Binding ties

While there's an abysmal amount of snow right here in Columbia Falls, most places east of here, at least to Marias Pass, have been getting dumped on.

The days it rained here it snowed there and West Glacier right now is a winter wonderland.

I have this love-hate relationship with winter.

First, the love. The love comes from not wearing a pack. I load everything into the pack and then load the pack into a sled. The arrangement works surprisingly well and you can haul around a lot more junk that you can in the summer, because the weight is off your back and onto the two biggest muscles in your body - your thighs.

A 75-pound plus sled pulls amazingly easy.

The hate comes from the fact that I'm not a huge snow lover, not a great big fan of the cold, and the light in January on most days is simply atrocious.

Of course, when the sun does shine it can be spectacular.

Such are tradeoffs.

So I've been skiing on a regular basis now, hauling the sled around. Boy Wonder has a pair of snowshoes, which can become exhausting. When you're three feet tall and the powder is a foot and a half deep, even with the shoes on, you don't go very far.

So he hops up on the sled and I pull him along.

It's a nice workout and gives you thighs like Walter Payton. (It's always sort of fun going into the hiking season in better shape than when you left it.)

I do most of this because I'm planning on some winter backcountry excursions as soon as I can get a weekend free. Backcountry winter camping is fun, but you have to be in pretty good shape because if something does go wrong, there's no one around to help, and the odds of freezing to death are significantly higher than, say, in August.

So Boy Wonder and Richard Garlough and I went out on a trip Sunday. Nothing serious, but the snow was sticky and we both forgot our wax, which makes even a mile or two fairly miserable.

I decided to do this little alternative route through the trees on a trail that is seldom used. It was sort of fun until I bent down to get a camera out of my pack and my ski broke in two at the binding.

The only thing holding it together was the metal edges.

This brought some concern but not a whole lot, because the beaten down trail wasn't that far away and so many folks had used it that walking, quite frankly, was easier than skiing. I thanked my lucky stars it hadn't happened in a place like Trout Lake, which, right now, is a long, long way from the road and one of the places I'd like to visit this winter.

So, there I was, hauling this sled with a pack, a kid, and a pair of skis lashed to the top.

On the way back there were two young women standing right in the middle of the path, looking at Lake McDonald.

Surely, they'll move, I thought as I got closer.

They kept chatting.

I got closer.

They kept chatting.

I got closer still.

They kept chatting.

I went around them.

That's the other thing about winter. If you keep your head down and just pull, you suddenly, effortlessly, become invisible.

I just hope it lasts through tax season.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.