Snow Snow SNOW!!! And SHOES!

Oh the woes of living in Alaska during the unforgiving winter!

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, you leave the relative safety, warmth and coziness of your home, to go outside and brave the cold, ice, and snow!  Occasionally, you feel the overwhelming urge to put on wool underwear, an extra shirt, two pairs of socks, a pair of snow pants, and a coat that consists of not just one, but two coats, put together to form a heavy, water-proof, and altogether much too sweat-inducing shell for which there sometimes seems to be no escape!  Then, to make things worse, you put on a stocking hat, a pair of gloves AND a pair of mittens, and some boots that would be better suited to kicking down doors than walking anywhere for any extended period of time.

Then you get in your truck, fully-equipped with studded snow tires, 4-wheel drive, and 300 pounds of traction sand in the bed, and drive up the "highway", which is basically a typical highway but with the added bonus of a layer of ice over the entire top surface, delicately frosted with snow that has been packed into a sort of shifting, ice-like substance that can give way suddenly and with no warning, and drive to a place where obviously no one else has parked since the last time it snowed (probably last night), making you think, "Hmmmm, I wonder if we will be able to get going again once we stop."  But, for some reason you stop anyway, and then for some silly and altogether unfathomable reason, you get out of the truck.

At this point, you decide the best course of action would be to put on a pair of "shoes".  These shoes consist of a big piece of plastic with a hole cut in the middle, hinges, and then another piece of plastic with some metal spikes on it, and straps to hold your feet atop these medieval-seeming contraptions, in the middles of the holes.  Then, you just head off into the woods!  "Why, oh why, oh why, would anyone do this for fun?!?" you ask.


You let the dogs out, who move more like deer bouncing through the snow with all of their unspent energy, and wonder, "How will we ever get them back in the truck???"  You follow them down a hill that you would probably think twice about descending on foot, much less when it is coated with a foot of snow and you are wearing plastic and metal death-devices on your feet.  You walk along through the woods, if trying unsuccessfully not to trip over small trees, downed logs and brush covered in 6 inches to 2 feet of snow can be called "walking".  You zig-zag through the forest, trying to make it to the shores of a river, all the while wondering whether or not you will make it, or die first of acute heat exhaustion due to all of the clothing you are wearing, or be stomped into jelly by the moose that the dogs randomly flushed out of the woods and lead straight back to you to deal with.

But, against all odds, you finally make it as far as you are going to go.  It's not the river...its a giant half-frozen marsh!  You know that it's "half-frozen" because where the dogs ran around on it even way out in the middle, you fall through at the edges of the water, filling your water-proof boots with cold water that smells like it came out of the wrong end of an elephant.  So, you take a couple of pictures with your spouse, sit down in the freezing snow, and watch the dogs run around on the ice that failed to hold you.

Finally, you trudge back through the snow, eventually making it to your car as the temperature begins to drop, and the snow begins to come down hard and in large flakes.  You are elated to make it back to the vehicle, loading the dogs up, and heading toward your all-together much too small home.  The dogs sleep for, basically, the rest of the day, evening, and night, and you are filled with a sense of nice contentment as you sit on the couch sipping hot apple cider and hot chocolate.

What a great day in cold, snowy, wintery Alaska...