Friday Fun With Coffee! #6

Good morning to all of you on this cool, but sunny, Friday! It did cool off alright, down to -4F (-20C), but it is supposed to reach a high of 25F (-4C) this afternoon and not cool off much tonight. Back to melting weather tomorrow which will be nice. We often get this kind of nice weather in February, kind of teasing us into thinking that winter is nearly over. However, there is still a lot of winter left yet.

I imagine you are probably wanting me to continue with my story from yesterday, so off we go back to that snowy ledge. My nice “slope” was actually 2 very dead trees that had fallen against the cliff edge many years previous and had been so covered with snow as to completely cover them to look like a natural slope. The snow was deep enough to hide any sign of the remaining branches on those two trees. One of my snowshoes had gotten tangled in the trees, twisting my ankle rather badly.

The day started off nicely snowshoeing through a snowy landscape, like the one above.

So, there I was, lying on my back in the snow, with my snowshoe, and my foot, caught in the dead trees. Not exactly the best position to be in for sure. Now, what to do next? First of all, I had to get my snowshoe, and my foot, untangled from the branches of those trees. That was not exactly easy since my snowshoe was in the air and I was lying on my back in soft snow. But, I was able to use the one tree to pull myself up so I could undo the strap on my snowshoe to get my foot free.

Then I was able to get my snowshoe out of the branches. I put my snowshoe back on since the snow was rather soft and deep on that ledge. However, my ankle was paining quite a bit, so moving around in that deep snow was not easy. What to do now? There was no visible way back up and from what I could see it was at least 20 feet down to the next ledge. Although I did not want to get too close to the edge since snow has a nasty habit of hanging far over the actual edge and I could then end up falling.

Watching these tiny chickadees, above, can be helpful at times.

And who knows what might be under that deep snow at the bottom. Deep snow can be nice to land in, but it can also hide some dangerous objects. So I decided that jumping down would not be a good option either. Besides, my ankle was really throbbing now and jumping could make things worse. It was 1pm when I left, it was now 2:30pm, so that gave me about 2 hours of daylight left. I was not really sure what to do, so I cleaned the snow off a rock and sat down to ponder the situation.

The only way out was to go up, but that granite was quite straight up for about 30 feet and rather smooth which made climbing up impossible, though one area wasn’t quite as bad looking. Sigh. While I was sitting there, some chickadees came along from the valley below, a couple stopping to check around those two trees I had uncovered, digging behind the bark looking for insects. Then off they went to the top, effortlessly flying upward.

Red-breasted Nuthatches often travel around with chickadees.

As they flew upward, I noticed a small branch or perhaps small tree sticking out of the snow, and a little further along a small balsam just sticking out of the snow. Considering how deep the snow was, they would be bigger than they looked. And if they were well anchored to that rock, then just maybe they would be strong enough that I could pull myself up. But they were too high to reach, even using my snowshoe. I looked over at those two dead trees.

Hmm, just might work. I brought one over and put it against the rock to use as a ladder. I checked the short branches to make sure they would be strong enough to hold me, then took my snowshoes off and began climbing. I was just about high enough to reach that first little tree when, SNAP! That broken tree broke again and I tumbled down sliding to the edge of the ledge!

Hmm, this story is longer than it looked. Guess I will have to finish it tomorrow. I hope you all have a very pleasant day and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2023 Steve McLeod.