose sizeable trunk had been recently assaulted by a Pileated woodpecker, the snow below the tree heavily littered with large splinters of wood.
It wasn't long after we entered the ravine that clouds began to move in, obscuring the sun. Not that we were able to feel much in the way of heat from the sun in any event, threading our way through the trails; first through a valley, then up again ascending another hill, making our way through the heights, encountering another descent into yet another valley which leads invariably to yet another long hill to ascend, which, having scaled it, immediately descend from its cusp to clamber up yet another hill. That's the ravine and its contours.
We've had to stop repeatedly as either Button or Riley come to a dragging, or an abrupt halt because one of their boots has managed to come loose and slip down their leg. We've got to haul it off the skinny little leg, and manoeuvre it back into place and moor it with the help of the sticky anchors I sewed onto the fleece boots. Patience, patience. They're no happier than we are with this irritating ritual, and we each persevere, playing the game over and over until we manage to traverse our usual walk, up hill down dale, and feel the better for it.
As this daily ravine hike takes us in a large loop, we cross the creek several times; at one juncture near the start of our hike, and yet again at a different place, when we're within ten minutes of our return circuit which will bring us once again to the last long hill we ascend to come out at the street where our house sits. The creek had just about frozen over this time last week, but in the interim we'd experienced a real thaw accompanied by freezing rain. The freezing rain had impacted rather deleteriously on the snowpack, leaving behind a glittering frozen trail, and the creek had run free once more, swollen with the results of the melt. Now, with several days of a typical January cold snap, the creek is slowly beginning its freeze-over again.
Every day offers us a slightly altered landscape. As familiar as we are with the layout, the look of the ravine, and its trails, there is something "different" about it each time we're there.
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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